Freedom of Expression in the New Media Landscape

While the normative foundations of the right to freedom of expression remain unchanged, the political, technological, and institutional contexts in which this right must be realized - and protected - have evolved significantly. Digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the ways people communicate, altering the speed, scale, and quality of information flows. The result is a new media ecosystem characterized by platformization, algorithmic curation, and blurred boundaries between public and private discourse. Within this environment, disinformation and information manipulation can be more readily produced and weaponized. The freedom of expression finds itself in the crosshairs.

Join Perry World House for a timely and forward-looking discussion examining what this evolving media landscape means for the protection and promotion of freedom of expression in the twenty-first century, and the broader implications for human rights in an era of technological transformation.

Speaker

David Kaye is a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, the independent expert of the United States to the Venice Commission, and an affiliated scholar at Oxford University’s Bonavero Institute for Human Rights and Lund University’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. From 2014 – 2020, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. He is the author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (2019), a Trustee of ARTICLE 19, served as Independent Chair of the Board of the Global Network Initiative (2020 – 2024) and was 2023-2024 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Public International Law at Lund University, Sweden. He writes regularly for international and American law journals and media outlets. David began his legal career with the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Moderator

Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is also its Lauren Berlant professor of communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3).

Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, as is her scholarly editorial work. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Banet-Weiser has been the recipient of international fellowships and visiting professorships at, among others, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, France; the Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Portugal in Lisbon, Portugal; Microsoft Research New England (the social media collective); and McGill University in Montreal (Media@McGill Scholar). She is also a fellow of the International Communication Association.

Banet-Weiser is the recipient of scholarly and mentoring awards, including the Constance Rourke Prize for Best Article in American Quarterly, and the Mellon Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She is a distinguished faculty fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California. She was formerly a professor and head of department at the London School of Economics after 19 years in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where she was professor, vice dean, and the director of the School of Communication.

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