Content Moderation and the First Amendment for Dummies
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Genevieve Lakier, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School and First Amendment expert. It’s basically impossible to have a conversation about content moderation without someone crying, “First Amendment!” at some point. But the cultural conception of the First Amendment doesn’t always match the legal conception. Evelyn and Quinta spoke with Genevieve about what First Amendment doctrine actually says, how its history might be quite different from what you think and what the dynamism of the doctrine over time—and the current composition of the Supreme Court—might suggest about the First Amendment’s possible futures for grappling with the internet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | It's this very mock at centric notion that we just want to empower private people who |
| 0:38.8 | haven't they need to be, whether they're the private person that is Facebook, whether |
| 0:42.7 | they're me. |
| 0:44.2 | You're all just totally free. |
| 0:46.0 | This is the vision to make whatever speech choices you want. |
| 0:50.7 | And the government has to sit on its hands when it comes to regal in the speech marketplace. |
| 0:55.5 | That notion of a really laissez faire First Amendment, a deregulatory First Amendment, |
| 0:59.6 | it's pretty recent. |
| 1:01.0 | And I think one of the reasons why the issue of how the First Amendment applies to the |
| 1:05.5 | regulation of social media companies is maybe donir and trickier than the issue of how |
| 1:10.4 | the First Amendment applied to radio broadcasts or television broadcasts. |
| 1:14.4 | It may have nothing to do with the technology per se, but where we are with the First Amendment. |
| 1:18.6 | First Amendment, when they were figuring out the regulatory rules for television and radio, |
| 1:23.0 | it was much less the regulatory than it is today. |
| 1:26.8 | I'm Quinted Jurassic, and this is the Laugh Air Podcast, March 11, 2021. |
| 1:33.8 | Today we're bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Laugh Air Podcasts |
| 1:37.8 | mini-series on disinformation and misinformation. |
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