Unmuted Free Speech Dialogue - Free Speech Is Dead. Long Live Free Speech.

Join Unmuted for a salon series on free speech in multiple arenas, hosted at P&T Knitwear.

Your Feed Is Lying to You. Should the Government Fix It?

Three companies decide what 200 million Americans see, read, and believe every day. Not through censorship: through algorithms designed to maximize engagement, not inform. The result: separate realities, separate facts, and a public square that doesn't feel very public anymore.

So should the government step in? Regulate the algorithms? Force transparency? Or is that cure worse than the disease: handing politicians the power to shape what you see under the banner of "protecting democracy"?

Two experts. The question that's actually shaping your daily life whether you realize it or not.

Thomas Healy is the Board of Visitors Distinguished Professor at Seton Hall Law School, where he teaches constitutional law and the First Amendment. Before law, he was a journalist, including a stint as Supreme Court correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. He's the author of The Great Dissent, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellow. If you want to understand where the constitutional lines around speech actually came from, he's the person to ask.

Lama Mohammed is the inaugural Tech Policy Fellow at NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics (CSMAP), where she translates the center's research into live policy conversations around algorithms, platform accountability, and AI governance. She briefs policymakers in the U.S. and abroad on emerging tech legislation and has published in Brookings, Tech Policy Press, and Stanford's Journal of Online Trust & Safety. If you want to understand what's actually being proposed to regulate your feed, and what breaks if we get it wrong, she's the person to ask.

Two experts. One question: can free speech survive without a shared foundation or is demanding that foundation itself the threat?