Journalist has said that social media poses a dire threat to democracy. Around the world. Around the world, not just here in the United States. Shes said social mediaallows people to spread disinformation , divides people from one another and incites violence. Concerns about our election are rising here in the United States as we face midterm elections in november and another president ial election in two years. The same time we are seeing calls from the right and left for social media regulation and challenges to some of these laws are making their way through the courts. They are also attempts at social media regulation around the world. We have so much to discuss today. Please be aware that due to time constraints we have decided not to address antitrust issues so were sorry about that. That will have to be another panel next time and i also want to apologize in advance. Every single question i asked the esteemed Panelists Group of experts could take the entire time and so by necessity they will be keeping their answers short. If they dont i will be cutting them off so i apologize for my witness in advance but they know, theyve been warned. With that, the other thing is that i also want to give you just a quick reminder of some basic First Amendment principles. This is something the panel has asked me to do at the outset. I know you heard about the First Amendment this week. I know jim renzi talked about the First Amendment on this so quickly just a reminder. The First Amendment does not respect private actors. There must be state action, government action. Instead, the First Amendment protects the expressive rights of the private actors and private actors include operations. The protections of the First Amendment are vast and in fact not really going to be the subject of our panel but i think for americans they wished the First Amendment did not protect asmuch speech. The First Amendment protects most speech. It protects a lot of offensive speech unless it falls within certain categories of unprotected or lesser protected expressions such as excitement, through true threats, fighting words. Obscenity and each of these categories are very carefully andnarrowly defined. The Supreme Court has over and over again embrace a marketplace of ideas theory of expression and said that the best response to speech that we dont like is more speech. These and other important First Amendment principles will come up throughout our discussion today and i know many of you know everything i said. I just thought it would be useful to have a little bit of groundwork as we get started. Let us begin panelists. The first question to paul. In a panel earlier this week dean kaminsky called the us the most important Technological Department since the printing press. I always like to look for silver linings. Can you start us off on a positive note. Say something positive about the way our democracy has benefited from social media. Thats almost as nearly challenging a question as asking me about the price of bitcoin. Let me begin by saying i think its very important to understand exactly what were talking about when we say social media. Because of course for many of us of a certain age, experience or demographic we tend to focus on the most prominent platforms. Facebook, twitter, youtube and forced by any reasonable definition assessing the impact of those platforms on democracy and whether or not they have been good for democracy would be important and why its also i think equally important and wise to understand the explosion of alternative social media platforms thathave emerged in the last three years. Of course, instagram, tiktok are prominent now but there are many other social media forms like read it or discord where theres an absolute explosion ofcommunication , engagement, discourse and so forth that also impacts how we assess the benefits of social media large on democracy. I also think its important to think about positivity as a wing of the negative effects and the benefits so i tend to view this question and focus on whether social media has been a net positive and im going to leave it to the audience to make those assessments at the end of this conversation but to my mind theres no doubt that there have been a number of very important positive impacts from certain types of social media. On Democratic Institutions and processes. No less than the printing press. Recall the dawn of the modern social media age. Going back to say 2004, lets define it as the birth of facebook. At that time or at least shortly thereafter these technologies were embraced as liberationtechnologies. Technologies that allow people to connect with one another across time, space and other dimensions in a way that was not possible before and the way in which this engagement took place, its important to bear in mind as we weigh the cost and negative aspects of social media over the course of the next 90 minutes. Search costs were lower, distribution costs were lower and amplification was now a tool available to the masses, not just a few. Those technological resources benefited a wide range of ideologies, perspectives, politics and so forth and at the same time really accelerated a transformation in the role of additional gatekeepers of mass information. And i say accelerated because the role of editors, publishers, traditional media was in transition even before 2004 to be clear but theres no question in the years that followed we saw a dramatic shift in the dynamics between the public on the one hand and sources of information on the other that were traditionally controlled by a small number of people working in a very limited environment. So the last thing ill just say as we embarked on this conversation. I think its important in assessing the net positivity of social media to consider this as well. Even if we are all in agreement that our democracy is in greater peril and it was five years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago and its somewhat irrefutable that over that same time we see the emergence of these massive social media platforms, its always very important to consider the fundamental question of whether or not the association between those two developments is correlation or causation. And i think that if we can keep our eye on that question as we weigh all these different effects were going to reach a positive place in terms of understanding. What we can do about the negative effects while maintaining benefits weve enjoyed over the last 15 to 25 years. Thanks for getting us started, that was great. One of the concerns we have with democracy is a feature we have a robust Public Discourse. Talk a little bit about how concerns, is there any merit the concerns people have about the power of social Media Companies over our Public Discourse . So first let me just say that i agree with everything that paul just said. Its important to start this conversation by recognizing that social media has had a lot of great effects for our democracy. There are all kinds of political movements that would not have been possible but for social media. All kinds of accountability that would not have been possible but for social media im going to spend most of my time talking about problems with social media. Thats not the full picture at all. I do think that there is merit to the complaint that a small number of social Media Companies, small number of Technology Companies now have gatekeeper power to Public Discourse. Facebook, google and youtube, twitter and maybe to some extent tiktok. A small number of companies now have a lot of say in who gets to speak. In what is effectively the Public Square which ideas get heard in the Public Square. Which ideas get traction in thePublic Square. They have a lot of power to decide those questions and they decide those questions through a combination of mechanisms, Group Content moderation policies which articulate the outer limits of Public Discourse on those platforms. Also through engineering and algorithmic decisions. Just the design of the platforms has a large effect on again, whose voices get hurt. And a lot of that shaping of Public Discourse is largely invisible to users and to the public. It all takes place kind of under the hood. And that is to some extent a result of the companys unwillingness to share information with the public but its also a result of the fact that companies dont fully understand their own platforms. A lot of these platforms, maybe all of them rely on Machine Learning algorithms which are only partly understood the people who designed them in the first place. So theres a lot of uncertainty and mystery about how these platforms are actually operating, why something that appeared in my newsfeed today appeared in my newsfeed today. All that is invisible and then on top of that, some of the platforms have become quite aggressive about interfering in journalism and research that would allow us to better understand whats going on on those platforms. And we can get into this later if it makes sense but theres a federal law, the Computer Fraud and abuse act which provided platforms of one tool for outside interference and also just the platforms terms of Service Often prohibit the use of certain digital investigative techniques that are crucial to the work of digital journalists and digital resources so there is this kind of opacity that i think is a real problem. Its a complicated question what we should do about it, im sure we will get into it later. Thank you. Rick, one of the concerns people often cite about our current discourse is the prevalence of speech and conspiracy theories but weve always had conspiracy theories and false information. Whats different today and how does social media play a role in especially in our elections. Rick it is one of the nations leading election law experts and is usually media solely or even primarily to blame for the concerns we have about democracy and is itsall coming from russia, china and other foreign actors . Thanks for the opportunity to be here and for that question. I would put social media into a broader context of what our call cheap speech, the term is not mine. Its my colleague. He was writing back in 1995 and he talked about how we were going to move to a new era where rather than if you didnt like something you saw on the New York Times you could write a letter to the editor or yell into the wind and that was all you could do. Instead the intermediaries that played a role in the past and acting as gatekeepers would be gone and this wouldbe democratizing. He saw cheap speech that would be inexpensive to produce and to disseminate and it was a very positive view. I think unfortunately we are now in an area era of cheap speech in a very negative sense in that we have a system that currently prioritizes low valued speech over higher valued speech and what i mean by that is if you look at journalism in particular, journalists have lost jobs after the coal miners in the United States. The role of global news media has been decimated and this creates a space, a unique space for the spreading of false information and my concern in particular is about false information regarding elections. So one of the claims i make in my book is that if we have the same polarized politics of today but the technology of the 1950s, we likely wouldnt have had january 6 and wouldnt have had a situation where large majorities of Republican Voters believed the false claim that the 20 20 election was stolen. Donald trump was able to go onto twitter 400 times according to accounts by the New York Times between november 3 and november 21, 2020 to make the false claims that the election was stolen and to call for there to be changes in the election results. And he was able to do that in an unmediated way. This was the 1950s he wouldnt have been able to go up to the podium or hundred times and speak to millions of people without a fact check. Without it being unmediated so the kinds of amplification and the reality in an already polarized era its a very toxic mix. You cant blame social media for all of our bills but social media supercharges the polarization we have today and creates conditions where you have millions of people who dont believe that the last election was legitimate and that creates conditions for potential problems with our elections Going Forward so im concerned that despite all the positives i agree with the positives that were mentioned on this panel but we wouldnt have had a black lives Matter Movement i think without social media. There were many positive things occurred because of social media but the risks toour elections are profound now and theyre only getting worse. Okay, thank you for that ray of sunshine. Im not sure shes going to have any better news for us. Nemo, were so grateful to have you here and id like you to give us a bit of a global perspective. Ourother democracies around the world having similar issues . Unfortunately i dont know that im going to be any more upbeat but i think as were thinking about this conversation were having in the us about social media and democracy i think its important to position that looking at the global context and the global context of where we are when it comes to things like Internet Freedom and human rights. And i think the sad reality is that nonprofits and other organizations who are documenting longterm trends have recognized that were in a place where Internet Freedom is in the line and is been in decline for over a decade. Freedom house as monitored this and shown this is an 11 year we seen a decline in Internet Freedom and concerning the those declines are not just happening in autocratic regimes. Theyre not happening in the countries where you might expect them to be happening but youre seeing more and more democratic regimes grappling with issues around social media regulation often turn to methods of regulation that have implications. To highlight a few of those trends we will talk more about regulatoryproposals and some of those frameworks. One trend were seeing is an increase in internet shutdown. This has become a powerful stick for Companies Operating around the world. When they faced government demands on content moderation to potentially have their service shut off. All the positives that paul and jamil talk about when we think about social media can be completely wiped away or wiped away at least temporarily and face those types of behaviors and often those behaviors are happening intimes of political turmoil. We have to think about how the regulations will intersect with those increasing powers and desire by some governments to utilize him of those more aggressive means of compliance. Thesecond i think trends we have to think about is internet fragmentation. Countries have different ideas of what type of speech should be permitted and what should be permitted. Sometimes the definition of what youd like to allow or not allowed might be influenced by political factors so were seeing an increase in laws aimed at providing governments or other actors rate her ability to Ask Companies to take down certain types of content. Thats happening in a variety of regimes that have different due process sections and have very different ways in which the political branches can intersect with those due process mechanisms. Finally i think in line with that fragmentation youre seeing a lot of countries wanting to have increased power over companies. Requiring employees to be located in country. Requiring data to be located in country and we have to recognize that creates the potential for a world where you sort of see content in one country that you dont see in another country or where a company will have to make difficult decisions about what to allow and what not to allow knowing that there own assets and employees are in country and they face consequences so i sort of provide that background to say as we think about these regulations we have to take a step back and realize were not in a place where Internet Freedom is going, where in the place where its contracting and those revelations can be vulnerable to those that would like to continue to entrust those rights. Iq. Eric. So glad to have you here. Youve expressed concerns in some of yourwriting about social media exceptionalism. Can you tell us more of what you mean by that . Thank you to theconference organizers for giving me an opportunity to be here. And when i think about social media theres going to be two different concerns that i have that i wanted to talk about. Thefirst is simply a definitional one. What is social media and how did it regulatory. Distinguished from other types of media. So for example in the internet regulations space weve seen social media defined very narrowly to really reach just a couple of large Internet Service areas and we seen it defined broadly to basicallyreach all user generated content. Allowing people to talk to each other. Its very hardactually to distinguish between those two categories. Add in a rigorous definitional way so when we see in laws that attempts to define regulations for social media theres an obvious question, how do we know that thats the right place to draw the line . The more an important piece about social media exceptionalism gets to the question of risk which is how does the internet mirror or accelerate or decelerate antisocial behavior generally. And one of the challenges that we real