Tuesday, January 19, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
Online media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook are, like the broadcasters and publishers before them, finding themselves as hosts, providers, and chaperones of public discourse. Though they often make the promise to openly and impartially host all content, they are of course actively making decisions about where the edges of these platforms should be: what should and should not appear, how content should be organized, what should be featured or squirreled away, and how it should be patrolled. And they're experimenting with both traditional and novel techniques for managing this discourse: not just removal and rating, but also technical mechanisms for marking content or making it inaccessible, and emerging techniques of depending on community governance. My aim is to sketch this array of interventions and see them together as structuring contemporary public discourse, and situate them in the history of commercial obligations around free speech.
About Tarleton
Tarleton Gillespie is is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, and blogger about law, technology, media, culture.