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TikTok, X, Elon and Zuck: The New Realities of Social Media
Ashutosh Bhagwat, Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality and Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Bhagwat will discuss the evolving nature of the ongoing wars over social media. He will describe various regulatory initiatives around the world targeting social media that were enacted during the Biden Administration, and critique them from both a constitutional and policy perspective. He will then explain how the tech industry’s embrace of President Trump over the last several months fundamentally undermines many of the assumptions driving previous fights over social media; and further, how currently available empirical evidence also fails to support arguments that social media is malevolent, polarizing, or even all that important. He will conclude his lecture with a call for calm, at least as to social media —everyone should take a deep breath and relax. Whatever the ills that currently beset the United States and the world—and they are undoubtedly many—they have little or nothing to do with social media. In particular, the European Union and some figures on the American political left should seriously reconsider their obsession with regulating new technologies, and put their energies to better uses.
This endowed lecture honors the life of Edward L. Barrett Jr., founding dean of UC Davis School of Law and renowned constitutional law scholar.
Ash Bhagwat is a Distinguished Professor of Law and the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality at UC Davis School of Law. Prior to joining the Davis faculty in 2011, Professor Bhagwat was a member of the faculty at UC Law SF (formerly UC Hastings College of the Law) for seventeen years. Bhagwat is the author of Our Democratic First Amendment, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2020, The Myth of Rights, published by the Oxford University Press in 2010, and Killing the Messenger: The War on Social Media, which is forthcoming from the Cambridge University Press later this year. He has also authored numerous articles and book chapters on a range of topics, with a special focus on the First Amendment and modern technologies.
Professor Bhagwat holds a B.A., summa cum laude with Honors in History, from Yale College, and a J.D. with Honors from The University of Chicago Law School where he served as Articles Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. After graduating from law school, he completed clerkships with Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court.
Professor Bhagwat is a member of the American Law Institute, and in 2003 was awarded the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence at UC Law SF.
Please contact Onell Berrios with any questions.