Views on First

Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch and Evelyn Douek of Stanford Law talk with Jameel Jaffer about the role that social media platforms are playing in shaping, suppressing, and distorting public discourse about the war. 

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, and Isabella Ramirez, Editor in Chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator, talk with Jameel Jaffer about the crisis at Columbia, and about the challenges of reporting on it.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Jeannie Suk Gersen, professor of law at Harvard, contributing writer to the New Yorker, founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, and co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. They talk about the challenges facing academic freedom on college campuses since October 7th. 

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They talk about “cancellations” before and after October 7, the difference between free speech law and free speech culture, and the free speech implications of Title VI, the law that requires universities to take action against discriminatory harassment. 

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, talks with Jameel Jaffer about the climate for speech supportive of Palestinians, defining discrimination, and the “Palestine Exception” to the First Amendment.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer talks with Eugene Volokh, distinguished professor of law at UCLA and soon-to-be senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about free speech on campus in the shadow of the war in Israel and Gaza. They discuss whether administrators should ban what some students describe as calls for genocide and consider what can be done to protect the space for dissent.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Social media platforms have evaded heavy regulation on their content moderation practices so far, but the jig may very well be up. Many U.S. states are considering enacting laws to rein platforms in. To date, two states—Florida and Texas—have passed laws that significantly limit social media companies’ ability to moderate their platforms, and the measures look very likely to be up for Supreme Court review soon. Guests Alex Abdo—litigation director of the Knight Institute—and Brian Willen—one of the lawyers representing platforms challenging these laws—discuss these immensely important Supreme Court cases. The debate around if and how to regulate social media grows increasingly fierce, and the future of the internet hangs in the balance.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Social media platforms make more decisions about free speech every minute than the Supreme Court has made in more than two hundred years. So the values and systems adopted by these Corporate Speech Overlords matter a lot.  Guests Nicole Wong—former Google VP and Twitter Exec—and Alex Stamos—Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook Chief Security Officer—tell the story of how Big Tech stumbled its way through developing systems of speech regulation, from the early laissez-faire days to the controversies of today. Turns out that speech regulation is hard.

Some sound effects used in this episode come from freesfx.co.uk.

Trombone sound effect comes from Benboncan on Freesound.org. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

“Dun Dun Dun” sound effect comes from copyc4t on Freesound.org. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Over time, the First Amendment has meant lots of different things to a lot of different people. In this episode, with University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier by her side, host Evelyn Douek travels back to the time when modern free speech doctrine first started to emerge. Together they consider the values that have influenced how America thinks about free speech and how these values came to shape the way American law approached regulating the internet back when very few people even knew what the internet was. We hear from someone who was there—Sen. Ron Wyden—now one of the most famous names in internet regulation—about Section 230—one of the most (in)famous online speech regulations out there. But things have been changing in the politics of online speech regulation, and things are really starting to get weird now.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. 

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.