CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Evelyn Doeuk
Stanford University
Content Moderation as Systems Thinking
January 27, 2023

The stylized picture of content moderation that forms the basis for most regulatory and academic discussion of online speech governance is misleading and incomplete. That picture depicts content moderation as a rough online analog of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bureaucracy of moderators. But content moderation should instead be understood as a project of mass speech administration and that looking past a post-by-post evaluation of platform decisionmaking reveals a complex and dynamic system that needs a more proactive and continuous form of governance than the vehicle of individual error correction allows.


Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Before joining the Stanford faculty she was the Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and did a doctorate at Harvard Law School on the topic of private and public regulation of online speech.

Evelyn's research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, Lawfare, The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, and a number of other publications. Being human, Evelyn naturally has a couple of podcasts, most recently as host of Moderated Content, podcast content from Stanford Law School about content moderation.