This episode of the Lawfare Podcast features Glen Weyl, economist and author at Microsoft Research; Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech Project at Vanderbilt; and Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center.

Together with Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and Contributing Editor at Lawfare, they talk about design vs moderation. Conversations about the challenges of social media often focus on moderation—what stays up and what comes down. Yet the way a social media platform is built influences everything from what we see, to what is amplified, to what content is created in the first place—as users respond to incentives, nudges, and affordances. Design processes are often invisible or opaque, and users have little power—though new decentralized platforms are changing that. So they talk about designing a prosocial media for the future, and the potential for an online world without Caesars.

Articles Referenced:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10834

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4178647

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/27/empowering-users-not-overlords-overcoming-digital-helplessness/

https://kgi.georgetown.edu/research-and-commentary/better-feeds/

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-algorithmic-management-of-polarization-and-violence-on-social-media

https://time.com/7258238/social-media-tang-siddarth-weyl/

https://futurefreespeech.org/scope-creep/

https://futurefreespeech.org/preventing-torrents-of-hate-or-stifling-free-expression-online/

https://www.thefai.org/posts/shaping-the-future-of-social-media-with-middleware

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[PREVIEW] #78 - PLAIN AS YOUR EYES CAN SEE: The Vanishing of Jim Sullivan