Talk: Speech Acts on Social Media: Algorithms, Amplifiers, and Affordances

Michael Barnes gave a presentation for the ANU Philosophy Department Seminar Series, on 16 November 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.