PUBLICATION DAY 🇺🇸 📚 We're thrilled that Jeff Howard's Setting Fire to Reason: The Ethics of Free Speech is out in the U.S. today with Princeton University Press. Interested in grappling with the significance of free speech in the digital age, and where its limits properly lie? Check it out!

Some posts promote violence, misinformation, or self-harm. Is removal always the right response? Tune in to this week's episode of UCL Uncovering Politics, where we hear from Jeffrey Howard, Professor of Political Philosophy and Public Policy: buff.ly/SjAsdx3 #SocialMedia #FreeSpeech #Moderation

New paper alert! 🚨 Prof Jeffrey Howard & Dr Beatriz Kira have published a new paper on how social media platforms respond to harmful content - and how necessity and proportionality apply to online moderation. Read it here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Remove or Reduce: Demotion, Content Moderation, and Human Rights - Law and Philosophy

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 distribu...

link.springer.com

Leif Wenar (Stanford) joins Philosophically Speaking to explore the doctrine of effective altruism, explaining why it leads us astray when thinking about our duties to the global poor and to the future.

Renée Jørgensen (Michigan) joins Philosophically Speaking to explore the ethics of using big data to allocate police attention, and why doing so is morally questionable.

Cécile Laborde (Oxford) joins Philosophically Speaking to ask who should be protected by discrimination law, and whether the socially advantaged can be victims of wrongful discrimination.

New publication! 📣 Digital Speech Lab's Doctoral Research Affiliate Alex Ruani has produced a widely discussed new study introducing a tool to assess the harm of nutrition misinformation - not just whether it’s true or false. Read the study here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Development and validation of a tool for detecting misinformation risk in diet, nutrition, and health content (Diet-MisRAT) - Scientific Reports

Misinformation in diet and nutrition is recognised as a major public health threat, with the potential to misguide dietary choices and contribute to preventable harm. To address this, we developed a M...

nature.com

Dr Sam Berstler (MIT) joins Philosophically Speaking to explore how merely asking questions can sometimes be morally wrong, violating our rights to privacy.

Later this week: Jeff Howard will join a debate at the Oxford Union on the proposition “This House Would End Private Ownership of Social Media Platforms." Find out more at: oxford-union.org

Prof Jeremy Waldron (NYU) joins Philosophically Speaking to discuss what’s so bad about lying - and why certain lies are distinctively destructive to our political life.

🎙️The Digital Speech Lab's new podcast Philosophically Speaking takes listeners through some moral and political dilemmas shaping public life today. Co-hosts Jeffrey Howard and Emily McTernan speak with leading philosophers about their work - and what it means for the ethical challenges of our time.

We’re pleased to share a new contribution to the Philosophical Glossary of AI 📘 Digital Speech Lab's Prof Jeff Howard has co-authored an entry on content moderation, alongside Dr Sarah Fisher. Read it here: aiglossary.co.uk/2026/01/16/c...

🎙️Philosophically Speaking Podcast Presenting the best new scholarship in political and social philosophy, featuring lively conversations with leading thinkers. Join hosts Jeffrey Howard and Emily McTernan, exploring the thorniest ethical questions of our time. feeds.transistor.fm/philosophica...

Feels like a good time to be releasing this episode featuring Jeffrey Howard of @uclspeechlab.bsky.social. How should social media platforms regulate AI-Generated Content? (Spoiler: it's not by allowing people to use AI to create non-consensual sexualised images.) www.buzzsprout.com/2113237/epis...

53. How should social media platforms regulate AI-generated content? With Jeffrey Howard - Ethics Untangled

AI-generated content is a familiar and increasingly prevalent feature of social media. Users post text, video, audio and images which have been created by AI, sometimes being clear that this is what t...

buzzsprout.com

IDEA: The Ethics Centre@idea-leeds.bsky.social · 7mo ago

In the latest episode of @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social, Jim talks with Jeffrey about why AI‑specific policies miss the point, and how platforms can moderate harmful content without undermining valuable free speech.

🌐Our Digital Civics Initiative delivers interactive workshops in schools and provides digital literacy training to support responsible, informed online participation - all to help young people navigate their engagement with content online 📱 Find out more: www.digitalspeechlab.com/digital-civics

The Digital Civics team have been busy this week delivering sessions in three schools across London on disagreeing well and tackling mis and disinformation.📚💬 A great week of activity - more on this work to come.

🚨 New from The Economist Britain’s controversial experiment in regulating the internet: Our Director, Professor Jeff Howard, is quoted - noting that identity/age checks for adult-content sites can be a proportionate and reasonable step for online safety. 🔐📱

🧠💻 The recent Curriculum Review highlights the need to strengthen digital and media literacy in schools - including tackling mis/disinformation and understanding the impact of AI. Our Digital Civics team is already leading the way through hands-on workshops with schools. 📚✨

Meet the Team! 🌟 Emma Connolly is a Fellow with the Digital Speech Lab, leading its new initiative in digital civic education. Her academic work focuses on the viral movement patterns of narratives on social media platforms. 📱

💡 Our Research Fellow Emma Connolly previously wrote for the (Mis)Translating Deceit project on why tracking disinformation is so difficult - and what we can do about it. Read it here: www.mis-translating-deceit.com/project-blog...

Why is tracking disinformation so difficult—and what can we do about it? - (Mis)Translating Deceit

Emma Connolly explores why tracking mis and disnformation is challenging as it moves across platforms, and why it is vital its circulation is mitigated.

mis-translating-deceit.com

Our Research Fellow Emma Connolly wrote in The Conversation about what unites American voters - from fears about technology to shared concerns over democracy. Read it here: theconversation.com/there-are-ma...

There are many things American voters agree on, from fears about technology to threats to democracy

Americans of both parties are worried about Trump having a third term, and have other shared concerns.

theconversation.com

Meet the Team! 🌟 Ricki-Lee Gerbrandt is a Fellow in Platform Governance at UCL’s Digital Speech Lab. ⚖️💻 She is a lawyer and legal scholar working at the intersection of media freedom, freedom of expression, and the governance of digital technologies.

🚨 New Publication 🚨 Digital Speech Lab's Research Fellow Ricki-Lee Gerbrandt & Director Jeffrey Howard ask: Should Social Media Platforms Permit Violating Content that is “Newsworthy”? Read their article in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety: 👉 tsjournal.org/index.php/jo...

The arrest of comedian Graham Linehan has reignited debate over Britain’s free speech laws. In The New York Times, Professor Jeffrey Howard pushed back on Nigel Farage’s claim that Britain is “like North Korea”: “The important thing to stress is there’s reasonable room for reasonable disagreement.”

Digital civics is about ethical civic behaviours, citizenship, and democratic engagement in the digital realm. 🧠 At the Digital Speech Lab, we study the governance of online communications - identifying the principles that should guide regulation, balancing free expression with preventing harm.

🚨 The Digital Speech Lab's submission to the UK Parliament’s inquiry on social media, misinformation, and harmful algorithms was cited in the final report! 🏛️ Always great to see our work feed into national policy conversations. 🔗 Read the full report here: committees.parliament.uk/publications...

Meet the Team! 🌟 Jeffrey Howard is Director of the Digital Speech Lab and Professor of Political Philosophy and Public Policy at UCL. 🌐 He leads our DSL work on how digital platforms shape public discourse and producing philosophical guidance on how to improve online content moderation.

Analysis: There are many things American voters agree on Emma Connolly @uclspeechlab.bsky.social explores the issues, from fears about technology to threats to democracy, that voters on both sides of the political divide agree in The Conversation.

There are many things American voters agree on, from fears about technology to threats to democracy

Americans of both parties are worried about Trump having a third term, and have other shared concerns.

buff.ly

💭Still thinking about the great conversations we had at the Cally Festival last weekend. 🧠Our team guided visitors through the maze of digital media, helping them spy misinformation and understand the algorithms behind their feeds. Grateful to everyone who joined the conversation! #CallyFest2025

📸 A few more snaps from Sunday’s Cally Festival! From curious kids to critical thinkers — we loved seeing so many people try out Likes, Lies, and Algorithms. Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by to test their digital literacy skills and chat with the team 🙌 #CallyFest2025