Amid ongoing debate over the impact of social media in the United States, an NYU Law Forum convened technology regulation experts on March 19 to examine how social media platforms have been regulated in the US to date—and how they might be regulated in the future. The Forum, titled “Regulating Social Media: Is it Lawful, Feasible, and Desirable?,” was co-hosted by Just Security and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
The panel featured Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center of Stanford Law School, and Michael Posner, Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU Stern School of Business. Moderating the discussion were the two co-editors-in-chief of Just Security, Ryan Goodman, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law, and Tess Bridgeman ’10. The group discussed the motivations of state actors to regulate social media, ways to achieve more meaningful regulation while maintaining users’ First Amendment rights, and real-world examples of content moderation—or the lack of it—in the current regulatory environment.
“We don’t have enough of a sense of how companies are making decisions,” said Posner. He continued: “Who’s doing the content moderating? How much money is being spent on it? What kind of training is going on?...I made an assertion that the business model is driving extremism because that’s what people want. I don’t know if I’m right or wrong, but I’d like to have a better sense. I’d like to know what exactly their algorithms are based on…. That will help us understand what exactly is going on and what needs to be addressed.”
Selected remarks from the panel discussion:
Michael Posner: “We’ve always been divided politically and otherwise socially—but for sure, [Meta and Google are] exacerbating it. People now live online. They spend hours and hours, and it’s not an accident that people are becoming more radicalized. They’re becoming less able to sort out facts and fiction, because they’re being driven in directions that reinforce their prejudices.” [video 8:47]
Daphne Keller: “All over the world, we have lawmakers who want to constrain the power of platforms for all the good reasons Mike has just outlined, and the way they want to do it is by empowering themselves to set the speech rules instead. There are so many laws being passed in the US and abroad that effectively take state preference about what legal speech from internet users is good or bad, and direct platforms to go and carry out those state preferences amongst legal speech as part of the platform’s legal obligations.” [video 18:43]
Watch the full discussion of social media regulation on video:
Posted April 15, 2025