“The EU v. Platforms and the First Amendment: Regulating Online Hate Speech,” Prof. Nunziato, GW Law

The question of what speech should be allowed on social media platforms – and what speech should be prohibited – is a pressing and timely one. Given X’s and Meta’s recent changes in their content moderation of harmful speech – with the tacit blessing of a recent Supreme Court decision and of the Trump Administration – and given the European Union’s increased regulation of hateful speech and of platforms’ content moderation practices – a clash of these titans is inevitable. Nunziato will discuss the underlying forces that brought about these conflicts – including First Amendment, international, and EU law governing free expression and hate speech and governing platforms’ rights and duties regarding content moderation.  She will also discuss the recent changes in X’s and Meta’s hate speech content moderation practices and the impetus for these changes.  Nunziato will explore the ways in which these platforms have swung from a hands-off approach to the content moderation of hate speech, to more aggressive stances on moderating hate speech that are consistent with international human rights principles, then back to laissez-faire approaches. She will argue that instead of swinging dramatically from one end of the spectrum to the other in an attempt to align themselves with the political mood of the country, platforms like Meta and X should re-embrace their earlier commitment to adopting content moderation practices that conform with widely accepted international human rights protections. Such protections are embodied in documents like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on Eliminating all Forms of Racial Discrimination, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Adopting content moderation practices that conform with widely accepted international human rights protections will allow these platforms to properly balance the expressive freedoms of members of the public against the right to be free from harmful, hateful, and discriminatory expression online.

Dawn Carla Nunziato is the Pedas Family Endowed Professor of IP and Technology Law at George Washington University Law School, where she co-directs the Ethical Technology Initiative and The Global Internet Freedom Project. She currently serves as chair of the U.S. TikTok Content Advisory Council and as an advisory board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). She is an internationally recognized expert on social media regulation and free speech and is the author of the critically acclaimed book, 
Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age" (Stanford University Press). She has written extensively on issues involving content regulation, speech, and information privacy on the Internet, and has lectured and taught courses on these subjects around the world, including at Oxford University, the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center, Tsinghua University in Beijing, the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Freiburg, the Qatar Ministry of Culture, the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. She has been an invited presenter at leading law schools and universities, including Emory, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Harvard, Notre Dame, Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Vanderbilt, University of Virginia, Washington University, and Yale. While a law student at the University of Virginia, she served as articles editor of the Virginia Law Review and was the recipient of the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize, awarded to the outstanding member of the graduating class.