PPE Spring Author Series: Susan Brison: Free Speech and Social Media

This event will be held via Zoom. Click here to register on the PPE website to receive the Zoom meeting information.

Following the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Twitter permanently banned President Trump from using its platform and Facebook temporarily suspended his account and asked its Oversight Board to decide whether the suspension should continue indefinitely. Seeing as Twitter and Facebook are not state actors, their actions were not in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But even if their actions were not illegal, were they nevertheless morally wrong? Is there a universal moral right to free speech, which they violated by de-platforming Trump? In this session of the PPE Author Series, we will discuss these questions with Professor Susan Brison, a leading scholar of philosophy of law, feminist philosophy, and social & political philosophy, and the co-editor of Free Speech in the Digital Age.

Our discussion will focus on a working paper by Brison entitled, “What’s So Special About Speech?” Participants will be required to read this paper in advance of the session. The paper will be distributed to participants via email.