Stanford Seminar - Content Moderation as Systems Thinking

January 27, 2023
Evelyn Doeuk of Stanford University
The stylized picture of content moderation that forms the basis for most regulatory and academic discussion of online speech governance is misleading and incomplete. That picture depicts content moderation as a rough online analog of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bureaucracy of moderators. But content moderation should instead be understood as a project of mass speech administration and that looking past a post-by-post evaluation of platform decision making reveals a complex and dynamic system that needs a more proactive and continuous form of governance than the vehicle of individual error correction allows.
About the speaker:
Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Before joining the Stanford faculty she was the Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and did a doctorate at Harvard Law School on the topic of private and public regulation of online speech.
Evelyn's research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, Lawfare, The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, and a number of other publications. Being human, Evelyn naturally has a couple of podcasts, most recently as host of Moderated Content, podcast content from Stanford Law School about content moderation.
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