Contrary to assumptions about user identification in online contexts, anonymity can often be part of a healthy digital public sphere.

The problem with social media isn’t problematic content alone—it’s the elimination of processes we rely on to guide our decisions and keep us informed.

How "bridging" can promote on- and offline social collaboration, productive deliberation, and trust

What different algorithmic interventions reveal about tackling misinformation

Empowering users to shape their own social media feeds

When it comes to the digital public sphere, we can do better. But what exactly does better look like?

Between the U.S., China, and EU, the race for global technological dominance is intensifying.

Social media promised a new, democratized, and digital public sphere. Algorithms can help us get there.

To understand how algorithms shape the internet, we must understand what algorithms really are.

What if there were a way to measure and better understand social media platforms' algorithms? With "nutrition labels," there might be.

How social media is designed has the potential to escalate conflict. It's becoming clear that platforms can do more to monitor their impact and discourage violence.

A grounded analysis of the challenges and opportunities

Exploring how the law regulates or should regulate false and misleading speech

What role should professional organizations play in responding to lies and misinformation spread by those within their ranks? 

Towards a better informed debate on the effects of social media

An interrogation of the societal impact of conspiracy theories and potential remedies

What leeway the government should enjoy to engage in counterspeech to combat misinformation or promote truthful discourse

Exploring the nature and value of government knowledge producers in our constitutional order and the legal, cultural, and political threats that they face

Why intentional lies used to conduct undercover investigations are celebrated in some contexts and criminalized in others

A century-old specter of propaganda and lies distorting the public sphere is raised as intermediary institutions that manage unregulated speech are undermined

How the Supreme Court has abandoned once-positive assumptions about press speech, even while embracing the trustworthiness of other speakers, and what it might mean for democracy

A guide to thinking about the best way to navigate the contemporary crises of the American public sphere

A framework for drawing lines on lies

Why the reflexive deployment of negative theory, which increasingly dominates the contemporary Supreme Court’s approach to Free Speech Clause problems, has its costs

When calls for regulating lies collide with free expression values

How to regulate lies that cause constitutionally “cognizable” harms to the structural interests of constitutional democracy

Pathways from platform capitalism

Privacy asymmetries limit access to evidence of innocence and are worsening in the global data economy. But the proper reading of a key statute could help reverse the inequity.

Prepublication review is a sweeping and broken system in need of repair

Lessons from 1940s media policy battles

A case for focusing on forward-looking policy considerations rather than a rights framework in regulating “AI systems”

Knight Institute policy paper proposes legal protection for certain research and newsgathering projects focused on platforms

Proposal spells out criteria that trigger transparency requirement, with ad data to be collected by government agency

Questions of data regulation are at the heart of democratic practice today, from issues of secrecy to the use of data to constitute democratic institutions themselves

Moving toward an industrial policy for artificial intelligence

Jameel Jaffer argues that their disclosures since 9/11 have been vital, and that we should protect them better than we do

Mathias Vermeulen on overcoming GDPR concerns to unlock access to platform data for independent researchers

Artificial intelligence’s opaque processes and outcomes make it an incomplete tool for governing

Why regulating the reach of online content is hard

Exploring the accountability challenges in environmental and public health regulation

Preserving records of what user content is taken down—and why—could make platforms more accountable and transparent

Disrupting surveillance-based business models requires government innovation

The technopolitics of the U.S. census

The case for abolishing the strained Noerr doctrine

Developing a platform-neutral "attention share" plurality review for media mergers

Tracing the history of the interplay between competition, the free flow of information, and democratic values in Supreme Court opinions

Examining past abuses of the ‘public interest’ standard to argue against expanding antitrust authority

Arguing which antimonopoly tools do and don't matter

Creating incentives for social media companies to be responsible and trustworthy institutions

Avoiding antitrust when competition isn't the problem

Crafting a systems-level approach to transparency

Urging transparency and accountability in industry-wide content removal decisions

Dismantling surveillance-based business models

Reframing the tech giants' role in an era of great power competition

Harnessing past successes in public broadcasting to build community-oriented digital tools

Considering the cost of applying a probablistic statistical framework to First Amendment questions on digital platforms

Exploring the First Amendment's evolving role in America's democratic political process and private commercial sphere

Balancing artificial bot babble, real human exchange, and First Amendment obligations when regulating online spaces

Diving into the tension between free speech, regulation, and inequality

The Knight Institute's second essay series asks leading scholars to think beyond existing First Amendment doctrine to imagine what freedom of speech could be in our current moment and our future. 

Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech 

Imagining a future of untamed, wild, boisterous, and raucous free speech

Recommending "technological transparency" for effective self-government in the U.S.

Crafting policy to combat social media's harmful business practices that encourage destructive speech

Introduction to Kate Klonick's "Facebook v. Sullivan"

Response to Kate Klonick's "Facebook v. Sullivan"

Response to Kate Klonick's "Facebook v. Sullivan"

Response to Kate Klonick's "Facebook v. Sullivan"

Investigating Facebook’s use of the “public figure” and “newsworthiness” concepts in content moderation decisions. 

The collapse of the U.S. government's system for organizing, conserving, and revealing its activities. 

The Knight Institute's inaugural essay series invites leading thinkers to identify and grapple with newly arising or intensifying structural threats to the system of free expression.

Introduction to Matthew Connelly's "State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It"

Response to Matthew Connelly's "State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It"

Response to Matthew Connelly's "State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It"

Response to Matthew Connelly's "State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It"

Introduction to Jack Goldsmith's "The Failure of Internet Freedom"

Respone to Jack Goldsmith's "The Failure of Internet Freedom"

Response to Jack Goldsmith's essay "The Failure of Internet Freedom"

Probing the demise of a non-regulation, anti-censorship, global internet agenda. 

Introduction to Olivier Sylvain's "Discriminatory Designs on User Data"

Response to Olivier Sylvain's essay "Discriminatory Designs on User Data"

Response to Olivier Sylvain's essay "Discriminatory Designs on User Data"

Response to Olivier Sylvain's essay "Discriminatory Designs on User Data"

Exploring how Section 230's immunity protections may enable or elicit disciminatory behaviors online

Deconstructing the “editorial analogy,” and analogical reasoning more generally, in First Amendment litigation involving powerful tech companies. 

Response to Heather Whitney's "Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy"

Introduction to Heather Whitney's "Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy"

Response to Heather Whitney's essay "Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy"

Response to Heather Whitney's "Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy"

Response to Frederick Schauer's "The Hostile Audience Revisited"

Introduction to Frederick Schauer's "The Hostile Audience Revisited"

Response to Frederick Schauer's "The Hostile Audience Revisited"

Response to Frederick Schauer's "The Hostile Audience Revisited"

Response to Frederick Schauer's essay "The Hostile Audience Revisited"

Incendiary speech in the wake of Charlottesville, Berkeley, Boston, and beyond.

Response to Tim Wu's "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?"

Response to Tim Wu's "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?"

New free expression challenges from “troll armies,” “flooding,” and propaganda robots that aim to distort or drown out disfavored speech.