Cybersecurity & Tech

Lawfare Daily: A World Without Caesars

Renee DiResta, Ravi Iyer, Jacob Mchangama, E. Glen Weyl, Jen Patja
Friday, March 14, 2025, 8:00 AM
Does the way a social media platform is built influence how users use it?

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
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This episode of the Lawfare Podcast features Glen Weyl, economist and author at Microsoft Research; Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech Project at Vanderbilt; and Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center.

Together with Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and Contributing Editor at Lawfare, they talk about design vs moderation. Conversations about the challenges of social media often focus on moderation—what stays up and what comes down. Yet the way a social media platform is built influences everything from what we see, to what is amplified, to what content is created in the first place—as users respond to incentives, nudges, and affordances. Design processes are often invisible or opaque, and users have little power—though new decentralized platforms are changing that. So they talk about designing a prosocial media for the future, and the potential for an online world without Caesars.

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Renée DiResta is an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. She is a contributing editor at Lawfare.
Ravi Iyer is the managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Prior to this role, he spent over four years at Meta seeking to understand and improve the platform’s effect on society.
Jacob Mchangama is the executive director of Justitia and the Future of Free Speech project. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022).
E. Glen Weyl is the research lead of Microsoft Research's Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory, founder and chair of the Plurality Institute, and founder of RadicalxChange Foundation.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
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