Bhanuraj Kashyap

Concerns about the toxicity of the internet and social media are widespread. Many reasons have been offered for why social media increases online toxicity, from bad algorithms to the rise of online trolling, but perhaps the most prominent explanation has been the negative effects of social media on empathy. In this paper, we offer a framework of digital empathy by first outlining a descriptive account of digital empathy, encompassing both affective and cognitive components. By “digital empathy”, we mean empathy mediated through digital environments. We also explore the normative impacts of platforms on digital empathy and offer four main categories of moral assessment: (1) morally problematic one-off failures of digital empathy; (2) aggregate harms of failures of digital empathy; (3) impacts of recommendation systems on digital empathy by amplifying, obscuring, framing, and rushing targets of empathy; and (4) moral deskilling of empathy due to widespread use of social media. We also critically explore harm-based justifications for moderating content to explicitly govern empathetic relationships between users of a platform. We demonstrate how discussions of digital empathy can inform and enhance broader debates about the ethics of online content moderation, thereby further illuminating the moral, social, and political implications of social media’s role in facilitating user interactions.

Generative AI technologies have the potential to be socially and politically transformative. In this paper, we focus on exploring the potential impacts that Generative AI could have on the functioning of our democracies and the nature of citizenship. We do so by drawing on accounts of deliberative democracy and the deliberative virtues associated with it, as well as the reciprocal impacts that social media and Generative AI will have on each other and the broader information landscape. Drawing on this background theory, we outline some of the key positive and negative impacts that Generative AI is likely to have on democratic citizenship. The political significance of these impacts suggests the need for further regulation.

The negative impacts of social media have given rise to philosophical questions around whether social media companies have the authority to regulate user-generated content on their platforms. The most popular justification for that authority is to appeal to private ownership rights. Social media companies own their platforms, and their ownership comes with various rights that ground their authority to moderate user-generated content on their platforms. However, we argue that ownership rights can be limited when their exercise results in significant harms to others or the perpetration of injustices. We outline some of the substantive harms that social media platforms inflict through their practices of content moderation and some of the procedural injustices that arise through their arbitrary application of community guidelines. This provides a normative basis for calls to better regulate user-generated content on social media platforms. We conclude by considering some of the political and legal implications of our argument.