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, which are often opaque and fall short of traditional forms of censorship. Recently, I’ve suggested that this kind of moderation is bad for democracy. Before that, 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. It is also nourished by discussions at PhilMod, an online speaker series I have founded and am currently organizing.

Democratic Values and Algorithmic Recommendation

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 which 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 content recommendation model.

Recently, I’ve drawn from the work of Amartya Sen to discuss the relationship between recommenders and human authenticity. I’m also currently interested in the impact of recommenders (as well as other emerging technologies) on equal opportunity for political influence.

Beyond this, I pay special attention to projects that aim to democratize the digital public sphere, especially those of interdisciplinary research teams that strive to design alternative digital platforms.

The Digital Public Sphere

I envision my research as belonging to a tradition of philosophical reflection on what Jürgen Habermas once called “structural transformations of the public sphere.” I am especially interested in the social transformations provoked by sudden changes in information technology (e.g., mass-market newspapers, radio, television, the internet, social media, LLMs, etc.). Figures of interest include John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, the Early Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy Fraser.