Symposium: Regulating Social Media Platforms—Government, Speech, and the Law

Just Security, Tech Policy Press, and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights are pleased to present a new symposium, Regulating Social Media Platforms: Government, Speech, and the Law.

This will be a pivotal year for technology regulation in the United States and around the world. With respect to social media companies in particular, the EU is already regulating platforms based on perceived harms they cause, most notably through its Digital Services Act, with other countries pursuing a range of regulatory approaches. In the United States, regulatory proposals at the federal level, such as renewed efforts to repeal or reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, have been stalled in Congress while federal regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission appear set to take aim at the content moderation practices of major platforms. Meanwhile, individual states such as Florida and Texas have tried to restrict content moderation and run into serious constitutional challenges. Other states, such as California and New York, have primarily aimed to force greater transparency on the part of social media companies; they, too, have encountered constitutional challenges.

Leading expert authors in this symposium evaluate current and prospective regulatory approaches to answer the following questions: is it lawful, feasible, and desirable for government actors to regulate social media platforms to reduce harmful effects on democracy and society? If so, how? What are the prospects for meaningful federal regulation, given the divisions in Congress and increasingly partisan leanings of regulators? And will the states be viable laboratories of experimentation? How will regulation in other parts of the globe impact content moderation practices for US-based companies? What is the short-term future for government regulation of social media platforms, and how might the regulatory landscape evolve over the longer term? These and related questions will be considered in this ongoing symposium.

We encourage you to visit this page regularly, as it will be updated with new articles as they are published.

Posts in the symposium series:

• Regulated Democracy and Regulated Speech — Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.
• Truth and Consequences: The Post-Election Regulatory Landscape for Big Tech — Susan Ness, distinguished fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Leveraging International Standards to Protect US Consumers Online, No Congress Required — Anna Lenhart, policy fellow at the Institute for Data Democracy and Politics at The George Washington University.
• Enabling a Thriving Middleware Market — Renée DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and Luke Hogg, director of outreach at the Foundation for American Innovation.