Canceled: CANCELED - The Rise of Content Cartels: When Should Social Media Companies Work Together?

On Tuesday, March 24th, 2020, the Strauss Center will host Evelyn Douek, S.J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society, for a talk examining how social media companies handle harmful online content.

Social media companies are increasingly being pressured to work together to help stem the spread of harmful content online. Based on a model used to combat the uncontroversially harmful and confined category of child sexual abuse imagery, platform collaboration has spread to terrorist content and foreign election interference in the past few years, and is being proposed as a solution to an increasing range of online speech pathologies. The impulse behind this is understandable: there are some problems in online discourse that competition alone cannot fix, and might even exacerbate. But when does such collaboration go too far and instead create unaccountable content cartels working together to censor speech? Should social media platforms have uniform standards, or does the marketplace of ideas require every platform to decide for itself where it will draw lines about what is allowed online? These are questions we urgently need to be asking. At the moment, they are being answered by default and in the interests of the powerful players.

Biography

Evelyn Douek is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society, studying global regulation of online speech, private content moderation institutional design and comparative free speech law and theory. Prior to coming to HLS, Evelyn was an Associate (clerk) to the Honourable Chief Justice Susan Kiefel of the High Court of Australia. She also worked in commercial litigation at Herbert Smith Freehills and Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Sydney. She graduated with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor of Commerce/Laws in 2013, where she was the Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal and the Undergraduate Student Representative on UNSW Council, the University's governing body.

Evelyn blogs regularly at Lawfare. Like everyone else, she naturally has a couple of podcasts, most recently as co-host of Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation and online speech in the run-up to the 2020 US election.

Tuesday, March 24, 2020 at 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Townes Hall (TNH), Law School, TNH 2.139
727 DEAN KEETON ST E, Austin, Texas 78705

Event Type

Policy & Law, Science & Tech

Departments

LBJ School of Public Affairs, School of Information, School of Law

Target Audience

Students, Faculty, General Public

Website

https://www.strausscenter.org/item/20...

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