2025 EUCOS Symposium Student Workshop

Student Workshop:

Tackling the Question of Social Media Content, Risk, and Regulation

Moderators: John A. Albert, Jessica Beyer

Open to pre-registered University of Washington students only

Description

This workshop offers students the opportunity to engage with a pressing technology policy problem while also practicing key professional skills. Workshop participation will help students practice these skills with support from experts on the topic of social media content regulation. 

The question of how and who should regulate social media content is one that every government in the world is grappling with. Particularly in democracies, questions about how to balance freedoms of expression and speech with countering the potential security risks of extremist content or harmful misinformation on social media have become increasingly pressing. Each social media platform has its own internal content moderation policy and different countries have chosen different paths to deal with this problem. Here we look to the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as one model for regulating social media content and contrast this approach with the US’s approach centered on Section 230 and the First Amendment.  

A key skill set for future employment is the ability to process information about a topic quickly, synthesize that information, understand it within broader societal and political contexts, and write short and concise briefs about the topic. By the end of the workshop, participants will gain this experience by producing a one-page policy brief. Well-written final versions of policy briefs will be published to the Jackson School’s Cybersecurity Initiative website if authors are interested in doing so and willing to go through a revision process. 

To participate, students must attend the panel discussion from 9:00-10:30 am PST on differing approaches to social media regulation in the EU and US. 

Instructions

A policy brief is a concise summary of a policy problem that contains the information necessary to make policy recommendations. To write one successfully, you need to outline relevant information, offer a policy recommendation, and discuss the trade-offs inherent to that recommendation. 

You could address the high level issue of overall content regulation. But, you might consider tackling a smaller issue within that such as health misinformation, extremist content, etc, and/or on a particular platform, e.g. WhatsApp, TikTok, etc. It is fine to do supplementary research on top of the information you gathered from the panel.

To do this you must do the following: 

1) Define the problem: You must offer evidence that there is a problem to be solved and that it is something that needs to be solved now. This includes concisely answering:

  1. What is the problem (e.g., health misinformation on TikTok)? 
  2. What are the parameters or variables of that problem? 
  3. For whom is this a problem?
  4. How do we know this is a problem? 
  5. What data illustrates or evidences the problem?
  6. Why do we need to address this problem now? 
  7. What are the potential consequences of not addressing this problem?

2) Describe existing solutions: You must identify what people have done to solve the problem. 

  1. What are the existing policies meant to address or impact this problem? 
  2. What are institutions in place to deal with this problem? 
  3. Are these existing policy and institutional solutions working? 
  4. What evidence do you have for your claims?

3) Propose a policy alternative: Propose a policy solution to the problem you have identified in 1(d). As part of your argument, you will need to: 

  1. Provide evidence your solution is the best available. 
  2. Identify the trade-offs that must be made to implement your solution.
  3. Make sure that your “solution” doesn’t already exist.
  4. Credit anyone else who has suggested this solution already. 
  5. Provide evidence that your proposed solution will address the problem. Remember that evidence is not someone saying that it will work. Instead, you need to find data that supports your claims or argument. 

4) Cite your work. You must cite your work using APA and in-text citations or Chicago and footnotes.