Most of us use social media everyday. We scroll for news, entertainment or simply to stay in touch with our friends and close ones. Unfortunately, these platforms also work as a channel to spread hate speech and fake news. Anxiety, misinformation, surveillance, lack of democratic supervision are just a selection of problems social media platforms (and their users) have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
It has become clear that the way social media platforms work should be regulated, but how and by whom? The platforms’ self regulation does not seem to work properly and given the global scale of their functioning, effective supervision is also problematic. Billions of posts, images, live streams every day make content moderation very difficult. Should social media platforms hire more people, or put more work into improving the automation processes in order to escape faulty moderation? Should legal instruments be introduced to regulate them from top down? Are there any good practices?
Apart from bringing people closer to one another, online platforms create boundaries of what can be said and who has the power to do so. In this webinar, we aim for a discussion about the new media platforms and speech policing that will explore the legal, ethical and practical perspectives.
This webinar took place on April 29, 2021 as part of “The new media: between science and fiction” series.
Recording
Panelists
Konrad Siemaszko
Konrad Siemaszko is a lawyer at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, where he has been involved in both litigation and research projects since 2016. His work focuses on freedom of expression and on the impact of new technologies on human rights. He holds degrees in law and sociology from Warsaw University.
Jillian C. York
Jillian C. York is a writer and activist whose work examines the impact of technology on our societal and cultural values. Based in Berlin, she is the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a fellow at the Center for Internet & Human Rights at the European University Viadrina, and a visiting professor at the College of Europe Natolin.
Jillian co-founded Onlinecensorship.org, an award-winning project that seeks to encourage companies to operate with greater transparency and accountability toward their users as they make decisions that regulate speech. She is a frequent public speaker on topics including censorship, surveillance, and the impact of social media on our lives and our societies. While she contributed chapters to several books before, she quite recently published her first own book “Silicon Values”.
Moderator
Maciej Kuziemski is a policy entrepreneur and researcher focused on the nexus of tech and society. He has been a 2018-19 Fulbright-Schuman Visiting Research Fellow at the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. While at Harvard, Maciej examined US government’s algorithmic practices. In his doctoral research Maciej has been studying sociotechnical imaginaries of algorithms and their influence over public sector practices in the US and the UK. His interests include citizen empowerment, policy design and public sector innovation.
In the past, Maciej has held research, policy and advisory positions with the European University Institute in Florence, UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, and European Parliament. Maciej holds Masters in Public Policy from the University of Oxford, a B.A. in Politics from the University of Warsaw, and is the recipient of the John Lewis Fellowship and Atlantic Council Millennium Fellowship.
