The Facebook Files — a collection of stories published at the Wall Street Journal based on hundreds of pages of leaked documents from inside Facebook — is one of the greatest exposés of Big Tech yet produced. Over the course of its first five articles, it details the internal machinations of Facebook, the company’s awareness of how its business model contributes to user harms, and its decisions to do nothing.
The implications of the Facebook Files resonate in the worlds of both activism and law. The first panel, The Activists, will discuss the ongoing ability for people inside and outside technology companies to participate in shaping the space that is shaping them. The second panel, The Academics, will discuss the social and legal changes that need to take place to make technology better and safer.
Please join us for this timely and expert discussion spanning the worlds of activism, and academia.
Tristan Harris (left) is the president and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, which advocates for humane technology that operates for the common good. He is the Co-Host of the podcast Your Undivided Attention and the primary subject of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
Frances Haugen (second from left) is a data scientist and former product manager at Facebook.
Shoshana Zuboff (second from right) is a is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of three of the first books to discuss the new epoch of technology and society, most notably The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019).
Meetali Jain (right) is the Deputy Director of Reset Tech, which works to attract long-term funding for civil society organizations engaged in the democracy and technology problem. A lawyer, academic, and campaigner, she has worked for over two decades to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses.
Panel II: The Academics
Jack M. Balkin (left) is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The Cycles of Constitutional Time (Oxford, 2020) and many articles about technology and law.
David Kaye (second from left) is a Clinical Professor of law at the UC Irvine, and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments, and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.
Nathaniel Persily (third from left) 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 codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, and was cochair of Social Science One. He is the coauthor, most recently of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (Cambridge 2020).
Zephyr Teachout (right) is an Associate Law Professor at Fordham Law School and the author, most recently, of Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (Macmillan, 2020), which argues for the use of antitrust to rein in corporate harms.
