Dr. Chinmayi Arun

Executive Director The Information Society Project Yale Law School

Facebook’s Faces

Video Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CibiyxFCXs

Time: Friday 12 January 2024, 10:30am - 12:00pm (HK time)

Place: The C-Centre, NAH 313 Humanities Building, CUHK

About the Talk

Chinmayi Arun builds on platform governance theories that account for social media platforms’ relationships with states and users, to offer a theory to account for differences among states, the varying influence of different publics, and the complexity and tensions within companies. She does so by focusing on Facebook, and on its decision first to suspend Donald Trump’s account and then to request its Oversight Board to review the decision.

Arun’s retheorizing includes less influential states and publics that are otherwise obscured, and renders visible the agency and influence of Facebook’s staff. She argues that Facebook engages with states and publics through multiple parallel regulatory conversations, further complicated by the fact that Facebook itself is not a monolith. Facebook has many faces — different teams working towards different goals, and engaging with different ministries, institutions, scholars, and civil society organizations. It is also internally complicated, with staff whose sympathies and powers vary and can be at odds with each other.

About the Speaker

Chinmayi Arun is a Lecturer in Law, Research Scholar in Law, and Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on platform governance, social media, algorithmic decision-making, the data economy, and privacy, all within the larger universe of questions raised by law’s relationship with the information society. Before arriving at Yale, Arun was Assistant Professor of Law at two of the most highly regarded law schools in India. During that time, she also founded and led the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi. Arun has served as a Human Rights Officer (temporary appointment) at the United Nations, where she worked on questions of privacy, online speech, and artificial intelligence, as well as on advisory committees of international bodies like UNESCO and UN Global Pulse.

🕙 Friday 12 January 2024, 10:30am - 12:00pm 📍 The C-Centre, NAH 313 Humanities Building, CUHK