Jeffrey Rosen, President & CEO of the National Constitution Center, Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School, and a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic, delivered the ninth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 13, 2016. Rosen argues that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are facing increased pressure to moderate content in a way that is inconsistent with First Amendment protections—in the name of promoting civility rather than democracy. He discusses the controversy around Facebook’s removal of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked child from the Vietnam War, problems regarding transparency in content moderation, the EU’s right to be forgotten ruling, and the challenges of online mobs and hate speech, among other topics.
