Date:
Location:
"Expert Governance of Online Speech"
Speaker:
Brenda Dvoskin, SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School; Visiting Fellow, Yale Information Society Project; Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Contact:
Sam Evans
samuel_evans@harvard.edu
Abstract:
In a world of fundamental disagreements about how social media companies should govern speech, it is striking that nearly everyone agrees that online speech governance should be based on human rights. The human rights project for content moderation proposes that social media platforms align their own internal speech policies with international human rights law (IHRL). It seeks, I argue, a system of expert governance: one in which a corporate technocracy applies a set of exogenous principles imagined as objective and global. To support these claims, this paper unveils the intellectual work that scholars, U.N. bodies, and the Facebook Oversight Board are doing to portray IHRL as an objective synthesis of the global public interest. Some examples of this work include a new reading of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the creation of boundaries between local facts and normative decisions, and the framing of normative questions as technical challenges. Overall, the paper provides a deep dive into the toolkit developed to date to pursue a system of expert governance of online speech. A draft is available here.
Bio:
Brenda's research focuses on social media governance and online speech. Chapters of her dissertation appear or are forthcoming in the Villanova Law Review and the Harvard International Law Journal. Prior to joining Harvard, Brenda was an advisor to the Solicitor General in Argentina. She has also worked with the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Global Freedom of Expression Initiative at Columbia University, and the Centro de Estudios en Tecnología y Sociedad. She earned her first law degree at Torcuato Di Tella University (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and an LLM (waived) from Harvard Law School as a Fulbright Scholar.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday, September 8:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe740BnzDfThwCzp-6O57xfGnW4bRbX3GZFogeVzjHXyPV6Kw/viewform
