Professor Ellen Goodman’s Work Profiled by GMF Digital

Ellen P. Goodman, non-resident senior fellow at the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, has just published with Sanjay Jolly a paper on renewing the traditional American commitment to “full stack” public media to address our information disorder. She has also just published the second in a series on how the FTC should respond to President Biden’s executive order on competition. On these and other digital freedom issues the Administration is now tackling, Ellen has led. Ellen is a professor at Rutgers Law School and co-directs the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL). 

Goodman was the first legal scholar to propose that platforms introduce friction to de-amplify harmful mis- and disinformation in her paper Digital Information Fidelity and Friction and earlier in her co-authored Stigler Committee on Digital Platforms Final Report. With Karen Kornbluh, she developed the idea of a circuit breaker to interrupt the spread of viral lies. These ideas have now been taken up by the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Misinformation, the Center for American Progress, and in Senate hearing questioning.

In her work with Kornbluh, Goodman created a roadmap for digital platform regulation involving competition and consumer protection law, as well as media law and self- regulation. They laid out these principles first in Democracy in 2019, and then more expansively in early 2020 in their roadmap Safeguarding Digital Democracy, following up with op-eds in the Washington Post, Just Security, and Slate.

Goodman’s academic work on smart cities has been influential in changing the course of Alphabet’s overreach in Toronto, starting with her law review article on the Sidewalk Labs project, Urbanism Under Google: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto, following up with a book chapter on Smart City Ethics, an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, and expert testimony for a civil rights plaintiff who challenged the project’s data practices. This work has informed her policy proposals on data and algorithmic governance.

On platform regulation, Goodman developed a signal-to-noise paradigm, which emerges from longstanding work on media policy. Working with the Obama Administration and the FCC, she proposed new directions for public media. With GMF, she has developed the idea of a civic infrastructure or “PBS for the Internet” and drawn on her expertise in advertising and regulatory design to publish with Kornbluh a policy proposal on using design interventions to reduce “dark patterns” in digital communications. This builds on theoretical work on cognitive autonomy and more generally on the discourse of positive freedoms—the freedom to be free from deception.