Philosophical Implications of Content Moderation

What is the extent of social media users’ right to communicate in the digital public sphere? When platforms suppress accounts, demote content, or remove it from feeds, do users have a rightful claim against such practices? If so, what are they owed, precisely?

My work focuses on the moral acceptability of speech regulation and content moderation in privately owned digital spaces. Currently, I’m interested in so-called “soft” moderation interventions, that is, interventions that fall short of traditional forms of censorship. While the very concept of soft interventions suggests that these forms of moderation are benign, I contend that they can significantly set back the interests of speakers and listeners.

Recently, I’ve written on the justifiability of state interventions against misinformation.

This project is informed by the blossoming political philosophical literature on the digital public sphere and recent First Amendment legal scholarship. It is also nourished by discussions at PhilMod, an online speaker series that I have founded and currently organize.

Democratic Values and Recommendation Algorithms

A significant portion of my work relates to the political philosophy of AI, and more specifically to the project of “aligning” recommender systems with democratic values.

Communication in the digital public sphere is mediated by recommendation algorithms that determine what items will be first displayed to users when they log in to their social media account(s). My work is guided by the belief that social media platforms’ ability to determine which speech is visible online greatly impacts democratic life and, for this reason, should be questioned and contested. It is part of a growing body of scholarship that criticizes engagement optimization as a model of content recommendation.

In some of my work in progress, I suggest that taking democratic equality seriously would require social media platforms to equalize online speech. I’m also interested in the question of how recommenders can be designed to respect personal autonomy.

Beyond this, I pay special attention to projects that aim to democratize the digital public sphere.

All my research projects belong to a long tradition of philosophical reflection on the relationship between democracy and the public sphere. Thinkers belonging to that tradition who I am reading at the moment include John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy Fraser. In the next few years, I’d like to write a history of that philosophical tradition and show how it can inform contemporary thinking about digital technologies.