Views on First

From the first Trump administration to the Biden administration, the fight to ban TikTok has cut across conventional partisan and ideological lines. In this episode, host Ramya Krishnan explores the ban as an affront to our First Amendment right to receive information and ideas from abroad. Georgetown Law professor and tech regulation expert Anupam Chander highlights the government’s glaring lack of evidence that TikTok poses a national security threat. Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker explains why concerns about data collection and foreign disinformation aren’t limited to TikTok and why we need solutions that rein in the rapacious surveillance practices of U.S. platforms, too.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

It's not new for repressive governments to go after journalists. What is new is the ease with which they can do so — by turning journalists’ own phones against them. Host Alex Abdo explores the pernicious commercial spyware industry, and how repressive governments around the world use spyware to target journalists and activists. John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, speaks about the technical capacities of commercial spyware products to infect a device without the user’s knowledge. Salvadoran news site El Faro co-founder Carlos Dada and digital content editor Nelson Rauda Zablah recount their experiences being targeted with spyware (likely by their own government), and seeking legal recourse with the help of the Knight Institute. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Citizen or not—anyone can be searched at the border. Border agents may search messages, photos, and other intimate data on your personal phone, tablet, or other devices. Host Ramya Krishnan hears from documentary filmmaker Akram Shibly about his experience being detained and having his phone searched—twice—by officials at the U.S.-Canadian border. Knight Institute attorney Stephanie Krent addresses the constitutionality of such searches and why warrants should be required.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Dating back to the Obama administration, the U.S. government has been using its authority over the border to justify the surveillance of visitors’ and immigrants’ social media accounts. Host Anna Diakun explores the chilling effect this digital surveillance has on the speech and associations of millions of people around the world. Guest Faiza Patel, Senior Director of the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice, discusses not only the legal concerns raised by the government's social media surveillance program but also the lack of evidence that it serves any national security purpose. Journalist and 404 Media co-founder Joseph Cox shares his findings about the array of surveillance technologies purchased by the government, and explains just how much we don’t know about how the government uses the information it obtains to make immigration and other law enforcement decisions.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

From the war on anarchism to President Trump’s extreme vetting policies, the U.S. government’s practice of using the border as a justification to exclude ideas considered “dangerous” is as American as apple pie. In the first episode of “Views on First: Speech & the Border,” host George Wang invites lawyer and historian Julia Rose Kraut to explore the history of ideological exclusion and the government’s authority to bar individuals from the country on the basis of their speech, beliefs, and associations. Illustrating how these policies continue to bear on noncitizens today, immigration activist Ravi Ragbir shares his ongoing fight with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s attempt to target him for deportation based on his activism and organizing. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

We’ve all been hearing a lot about “the border”—in news headlines, candidates’ speeches, and political debates. On our third season of “Views on First: Speech & the Border” we examine the frontiers of censorship and surveillance. Today, the U.S. government uses its authority over the border to justify the exclusion of certain people and ideas, the surveillance of social media, the warrantless search of travelers’ laptops and cellphones, and the imposition of limits on access to foreign communications platforms. New digital technologies are reshaping the border and reinforcing the government’s power to control the flow of information and ideas, with dangerous consequences for democracy. Each episode, you'll hear from a Knight Institute lawyer involved in cases aimed at protecting vital First Amendment rights at the border and beyond. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman talks with Jameel Jaffer about whether and when universities should issue statements about social and political issues, and about the pros and cons of institutional neutrality.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Cornell Law School’s Michael Dorf talks with Jameel Jaffer about how federal anti-discrimination law is shaping universities’ responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campus, and about the tensions between anti-discrimination law and the First Amendment.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch and Evelyn Douek of Stanford Law talk with Jameel Jaffer about the role that social media platforms are playing in shaping, suppressing, and distorting public discourse about the war. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, and Isabella Ramirez, Editor in Chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator, talk with Jameel Jaffer about the crisis at Columbia, and about the challenges of reporting on it.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Jeannie Suk Gersen, professor of law at Harvard, contributing writer to the New Yorker, founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, and co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. They talk about the challenges facing academic freedom on college campuses since October 7th. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They talk about “cancellations” before and after October 7, the difference between free speech law and free speech culture, and the free speech implications of Title VI, the law that requires universities to take action against discriminatory harassment. Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, talks with Jameel Jaffer about the climate for speech supportive of Palestinians, defining discrimination, and the “Palestine Exception” to the First Amendment.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer talks with Eugene Volokh, distinguished professor of law at UCLA and soon-to-be senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about free speech on campus in the shadow of the war in Israel and Gaza. They discuss whether administrators should ban what some students describe as calls for genocide and consider what can be done to protect the space for dissent.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer talks with Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and one of the country’s leading theorists of free speech, about the climate for speech in the United States relating to the war in Israel and Gaza. How repressive is this moment, really? Is the First Amendment failing us? And what imprint will the events unfolding now leave on free speech law and culture?Read this episode's transcript: https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/79mb6nc1za FURTHER READINGAn Open Letter to the Deans of U.S. Law Schools: https://medium.com/@uslegalscholars/an-open-letter-to-the-deans-of-u-s-law-schools-d7c9ef846c68Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Social media platforms have evaded heavy regulation on their content moderation practices so far, but the jig may very well be up. Many U.S. states are considering enacting laws to rein platforms in. To date, two states—Florida and Texas—have passed laws that significantly limit social media companies’ ability to moderate their platforms, and the measures look very likely to be up for Supreme Court review soon. Guests Alex Abdo—litigation director of the Knight Institute—and Brian Willen—one of the lawyers representing platforms challenging these laws—discuss these immensely important Supreme Court cases. The debate around if and how to regulate social media grows increasingly fierce, and the future of the internet hangs in the balance.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Social media platforms make more decisions about free speech every minute than the Supreme Court has made in more than two hundred years. So the values and systems adopted by these Corporate Speech Overlords matter a lot.  Guests Nicole Wong—former Google VP and Twitter Exec—and Alex Stamos—Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook Chief Security Officer—tell the story of how Big Tech stumbled its way through developing systems of speech regulation, from the early laissez-faire days to the controversies of today. Turns out that speech regulation is hard.Some sound effects used in this episode come from freesfx.co.uk.Trombone sound effect comes from Benboncan on Freesound.org. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.“Dun Dun Dun” sound effect comes from copyc4t on Freesound.org. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Over time, the First Amendment has meant lots of different things to a lot of different people. In this episode, with University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier by her side, host Evelyn Douek travels back to the time when modern free speech doctrine first started to emerge. Together they consider the values that have influenced how America thinks about free speech and how these values came to shape the way American law approached regulating the internet back when very few people even knew what the internet was. We hear from someone who was there—Sen. Ron Wyden—now one of the most famous names in internet regulation—about Section 230—one of the most (in)famous online speech regulations out there. But things have been changing in the politics of online speech regulation, and things are really starting to get weird now.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Thanks to the ruling in Knight v. Trump, then-president Trump could no longer block critics on social media. Hooray! But the ruling was only the start of the story, and quickly new questions arose. How would it affect other government officials? What might it mean for the development of the law more generally? Could the ruling be used in ways that the Knight Institute team didn't expect and doesn’t agree with? In this episode, host Evelyn Douek is joined by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman and former Twitter head of integrity Yoel Roth. Together they explore the ramifications of Knight v. Trump, and ask: Did the case establish much-needed guardrails around free speech online, or is it starting us on a slippery slope that could fundamentally change how the First Amendment applies to social media platforms?Harp sound effect used in this episode comes from SPANAC on Free Sounds Library. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

What is Twitter (or any social media platform) as a matter of First Amendment law? In the first of five episodes, host Evelyn Douek begins to crack open this question, starting with perhaps the most famous Twitter handle of all — @realdonaldtrump. As president, Trump used his account to hire and fire government officials, butt heads with North Korea, and block his critics, a practice that one group of lawyers started to question.Guests Jameel Jaffer and Katie Fallow — executive director and senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, respectively — discuss the Knight Institute’s landmark case –Knight v. Trump – establishing that the First Amendment bars public officials from blocking critics from their social media accounts. They are joined by some of the plaintiffs from that lawsuit—comedy writer Nick Jack Pappas, chocolatier and political consultant Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, and sociologist Philip Cohen, who recount their experiences of being blocked (and then unblocked) by Trump.This episode contains strong language.Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.