Emerging Threats
An essay series exploring new or intensifying threats to the system of free expression
The Knight First Amendment Institute’s Emerging Threats series invited leading thinkers to identify and grapple with newly arising or intensifying structural threats to the system of free expression. Fake news, hostile audiences, powerful private platforms, government secret-keeping, and other phenomena have the potential to destabilize political systems and undermine economic and social reform. The papers in the series explore ways to address these threats and preserve the foundations of democracy essential to healthy open societies, including the United States.
The Emerging Threats series is edited by David Pozen, professor at Columbia Law School and inaugural senior visiting research scholar at the Knight Institute.
Featured
Introducing the Emerging Threats Essays
The Knight Institute's inaugural essay series invites leading thinkers to identify and grapple with newly arising or intensifying structural threats to the system of free expression.
By Jameel Jaffer & David PozenPodcast
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The Perilous Public Square: An Essay Collection
Four essay authors reflect on current free expression events in new interviews
By Katy Glenn Bass
Essays and Scholarship
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Facebook v. Sullivan
Investigating Facebook’s use of the “public figure” and “newsworthiness” concepts in content moderation decisions.
By Kate Klonick -
State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It
The collapse of the U.S. government's system for organizing, conserving, and revealing its activities.
By Matthew Connelly -
The Failure of Internet Freedom
Probing the demise of a non-regulation, anti-censorship, global internet agenda.
By Jack Goldsmith -
Discriminatory Designs on User Data
Exploring how Section 230's immunity protections may enable or elicit disciminatory behaviors online
By Olivier Sylvain -
Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy
Deconstructing the “editorial analogy,” and analogical reasoning more generally, in First Amendment litigation involving powerful tech companies.
By Heather Whitney -
The Hostile Audience Revisited
Incendiary speech in the wake of Charlottesville, Berkeley, Boston, and beyond.
By Frederick Schauer -
Is the First Amendment Obsolete?
New free expression challenges from “troll armies,” “flooding,” and propaganda robots that aim to distort or drown out disfavored speech.
By Tim Wu