Enhancing the FTC's Consumer Protection Authority to Regulate Social Media Companies

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Join us on Tuesday, June 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Enhancing the FTC's Consumer Protection Authority to Regulate Social Media Companies” featuring Paul Barrett of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and Susan Ness of the Annenberg Public Policy Center in conversation with Julie Owono of the Content Policy & Society Lab. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About the Seminar: 

The social media industry’s self-regulation has proven inadequate. It is time for Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to step in. Enhancing the FTC's Consumer Protection Authority to Regulate Social Media Companies offers principles and policy goals to help lawmakers and regulators sort through the dozens of bills pending before Congress and shape an agenda for the FTC to use its consumer protection authority to incentivize better corporate conduct.

About the Speakers:

Paul Barrett is the deputy director and senior research scholar at the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He joined the Center in September 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist focusing on the intersection of business, law, and society. At Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, he wrote cover stories on topics such as energy and the environment, military procurement, and the civilian firearm industry. From 1986 to 2005, he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, serving for part of that time as the newspaper’s Supreme Court correspondent. Paul is the author of four nonfiction books, including GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun, a New York Times Bestseller.
 
At the Center for Business and Human Rights, Paul has written a series of reports on the role of the social media industry in a democracy. Topics have included the problems of foreign and domestic disinformation, the consequences of outsourced content moderation, the debate over Section 230, the role of social media in intensifying political polarization in the U.S., and how Congress could enhance the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection authority to regulate the major platforms. Since 2008, Paul has served as an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law, where he co-teaches a seminar called “Law, Economics, and Journalism.” He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard.

Susan Ness is a distinguished fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, where she leads a project to encourage transatlantic governments and stakeholders to forge common ‘modular’ solutions that are accepted under different tech regulatory frameworks. Previously, she convened the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression, which published a report and 14 briefing papers. She also is a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund, working on transatlantic digital policy. She is a former member of the Federal Communications Commission, where she focused on digital transformation of communications. She is a board member of both media company TEGNA Inc, and Vital Voices Global Partnership, an NGO that supports women leaders who are improving the world. She holds a J.D. from Boston College Law School and an M.B.A. from The Wharton Graduate School (University of Pennsylvania).

Julie Owono is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar. 

With a fluency in five languages, a childhood spent in various countries, and an educational background at the Lyçée Français Alexandre Dumas in Moscow, Julie has a unique perspective to understand the challenges and opportunities of a global Internet. This background has shaped her belief that global and multi stakeholder collaborations can be instrumental in the emergence of rights-based content policies and regulations.