The Aspen Institute

This is a presentation of the newly released report from the Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression. The report’s recommendations are the culmination of a yearlong investigation by 28 legislators, government officials, tech executives, civil society leaders and academics from North America and Europe. They address hate speech, violent extremism and viral deception without chilling free expression, a fundamental right that both promotes individual liberty and holds governments accountable.  

We are joined by:

• Harlem Désir, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media; former French Minister of State for Europe Affairs; former Member of European Parliament
• Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director, Stanford Global Digital Policy Incubator; former U.S. Ambassador, UN Human Rights Council
• Jeff Jarvis, Professor and Director, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, City University of New York
• Susan Ness, Distinguished Fellow, Annenberg Public Policy Center; Former Member, Federal Communications Commission; Distinguished Fellow, German Marshall Fund
• Vivian Schiller, Executive Director, Aspen Digital
  

Harlem Désir was appointed as the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media in July 2017. Prior to this position, Désir was French Minister of State for European Affairs, attached to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, since April 2014. He was a Member of the European Parliament for three consecutive terms from 1999 to 2014. He was also Vice-President of the Delegation for relations with the United States (2002-2004), a member of the Joint ACP-EU Parliamentary Assembly (2002- 2009), and a member of the Delegation for relations with India (2009-2014). Désir holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Paris I Sorbonne University. He has been awarded the Olof Palme Prize, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix, and the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Eileen Donahoe is executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University. Donahoe served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva during the Obama administration. After leaving government Donahoe was director of global affairs at Human Rights Watch, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy. She serves on the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors; Dartmouth College Board of Trustees; University of Essex Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Advisory Board; Benetech Human Rights Advisory Board; and Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jeff Jarvis is professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Jarvis is the author of Geeks Bearing Gifts, Public Parts, What Would Google Do? and Gutenberg the Geek and is cohost of the podcast “This Week in Google.” He blogs at buzzmachine.com. Previously, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications (including Condé Nast and Newhouse Newspapers); creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; and TV critic of TV Guide and People magazines.

Susan Ness is a distinguished fellow of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and a former member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. She also is a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Previously, Ness was a senior fellow with the SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She heads Susan Ness Strategies, a communications policy consulting firm, and is a member of the board of directors of TEGNA. She also serves on the board of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an NGO that identifies emerging women leaders around the world and assists them to achieve their mission.

Vivian Schiller is Executive Director of Aspen Digital. Over the last 30 years, Vivian has held executive roles at some of the most respected media organization in the world. Those include: President and CEO of NPR; Global Chair of News at Twitter; General Manager of NYTimes.com; Chief Digital Office of NBC News; chief of the Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture of The New York Times and Discovery Communications; and head of CNN documentary and long form divisions. Documentaries and series produced under her auspices earned multiple honors, including three Peabody Awards, four Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards, and dozens of Emmys. Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and a Director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian. She is also strategic advisor to Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

The Transatlantic Working Group is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (APPC) in partnership with The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and with the Institute for Information Law, which is affiliated with the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. The TWG is also supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.