Conference Presentation: AAP 2023

Michael Barnes gave a presentation for the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) Annual Conference, on 4 July 2023. The talk, titled ‘Speech Acts on Social Media: Algorithms, Amplifiers, and Affordances,’ is part of a larger project that aims to update speech act theory for online communication, and then apply it to help make sense of various afflictions of our online lives. This talk argued that social media platforms are morally responsible for the harms their recommendations cause, in part because recommendation is a type of speech act that imbeds the recommender’s values.