IViR is pleased to announce that
Professor Kate Klonick
will give a lecture entitled
Big Speech
on 31 May 2024
The massive scale of Big Tech platforms is widely viewed not just as a threat to market efficiency or consumer welfare, but to the integrity of the public sphere and democracy itself. This is especially true when it comes to Big Speech—the firms who control and profit from large user-generated content platforms. With regulation stymied in the United States, structural break-up under antitrust law has emerged as an alternative means to address Big Speech’s power over the democratic public sphere. In addition to these domestic regulatory efforts, the European Union has stepped up to regulate content moderation, most imminently through its Digital Services Act (DSA), which places different regulatory burdens on platforms based on the number of monthly average users in the EU, thereby disincentivizing Big Speech in Europe.
Drawing from the empirical literature of online speech governance, this lecture offers a novel description of what speech platforms do and how they operate, before outlining a series of observations about the relationships between a platform’s size, its composition, and its content moderation practices.
Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John’s University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private internet platform governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post and numerous other publications.
For the 2023-2024 academic year, she is a Fulbright Schuman Innovation Scholar in the European Union where she is a Visiting Professor at SciencesPo and University of Amsterdam researching and writing about the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
Date: 31 May 2024
Time: 15:30 – 16:45 CET (Amsterdam)
Place:
– IViR Room, REC A5.24, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam.
– Online via Zoom (you will receive the Zoomlink via e-mail on the morning of the lecture).
See also the flyer.
Please fill in the form to sign up for this IViR Lecture: