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PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us on October 19th for our weekly seminar from 12 PM - 1 PM PT featuring Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at University of Chicago's Law School and CPC Co-Director, Nate Persily. This series is organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

For years now, scholars have expressed alarm at the tendency of government officials to pressure—or “jawbone”—social media companies into taking down what the officials consider to be harmful or offensive speech, even when no law requires it. Scholars have worried, for good reason, that the practice of jawboning allows government officials to evade the stringent constraints on their power to regulate speech imposed by the First Amendment. But relatively little attention has been paid to the constitutional question of whether, or rather when, government jawboning itself violates the First Amendment. In fact, answering this question turns out to be quite difficult because of deep inconsistencies in the cases that deal with jawboning, both in the social media context and beyond. In this talk, I will explore what those inconsistencies are, why the case law is so unclear about where the line between permissible government pressure and unconstitutional governmental coercion falls, and what kind of jawboning rule might be necessary to protect free speech values in a public sphere in which both private companies and government officials possess considerable power to determine who can and cannot speak.

Speaker Profile:

Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.
 
Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She will serve as the Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight Institute at Columbia University for the 2021-2022 school year, where she will be supervising a project exploring the relationship between the First Amendment and the regulation of lies, disinformation and misinformation.

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PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us at the weekly Cyber Policy Center (CPC) seminar on Tue, October 12th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Soojong Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet. This session will be moderated by Co-Director of the CPC, Nate Persily. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

There has been growing concern about online misinformation and falsehood. It has been suspected that the proliferation of misleading narratives is especially severe on Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, but there has been a lack of large-scale systematic investigations on these issues. This talk will introduce a series of ongoing research projects investigating online groups promoting misleading narratives on Facebook, including anti-vaccine groups, climate change denialists, countermovements against racial justice movements, and conspiracy theorists. The presentation will discuss the prevalence, characteristics, ecosystem of misleading narratives on Facebook, and implications for potential interventions.

Speaker Profile:

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around digital media, social networks, and information propagation. As a former computer scientist, he is also interested in developing and applying computational methods, including online experiments, large-scale data analysis, and computational modeling.

Download transcript of talk

This event is open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

The latest tensions between Europe and America in the wake of the Afghanistan pullout and the Australian submarine deal reflect more than just temporary friction, but rather may indicate profound shifts in the geopolitical order that could signal the dissipation of the Atlantic alliance three decades after the end of the Cold War and nearly eight decades after its birth.

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*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 18, 2021.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.