Coronavirus
COVID-19 and Social Media Content Moderation
Evelyn Douek Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 1:10 PM
The pandemic is shaping up to be a formative moment for tech platforms.
Evelyn Douek is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, studying international and transnational regulation of online speech. Before coming to Harvard to complete a Master of Laws, Evelyn clerked for the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, the Hon. Justice Susan Kiefel, and worked as a corporate litigator. She received her LL.B. from UNSW Sydney, where she was Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal.
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Social Media
Facebook’s White Paper on the Future of Online Content Regulation: Hard Questions for Lawmakers
Evelyn Douek Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 11:27 AM
The company’s new white paper is a thoughtful document that raises serious questions that regulators, and the rest of us interested in the future of online content regulation, need to reckon with.
Disinformation
Members of the House Are on Notice: No Tweeting Deepfakes
Evelyn Douek, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 3:54 PM
The House Ethics Committee has announced that members who share deepfakes or “other audio-visual distortions intended to mislead the public” could face sanctions. It’s a small but noteworthy step.
Disinformation
Facebook's Oversight Board Bylaws: For Once, Moving Slowly
Evelyn Douek Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 4:15 PM
The new bylaws include a number of promising signs about Facebook’s commitment to the Oversight Board experiment. But the board’s original ambit of operations will be fairly limited.
Social Media
New U.N. Report on Online Hate Speech
Evelyn Douek Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 1:28 PM
David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the freedom of opinion and expression, recommended in June 2018 that social media companies adopt international human rights law as the authoritative standard for their content moderation. Before Kaye’s report, the idea was fairly out of the mainstream. But the ground has shifted.
Social Media
How Much Power Did Facebook Give Its Oversight Board?
Evelyn Douek Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:47 AM
Last week, Facebook announced the final charter for its independent Oversight Board, which will have the power to hear cases and overrule Facebook’s decisions about what can and cannot remain on Facebook’s platforms. This is a potentially pivotal moment in the history of online speech and an unprecedented innovation in private platform governance.
Aegis
Verified Accountability: Self-Regulation of Content Moderation as an Answer to the Special Problems of Speech Regulation
Evelyn Douek Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:47 PM
The “techlash” of the past few years represents a moment of quasi-constitutional upheaval for the internet. The way a few private companies have been “governing” large parts of the digital world has suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Calls to find mechanisms to limit the arbitrary exercise of power online have gained new urgency. This task of “digital constitutionalism” is one of the great projects of the coming decades. It is especially pressing in the context of content moderation – platforms’ practice of designing and enforcing rules for what they allow to be posted on their services.