Attempting to break out of prison is spectacularly imprudent: it is likely to fail, risks incurring a longer prison sentence, and endangers one’s life. But is it morally wrong? In many cases, it is: culpable wrongdoers legitimately sentenced to proportionate punishments [...]

The debate over free speech is often marked by two extremes: in one corner, those who think that the right to free speech is nearly absolute; in the other, those who defend sweeping prohibitions on harmful speech. In Setting Fire to Reason, [...]

How should social media platforms respond to harmful speech? For some content, platforms respond by removing it. But for other content, platforms allow the speech to be posted, but reduce its distribution throughout their networks to reduce its visibility. This second [...]

Freedom of speech is among the most cherished values of liberal democracy. But there is a surprising amount of disagreement as to what, exactly, it requires, and what priority it should take over other values. This chapter surveys debates in modern [...]

This chapter considers the ethics of deploying machine tools for the task of moderating hate speech on social media. The benefits of deploying AI are substantial: platforms have a moral duty to moderate hate speech on their networks, and AI enables [...]

This chapter shows how philosophical debate over speech is entwined with empirical issues, with many disagreements in the free speech literature turning on questions about facts rather than on questions about values. Attending to these empirical puzzles—about the consequences of free [...]

In 2016, Facebook received widespread global criticism for removing the iconic “Terror of War” photo (widely known as the “Napalm Girl” photo) for violating its rules on child nudity. To remedy that concern, Facebook introduced a general “newsworthiness allowance” to apply [...]

Artificially generated content threatens to seriously disrupt the public sphere. Generative AI massively facilitates the production of convincing portrayals of fabricated events. We have already begun to witness the spread of synthetic misinformation, political propaganda, and non-consensual intimate deepfakes. Malicious uses [...]

In this paper, we argue that the Online Safety Act 2023 and Ofcom’s guidance incentivise online platforms to adopt a ‘Bypass Strategy’, where they create and enforce content moderation rules that are broader than existing criminal law to bypass judgements of [...]

Human beings have significant interests in communicating what they think to others, and in listening to what others have to say. These interests make it difficult to justify coercive restrictions on people’s communications, plausibly grounding a moral right to speak (and [...]