free speech

Aaron Edlin and Carl Shapiro respond to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s keynote speech at the 2025 Stigler Center antitrust and competition conference, in which he lays out his approach to regulating the content moderation policies of the major social media platforms. They explain why Ferguson’s approach threatens the exercise of free speech, is inconsistent with antitrust law, and politicizes the agency.

The following is a transcript of Tom Ginsburg's keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.

Mark MacCarthy writes that the case law supports Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s charge that collaboration by social media companies on content moderation practices would be anticompetitive collusion. However, the author argues that open and transparent cooperation might actually benefit a troubled internet, and Congress should consider carving out a content-neutral antitrust exemption for platforms in the way it has in the past for broadcast networks.

Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between...

Ashutosh Bhagwat argues in new research that expecting social media platforms to serve as gatekeepers for the “truth” flounders on economic, organizational, and democratic grounds. In fact, the end of media gatekeepers and elite control over public discourse may be what is necessary to reinvigorate the marketplace of ideas and reduce political polarization.

Will increasing the liability of internet platforms mitigate disinformation? Economists weighed in on the effects of limiting or repealing protections for Big Tech through a recent survey from the Forum for the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets—previously the Initiative on Global Markets—at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Citizens United v. FEC stands in the public eye as the U.S. Supreme Court case that flooded U.S. elections with “dark money” and SuperPACs....

Social media platforms are not infrastructure nor natural monopolies, and they should be regulated only if they have monopolistic power and abuse it. Free...

President Donald Trump's seditious actions are exposing the political power that Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook enjoy. Banning him from their platforms sets...

In an interview with ProMarket, Francis Fukuyama discusses the political threat posed by digital platforms and why he believes a “middleware” solution would be...