Law, Tech & Society (Spring 2026)

Overview

In this seminar, we will learn to think about how the world we live in shapes and is shaped by technology, and we will consider what the role of law is and should be with respect to regulating technology’s creation, use, and effects. We will learn to analyze the relationships between technology, law, and society through theoretical and critical lenses. We will examine how law and policy interacts with the development and proliferation of new technologies, or new applications of existing technologies. We will examine the challenges that legislators, judges, and regulators face when acting in contexts affected by technology, including uncertainty about the future, lack of technical expertise, and the speed at which technology develops. We will learn to synthesize insights from a variety of sources and fields in our discussions and in a final research paper.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Articulate what it means to think about technology through a sociotechnical lens, and why it matters.
  • Scrutinize the ways in which technologies can be beneficial or harmful to society.
  • Describe the differences between how different legal actors—judges, legislators, regulators, and in-house counsel—might interact with technological development.
  • Examine the role and limitations of law in regulating the social effects of technology.

Class Meetings and Office Hours

We will meet Tuesdays, from 1:10–3:10 PM, in Room 2483. Office hours will be by appointment, in my office, Room 3370.

Materials

There is no assigned textbook for this seminar. We will read books, journal articles, news articles, cases, and other materials. Some of the assignments below are hyperlinked, but readings that are not will be posted in the course OneDrive folder, linked to the right and on BruinLearn.

Note: This course has some heavy reading requirements. I’ve tried to keep the harder readings in shorter weeks, and have spaced out the books so you can get a head start the week before. (Also, books do not require the same kind of attentive reading as case law does; you can read for the general ideas and skim other parts as needed.) Please consider whether you’re willing to do all the reading necessary when deciding whether to take this course; you will not get much out of it, nor will you do well in it, if you do not complete the readings.

Two of the four books we will read (or read large portions of) are available online through the UC Library system, though if you can swing it, I recommend purchasing physical copies so you can mark them up, take notes, and bring them to class. The books are:

For assistance with the final paper, I recommend Professor Volokh’s book Academic Legal Writing. It doesn’t really matter which edition, though later is probably at least a little better. This book is especially useful if you hope to expand and publish it after the seminar (more on that below), or if you plan to write a Note in your law school career.

Attendance

Regular attendance is required for all classes at UCLA Law, and is especially important in seminars. Pursuant to our academic standards, students who do not regularly attend class may, at my discretion, be prohibited from turning in a final paper, resulting in a grade of “F” or being dropped from the class. Students for whom this may be an issue will receive a written warning before this final action, and may need to attend all remaining classes after the written warning is given. If you must miss a class because of a medical need, or serious familial, religious, or professional obligation, please email me at least 2 hours before class to request an excused absence. It should go without saying by now, but if you feel ill or are positive for COVID-19, please email me for the excused absence and do not come to class.

Attendance during the first week of class is required to remain enrolled in the class or to be accepted into the class from the wait list. The Records Office will be notified of any students who are enrolled, or wait listed, but who did not attend any class sessions during the first week. The Records Office will be asked to drop those students from the class or wait list, and to enroll students from the wait list who did attend during the first week.

The Classroom Environment

I want to ask for three things from you in creating the classroom environment that is conducive to learning: presence, generosity, and security. First, I ask for presence. We are engaged together in a semester-long intellectual exploration, and I hope you will be present for it, as much as you are able. This goes beyond simple physical attendance or even preparation. I encourage and invite you to bring into the class as much of your attention, your curiosity, your interest and imagination, as you can.

Some of the topics we face in here may be difficult, not just intellectually, but emotionally or politically as well. In daily life, we may often face strong pressure to embrace, or to reject, particular opinions in matters of law and policy. On some issues, this can be part of how we express our values and define ourselves. The seminar room is an intentionally different kind of space: It is a safe place to play with new ideas, to try on arguments, to entertain controversial, uncertain, or unpopular views. Advocating a position with which one actually disagrees can at times be fruitful. In any event, I expect you to honor one another’s intellectual growth by making an active effort to hold your mind open to new perspectives.

Therefore, the second thing I ask is that you be generous toward the ideas you encounter here — whether from me, from the readings, or from our shared discussion — in a specific way: seek out the strongest version of each idea, before responding to it. Ask yourself, “what’s the smartest thing this person (or this text) could possibly be trying to say?” Then, respond to that, including with spirited objections if they arise for you.

Third, I ask that you work with me to create conditions in which we can feel secure in taking intellectual risks. Specifically, please do not quote your classmates outside of class without first obtaining their permission. Views expressed in the seminar are part of the learning process, and may not reflect the speaker’s fully developed view. Conversation is a vehicle that helps us discover and develop our perspectives.

Grading

Your grade will be based on class participation (50%), reading reflections (10%) and a final research paper as described below (40%).

Class Participation

This course is driven by group discussion, and class participation is 50% of your grade. I will be a discussion participant and sometimes facilitator, but I do not intend to drive it. You will be assessed on the quality, not the quantity, of your participation. We each bring our own valuable perspectives and expertise to the discussion, and the lenses through which each of us sees the readings are as interesting and important as the readings themselves. Quality participation, therefore, does not mean that you understand the material fully and completely with the perfect interpretation. There are neither right nor wrong answers. Rather, quality participation means thorough preparation and thoughtful engagement that enriches class discussion and thus helps us all learn.

I cannot stress this enough: If you do not want to be an active participant in class discussion, do not take this course. Participation is required, and you will not receive a grade you are happy with if you do not contribute meaningfully to the discussion. We are here to learn from and teach each other, and if you do not participate meaningfully, you are depriving not only yourself, but your classmates as well.

Weekly Reading Reflections

Each week, by the night before class—where “night” is defined as “before I wake up and read them in the morning”—you must submit a brief reading reflection on the BruinLearn discussion board. These reflections can be a few paragraphs, or the equivalent of a page or two at most. You should not summarize the readings. The aim is merely to inform your classmates and me what the readings made you think about, in order to facilitate and enrich class discussion. I will read all of your reflections before class, and I expect each of you to do the same. (You should feel free to comment on each others’ posts as well. Discussion is always welcome.)

The sum of these will make up 10% of your final grade, and you will receive full credit if you demonstrate that you have done the readings and thought about them meaningfully. You may skip one week, with advance notice, no questions asked. Otherwise, if you fail to post the response, or it is not a meaningful contribution, you will be graded accordingly.

Final Paper

The remaining 40% of your grade will be determined by an original research paper. In it, you should do new factual and legal research to explore a topic related to law, technology, and society that we do not cover in class, or a new aspect of a topic we do cover.

You may choose whether to have the paper satisfy the SAW requirement. If your paper satisfies the requirement, it should be somewhere in the 25–40 page range. This is only a guideline. The rule is that the research must be “substantial,” and though this is perhaps not helpful as a directive, my view is that you should write exactly as many words as needed to make your arguments well. I am giving you an approximate page count to explain that I anticipate that something in that range will accomplish the task. If you go under that range, I anticipate that it will not meet the SAW requirement, and if you greatly exceed that range, your claim must be large enough to justify the extra length used to defend it. If your paper does not satisfy the SAW requirement, it can be shorter, somewhere in the 15-20 page range.

The paper will be evaluated on clarity and organization, the integration of valid sources and analytical arguments to back up your claims, and a demonstrated facility with the concepts we cover in class. This last part is especially important to me. This class is about the interweaving of law, technology, and society, and this is your chance to demonstrate to me that you have absorbed the analytical frames and concepts that are central to the class. The goal is not to parrot those concepts back at me—you need to write about whatever topic excites you—but for me to be able to see how the concepts in the course have influenced your thinking. (Hint: If you write about technology as if it were entirely separable from the people who build, use, and otherwise interact with it, you’re going to have a bad time. You will see what I mean in the first couple weeks.) Please note that per our Academic Standards, the use of AI assistance in drafting or editing your paper is strictly prohibited, and if such use discovered, it will result in automatic failure of the course and be considered a violation of the Student Conduct Code.

Depending on whether you are aiming to satisfy the SAW, you must complete either two or three assignments on the way to the final paper. Each of these must be submitted before the start of class on the specified due date. Failure to adequately complete these assignments on time will result in automatic single-step letter-grade deductions from your final paper grade. Please submit the assignments in the designated place in BruinLearn. They should be a Word documents titled specifically: “Paper_Proposal.docx”, “Outline_and_Bibligraphy.docx”, “First_Draft.docx” or “Final_Draft.docx”, as appropriate. Do not include your name, BruinLearn takes care of that. Please number your pages as well. Doing this correctively ensures that I will be able to give you credit for having turned it in.

Paper Proposal (Due Week 5, 2/17; mandatory for all students):

You must submit a paper proposal. This should be 1–2 pages, identifying the topic you wish to explore; some open questions; a rough sketch of the paper’s expected thesis; and an indication of whether you plan to use the paper to fulfill the SAW requirement. For this assignment, you will need to do some initial research to understand what is out there already. I also expect this thesis to change as you research more, so do not worry about it being perfect; I just want to make sure you’re on the right track and asking the right sorts of questions.

In the following week, I will return the proposals with comments. But feel free to check in with me as you think about topics before your proposal is due.

Some of you who are satisfying the SAW requirement may be interested in turning the seminar paper into a publishable paper. If so, please discuss that with me as early as possible, at latest by the paper proposal. I’m happy to help guide you, and it will not affect my evaluation for grading purposes, but it will change the advice I give you, especially with respect to topic choice.

Annotated Paper Outline and Bibliography (Due Week 9, 3/17; mandatory for all students):

Next, you must submit an annotated paper outline and initial bibliography. By this time, you should have done substantial research and understand your argument decently well. I expect you to outline the paper at a level of detail such that I can understand your thesis and each step of the argument by reading the outline. Please annotate your outline as needed to make this happen. For the bibliography, you should provide a list of at least ten sources separate from the outline, and for each, a few sentences explaining what it is and how it fits in the argument of your paper.

I will return the outline with comments the following week, and will make time to meet with each of you that wants to meet and discuss the paper. It is imperative that you lay out the outline and annotation in a tight, organized manner, and that you state your thesis explicitly so that I know what you’re trying to argue. If you do not give me your thesis, or the information is not organized enough way, my feedback will be less helpful.

First Draft (Due Week 12, 4/14; mandatory for SAW papers, optional for others):

If you are aiming to satisfy the SAW, your first draft is due four weeks after your outline. This first draft should be as close to your finished product as you can make it, to spare you from having to make big changes during finals period. I will not be grading them yet, but I will offer feedback. I hope to turn them around within about 10 days, to give you a full four weeks to work on the final draft. If you are not satisfying the SAW requirement, then you may turn in a first draft, and I will provide feedback, but it is not a requirement.

Final Draft (Due at the end of finals period, 5/12):

Self-explanatory. This is final the product that will be graded.

Accommodations

UCLA Law strives to provide accommodations in a way that supports students with disabilities while maintaining their anonymity and the fundamental nature of our law program. As such, students needing academic accommodations should not contact their professors directly, but contact Carmina Ocampo, Director of Student Life or the UCLA Center for Accessible Education (CAE) When possible, students should start this process within the first two weeks of the semester, as reasonable notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. 

Resources for Health and Wellness

Students needing assistance with medical or mental health issues, substance abuse, anxiety or depression or other health-related matters should contact the Office for Student Affairs, UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) at 310-825-0768 (Courtney Walters is the counselor regularly assigned to the law school) or the Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center at 310-825-4073.

Course Schedule

The first few weeks of the course will be dedicated to thinking about what technology is and what it means. We will interrogate the idea of technology as an object, and explore the social systems and power structures that affect and are affected by technology. We will spend this portion of the course developing a vocabulary that is associated with these questions in the scholarship.

For the remaining time, we will apply our newly acquired theoretical frameworks to different case studies. How do technology, legal issues, and social or cultural issues interact? How much of the effect of a technology is new, and how much is attributable to existing societal structures? What kinds of problems does the technology raise, and how can law best respond or anticipate the problems? These are the kinds of questions I hope to discuss each week, as well as whatever you all raise in your weekly reflection papers.

Reading Assignments

Your weekly reading assignments are below. Required readings are in bold and recommended in normal type, with some annotation as to why they might be interesting to read in your surely ample spare time.

Week 1: Technology, Politics, and Society

Does technology drive social change? How does society shape technology? What does it mean to talk about the politics of a technology? What do we even mean by “technology” anyway?

We begin the semester with several classic texts in Science, Technology and Society (STS). by probing the definition of technology and examining how and when it makes sense to speak about technology as having political or normative attributes. We will also have some time to get to know each other and go over the plan for the course.

  • This syllabus. Yes, the whole thing. Seriously. I worked hard on it.
  • Donald MacKenzie & Judy Wajcman, Introductory Essay, in The Social Shaping of Technology (1985).
  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan, How the Refrigerator Got its Hum (1985)
  • Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980)
  • Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other (1987)
    • This is a classic articulation of the “social construction of technology” theory, and an interesting look at the history of the bicycle as an illustration of it.
  • Ryan Calo, The Scale and the Reactor, Chapter 2 in Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach, (2025)
    • This chapters offers an overview of STS as a discipline and explains how law and technology can learn from it and add to it. Focused more on scholarship than policy, but the lessons translate and align well with the goals of this seminar.
Week 2: How Do We Regulate Technology?

How should we think about regulating technology? Can law keep up with the pace of technological development? Does technology drive legal change? Does the idea of “regulating technology” even make sense?

This week we will think about ideas such as the pacing problem, the Collingridge dilemma, technological exceptionalism, and technological neutrality to ask how to best approach regulation in a world of developing technology.

  • Gary E. Marchant, The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and the Law (2011)
  • Meg Leta Jones, Does Technology Drive Law? The Dilemma of Technological Exceptionalism in Cyberlaw (2018)
  • Lyria Bennett Moses, How to Think about Law, Regulation and Technology: Problems with“Technology” as a Regulatory Target (2013)
  • Rebecca Crootof & BJ Ard, Structuring TechLaw (2021) (Parts I & II)
    • This article proposes a theory of technology regulation as a set of responses to standard types of legal uncertainty that occur in the wake of sociotechnical change.
Week 3: Technology as Regulation

Last week we discussed the regulation of technology; this week it’s regulation by technology. How does technology regulate? How are regulation by law and regulation by technology similar? How are they different? How can translating legal requirements into code distort their meaning? When is that an acceptable risk?

  • Lawrence Lessig, What Things Regulate?, Chapter 7 in Code 2.0 (2002)
  • Danielle Citron, Technological Due Process, (2008) (Parts I & II)
  • Karen E.C. Levy, Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law (2017)
  • Madeleine Akrich, The De-Scription of Technical Objects (1992)
    • This is another classic STS piece, in which Akrich describes the kinds of “scripts” that technology designers imbue their creations with, based on the limited contexts in which they consider that they may be used. Akrich describes situations in which those scripts do not accurate reflect real world scenarios, and how that changes teh function of the technologies in question.
Week 4: Technology and Race

How does technology encode race? Those of you in the Critical Race Studies Program might have noticed certain similarities in critical approaches to technology and critical approaches to law. For example, both CRT and STS aim to unearth claims to neutrality that hide value judgments and drive inequities. Well, it turns out that there is some substantive overlap as well. This week will discuss how technology can reinforce racial hierarchies and ask how what the law’s role is in mediating race and technology.

Week 5: Innovation, What Is It Good For?

Paper Proposal Due

As a country, we celebrate innovation. And any time there is a movement to regulate the creation or use of technology, the concern that such regulation will “harm innovation” looms large, usually successfully preventing meaningful regulatory action. But what is innovation? Is it an unalloyed good, as our law tends to assume? Why do we venerate it? Should we? This week, we’ll critically analyze innovation as a concept—what it is, how it’s used, , and its political nature.

  • Gaia Bernstein, In the Shadow of Innovation (2010) (Parts I-III)
  • Christopher Buccafusco & Samuel N. Weinstein, Antisocial Innovation (2024)(Parts I, II (intro only), IV-V)
  • Mario Biagioli, Weighing Intellectual Property: Can We Balance the Social Costs and Benefits of Patenting? (2018)
    • Article examining the incoherence of “balancing” as a method toevaluate the normative tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of patenting and its relationship to innovation.
Week 6: “Enshittification“

Following up on our discussion of innovation, we welcome Cory Doctorow to class to discuss his book, Enshittification. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the term, as it rapidly entered the mainstream lexicon after he coined it in 2022. It is meant to describe a pattern over the last few decades where the creators of technology products first promise great things to end users to draw them in, then use the enticement of a large population of users to draw in business customers who can advertise to the users, and then finally, once network effects are established and both users and businesses are locked in, the technology companies make the products worse for both in order to siphon off all possible profit. All in all, an example of what Buccafusco and Weinstein might call antisocial innovation, but in a business model. We will discuss the book, with particular attention to Doctorow’s prescriptions for change. As you read, try to think about the different types of responses that might be required if you diagnose the problem as one of ego-driven billionaires, structural market forces, our legal culture, the technical surveillance capabilities of the internet, or something else.

  • Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025)
Week 7: AI as Normal Technology

What even is artificial intelligence? Is it a tool or a revolution? Is it destined to be “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), an all-powerful god-like being that will usher in an era of posthumanism? Is it a waste of energy and water that has no business case? Something in between? This week we’ll read and discuss essays by two computer scientists who argue that is a “normal” technology: impactful, potentially disruptive, but fundamentally similar to technologies that came before. As you read, think about the law and policy implications of seeing AI as normal rather than exceptional.

  • Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI as Normal Technology (2025)
    • They also have a companion piece here. It’s optional but perhaps clarifying.
  • Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan AGI Is Not a Milestone (2025)
  • Garrison Lovely, The AI Doomers Feel Undeterred (2025)
    • For a contrast, this is magazine article discussing the perspectives of several prominent AI “doomers”—people who believe that we should slow down on AI research because AGI will fundamentally reshape or destroy humanity without the right guardrails.
    • Narayanan & Kapoor would probably see doomerism as an example of what Lee Vinsel calls “criti-hype,” criticism that only works by first accepting the maximalist position on what a technology is capable of. It’s a useful concept.
  • Inioluwa Deborah Raji, et al., The Fallacy of AI Functionality (2022)
    • Paper documenting and taxonomizing the different ways that AI already in the marketplace fails, while arguing that existing laws can address these failures.
  • Margot E. Kaminski & Andrew D. Selbst, An American’s Guide to the EU AI Act (forthcoming 2026)
    • Paper breaking down the EU AI Act and its reliance on other parts of EU law for a U.S. legal audience.
Week 8: Policing and Technology

This week, we will examine how the Fourth Amendment and policing have developed alongside technology.

  • Orin S. Kerr, An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment (2011) (Read pp. 479–90, 494–508)
  • Sarah A. Seo, How Cars Transformed Policing (2019)
  • Sarah Brayne, Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing (2017) (Read pp. 979–82, 985–1001)
  • Paul Ohm, The Many Revolutions of Carpenter (2019) (Read pp. 358–69, 394–409)
  • Kevin S. Bankston & Ashkan Soltani, Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones (2014)
    • Essay arguing that the economics of information disclosure and retrieval has relevance for the Fourth Amendment’s control over police.
  • Carpenter v. United States, 138 S.Ct. 2206 (2018) & Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001)
    • The two full cases discussed in Professor Ohm’s excerpt. They’re important cases for understanding the Fourth Amendment and technology, so they are useful to read in full.
Week 9: Technology and Reproductive Rights

Outline and Annotated Bibliography Due

Reproductive rights are collapsing in this country. This week we’ll examine the role of technology in reproductive rights by looking at abortion medication and the rise of “femtech,” a class of consumer technology design to meet “female” needs. We will think through the societal changes that attend each, how they can empower pregnant people, and how they are and will be regulated in a post-Roe world.

  • David S. Cohen, Greer Donley & Rachel Rebouché, Abortion Pills (2024) (skip Part IV)
  • Leah R. Fowler & Michael R. Ulrich, Femtechnodystopia (2023) (Parts I.B & II)
  • Cynthia Conti-Cook, Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary (2020)
    • Article detailing at greater length all the digital traces that pregnant people will leave behind as they seek out self-help for abortions rather than visit medical facilities.
  • Michela Meister and Karen Levy, Digital Security and Reproductive Rights: Lessons for Feminist Cyberlaw (2024)
    • Essay drawing on feminist epistemology to argue that digital security and privacy are more linked to physical bodies and physical security than is widely appreciated.
Week 10: The Internet of Propaganda

This week we will read Professor Francesca Tripodi’s book, which links the command often heard on the internet to “just do your own research” with text analysis techniques learned in bible study, and then explains how conservative elites have consciously used these connections to weaponize information and spread misinformation. As always, we should think about the different roles that different actors, technologies, and ecosystems have played in getting to this point. Was the ability to create this manipulation a hidden affordance of the technology? Was this an intentional result, and if so, whose intent? This discussion will relate to broader themes of misinformation and disinformation and what to do about them.

  • Francesca Bolla Tripodi, The Propagandists’ Playbook: (2022)
  • Rebecca Lewis, Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube (2018)
    • White paper detailing the networked nature of different elements of the political right on YouTube, from the mainstream to the extreme. The research was conducted in the same research group where Professor Tripodi was working on her book as a postdoctoral fellow.
  • James Bridle, Something Is Wrong on the Internet, (2017)
    • One of the early popular press pieces describing some horrific consequences of the combination of YouTube’s recommendation engine and AI content creation optimized for attention.
  • Andrew M. Guess & Benjamin A. Lyons, Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda (2020)
    • Book chapter defining and contrasting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “propaganda”
Week 11: Technology and Labor

This week we’ll discuss technology, labor, and law. How does technology transform the workplace? How does workplace regulation shape technology in turn? What does it mean to say that technology creates efficiency improvements? How does technology change the relationship between people and their work? How are the effects of technology in and on the workplace divided by class or industry? Should workers worry about AI, and if so, why?

  • Brishen Rogers, The Law and Political Economy of Workplace Technological Change (2020)
  • Veena Dubal, On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (2023) (Read the Introduction and Part II)
    • The rest of the article is recommended but optional. It makes a normative argument that the system of algorithmic wage discrimination that Part II details is unfair and should be banned.
  • Alexandra Mateescu & Madeleine Clare Elish, AI in Context: The Labor of Integrating New Technologies (2018)
    • Report on the effects of integrating automating technology on labor in grocery stores and farm work.
Week 12: Cyberlibertarianism and Cryptocurrency

First Draft Due for SAW papers

We began the semester with Landgon Winner’s famous question: Do artifacts have politics? This week we instead ask: Do digital technologies have right-wing politics? David Golumbia was an English professor and cultural theorist who spent much of his career diving into the cultural and political valence of modern technologies. His conclusions inform his larger work, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (2024), in which he details the libertarian streak in the early internet days emerging from both left and right, including Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow’s famous declaration. We’re reading Golumbia’s shorter book on cryptocurrency that he wrote along the way, so that I can spare you the full tome. Thus, while we’ll talk about cryptocurrency, we will also expand our discussion to bigger topics like the surveillance state that is powered by big tech, and the support that the tech oligarchs have given the Trump regime.

  • John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
  • David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016)
  • Thomas A. Streeter – Missing the Net, Chapter 3 in The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (2010)
    • Book chapter discussing the political mythology of the personal computer and its relation to neoliberalism and law and economics
Week 13: Social Media and Content Moderation

With social media comes content moderation. For years, people have argued about how to regulate content online properly. A free speech maximalist position leads to platforms overrun by pornography and hate speech, and content that is illegal in the US or elsewhere. But remove too much content and you stifle speech, and eventually engagement. Once a policy exists, how easy is it to tell what content violates it? Who decides and how? Can enforcement ever scale? Is this kind of private power concerning? This week, we’ll discuss many of these questions, as well the First Amendment implications of content moderation.

  • Robyn Caplan, Content or Context Moderation: Artisanal, Community-Reliant, and Industrial Approaches (2018)
  • James Grimmelmann, The Platform Is the Message (2018)
  • NetChoice v. Attorney General, Florida (11th Cir. 2023) (excerpt)
  • NetChoice v. Paxton (5th Cir. 2023) (excerpt)
    • These are the two lower court opinions that led to Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024), but they are more interesting than Moody for questions of content moderation, as Moody dodged them for the most part.
  • Evelyn Doeuk, Content Moderation as Systems Thinking (2022)
    • This article argues that because of its scale and speed, content moderation is better seen as a “project of mass speech administration” than as individual adjudications about posts, meaning that lawmakers and reformers should see it as an issue of institutional design rather than through the lens of analogy to individual speech rights.
  • Isaac Chotiner, The Underworld of Online Content Moderation (2019)
    • Interview with Prof. Sarah Roberts about her book “Behind the Screen,” which describes the pyschological horrors and other terrible working conditions of those who review content for takedown decisions.