Online platforms' effects on public health, safety and democracy

Yaël Eisenstat discusses the impact of online platforms on public health, safety and democracy. She is currently[1] the Director of Policy and Impact at Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D),[2] working on policy solutions for how to hold social media and other online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. Previously, she was Vice President at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology & Society (CTS). She was a Facebook election integrity head in 2018 and later became a whistleblower, speaking publicly about the dangers to democracy stemming from the company's decisions and products. She has held other other positions protecting democracy including as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House advisor. C4D contributed to the recent March 24, 2026, jury verdict in a civil case against Internet companies in New Mexico.[3]
Eisenstat is interviewed by Spencer Graves.[4]

Eisenstat's work includes a TED Talk and an SXSW panel in 2020 and a 2024  research report on tech platforms and political violence.

In Eisenstat's (2020) TED talk, she said that around 2015 she began to notice that she was losing the ability to engage with others who were thought differently. Conversations with others in the US were becoming more difficult than conversations she had had as a CIA officer and diplomat drinking tea and talking with outspoken anti-Western clerics and suspected terrorists in Africa. Many of those engagements began with mutual suspicion but none degenerated into shouting or insults. In some cases she built collaboration on areas of mutual interest. Her most powerful tools were to listen, learn and build empathy. Most of her contacts wanted to feel heard, validated and respected. But social media companies like Facebook incentivize inflammatory content contributing to a culture of political polarization and mistrust. This generates revenue for Facebook and similar companies that make money from clicks, "because the shortest path to a click is anger or hate", in the words of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, interviewed 2024-08-19 for this Media & Democracy series. When Facebook asked Eisenstat in 2018 to lead their work to support global elections integrity for political ads, she agreed. She left six months later, speaking openly about Facebook's inability to meet its responsibility to secure elections, subsequently documented, e.g., in the thousands of internal Facebook documents that Haugen released to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.

Eisenstat was part of a "panel about the Future of Tech Responsibility" for the 2020 South by Southwest festival. The festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, but the panel was held virtually. This panel included a discussion of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended by the Communications Decency Act of 1996.[5] It was "written before platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter existed" -- written while Google was a research project by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Section 230 includes, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."[6] Eisenstat says that it's time to revisit Section 230, to demand accountability where Internet companies promote or suppress information based on the content while protecting web freedom otherwise. This is similar to the recommendations of Dean Baker that when Internet companies make money by promoting information differentially based on content, they should be liable as are legacy media under the US Supreme Court decision in NYT v. Sullivan (1964). In other cases, they should be treated as common carriers like telephone companies.

More recently, Eisenstat et al. (2024a, b) are insisting that, "Tech Platforms Must Do More to Avoid Contributing to Potential Political Violence". The New York Times had reported that, "a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal," particularly targeting public officials and democratic institutions. A survey from the Brennan Center found that 38% of election officials have experienced violent threats. They attributed these threats primarily to tech platforms and gave seven recommendations in four themes "congruent with any number of papers that academics and civil society leaders have published over the years." They said that platforms

• must develop robust standards for threat assessment and engage in scenario planning, crisis training, and engagement with external stakeholders, with as much transparency as possible.


• should enforce clear and actionable content moderation policies that address election integrity.


• should enforce their rules uniformly, not exempting politicians and other political influencers.


• must clearly explain important content moderation decisions, ensuring transparency especially when it comes to high profile accounts.

They hope that increasing demands for accountability will prompt platforms to act more responsibly and prioritize the risk of political violence both in the United States and abroad.

More on this including a moderated discussion of the issues raised is available in the companion article on Wikiversity on "Online platforms' effects on public health, safety and democracy".

• Bobby Allyn (25 March 2026). "Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial". NPR. Wikidata Q139572103.


• Yael Eisenstat (August 2020) Dear Facebook, this is how you're breaking democracy, TED, Wikidata Q138844363


• Yael Eisenstat (2021). "Section 230 Revisited: Web Freedom vs Accountability". Cornell Tech. 13 May 2020. Wikidata Q139568755.


• Yael Eisenstat; Justin Hendrix; Daniel Kreiss (2024a). "Preventing Tech-Fueled Political Violence: What online platforms can do to ensure that they do not contribute to election-related violence". The Bulletin of Technology & Public Life. 22 May 2024. Wikidata Q139571027.


• Yael Eisenstat; Justin Hendrix; Daniel Kreiss (2024B). "Tech Platforms Must Do More to Avoid Contributing to Potential Political Violence". Tech Policy Press. Wikidata Q139571163.


• Katie McQue (24 March 2026). "Meta ordered to pay $375m after being found liable in child exploitation case". The Guardian. Wikidata Q139572337. ISSN 0261-3077.


• Blake E. Reid (4 September 2020), Section 230 of… what?, Wikidata Q139570229