David Hudson, Jr. of Belmont University and First Amendment Fellow for the Freedom Forum, Kate Klonick of St. John’s University School of Law, Nathaniel Persily, co-director of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and John Samples of the Cato Institute and member of Facebook's Oversight Board explore what social media platforms are doing to tackle disinformation, foreign interference, and fake news during this election season. Jan Neuharth, chair and CEO of Freedom Forum, will provide introductory remarks and Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
This program is presented in partnership with the Freedom Forum.
Participants
David Hudson, Jr., a Visiting Associate Professor of Legal Practice, teaches Legal Information and Communication at Belmont University. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of more than 40 books. For much of his career, he has worked on First Amendment issues. He serves as a Justice Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and a First Amendment Fellow for the Freedom Forum Institute. For 17 years, he was an attorney and scholar at the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Hudson has taught classes at Vanderbilt Law School and the Nashville School of Law.
Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor of Law at the St. Johns University School of Law and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her current research focuses on the development of Facebook's new Oversight Board. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Southern California Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Lawfare, Vox, The Guardian and numerous other publications.
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. He is also a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age and along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Project on a Healthy Election). Persily is co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One. He has served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute, where he founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government. Samples serves on Facebook's Oversight Board. He is currently living in Northern California and working on a book‐length manuscript about social media and speech regulation which extends and updates his policy analysis, “Why Government Should not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media.” He previously wrote The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History and The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform. Samples also co‐edited with Michael McDonald The Marketplace of Democracy.
Jan Neuharth the chair and CEO of the Freedom Forum. Neuharth practiced law with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker in Los Angeles, worked as a press assistant for Sen. Howard Baker in Washington, D.C., and conducted political polling for Louis Harris International in London. Neuharth is an active member of the California Bar and admitted as an Attorney and Counselor of the United States Supreme Court. Neuharth serves on the boards of several non-profit, corporate and community organizations, and is the author of the award-winning Hunt Country Suspenseseries.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Freedom Forum First Amendment Freedom to Petition
- Kate Klonick, Yale Law Journal, “The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating an Independent Institution to Adjudicate Online Free Expression”
- Kate Klonick, Harvard Law Review, “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech”
- Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project
- John Samples, Cato at Liberty, “A First Look at Facebook’s Oversight Board”
- David Hudson, Freedom of Speech: Documents Decoded
- Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Magazine, “Google’s Gatekeepers"
- Nathaniel Persily (co-editor), Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform
- Packingham v. North Carolina
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