At Elon Law Review’s 2025 symposium, “Breaking News: First Amendment on Trial,” scholars and journalists explored free speech, press rights, social media and AI’s growing influence on information access.
In a media-saturated world where hot takes dominate — amplified by algorithms and rewarded by clicks, shares and views — cooler heads and shared humanity must prevail for democracy to thrive.
That was the message delivered by Siva Vaidhyanathan, keynote speaker at the Elon Law Review’s 2025 symposium, “Breaking News, First Amendment on Trial,” held Friday, Sept. 19, at Elon Law. The event explored the intersection of the First Amendment, law and technology.
“We have a media ecosystem where all the incentives are designed to spread highly emotional messages. Content that’s deep, deliberative, cooler takes rather than the hotter takes, those sink. Those are harder to spread,” Vaidhyanthan said during his address, “The Great Scramble: How 20 Years of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence Have Changed Politics, Society, and Free Speech.”
Vaidhyanathan is a renowned social media scholar and the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. Much of his hour-long address was devoted to processing the assassination of conservative figurehead Charlie Kirk and reactions to it across society, the media and the federal government.
“We have to take these moments — every chance we get — to cool the hot takes, to approach all of these concerns with courage and fortitude and faith and mutual respect.”
The symposium also included panel discussions among journalists, attorneys and scholars that spanned current topics in First Amendment litigation, free speech, press rights, and the emerging influences of social media and AI. More than 100 people attended the event, which was organized by Elon Law Review members Yates May L’25, chief symposium editor, and Saniya Pangare L’25 and Cameron Riordan L’25, symposium editors.
Vaidhyanathan argued that the current reactionary media landscape, and social media in particular, destabilizes democratic systems and can lead to violence like that perpetrated against Kirk and others.
“The real thing is we have undermined our ability to deliberate collectively,” Vaidhyanathan said. “We are now incapable of having serious conversations about serious issues. And that’s before the whole censorship issue — which is now alive again, as you know. It’s almost impossible to even agree on a shared problem, let alone disagree and ultimately deliberate and maybe compromise about those issues. So right now, we are living in cacophony. What thrives in cacophony? Confusion. Hatred. Fear. Indignation. Cynicism. That is the problem. That is the threat to democracy, ultimately.”
He emphasized a need for calm deliberation of issues over zero-sum debates, willingness to compromise and recognition of the humanity of people who hold opposing views.
Also discussed at the symposium:
Panel 1: First Amendment Litigation
- Lauren Gailey, assistant professor, Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University
- Amanda Martin, clinical professor of law and supervising attorney, First Amendment Clinic of Duke University School of Law
- Evan Ringel, assistant professor, Appalachian State University Department of Communication
Moderator: Enrique Armijo, professor of law at Elon Law
The panel on First Amendment litigation explored how courts and communities handle issues of free speech and press rights. Gailey focused on the often-overlooked “press” part of the First Amendment, arguing that journalists already receive special treatment in practice and that the law should be clearer about it. She suggested replacing the high bar of proving “actual malice” in libel cases with a more practical standard tied to professional responsibility and called for updating the definition of who counts as “press” to reflect today’s media landscape, including podcasters and online voices.
Martin connected these ideas to North Carolina cases, pointing to a recent jury verdict against The News & Observer and the state’s reporter’s privilege law, which broadly protects journalists but isn’t always applied in practice. She noted that juries often find “actual malice” confusing and may already be moving toward a gross negligence-based approach.
Ringel traced how federal press policy has shifted over time, highlighting changes to Department of Justice guidelines and warning that without a permanent federal law, protections for journalists remain fragile.
Panel 2: Free Speech and the Press
- Israel Balderas, assistant professor of journalism, School of Communications at Elon University
- Justice (ret.) John G. Browning, Distinguished Jurist in Residence at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law
- Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation & Law Fellow, University of Texas at Austin
Moderator: Patricia Perkins, associate dean for academic affairs and associate professor, Elon Law
Browning warned that AI already shapes journalism while public trust erodes. He shared concern that journalism jobs are shrinking as automation grows, decreasing the ability of human eyes and ethics in preventing mistakes. Browning described “libel by AI” — hallucination, omission, misquote, and conflation — with cases of mayors, professors and businesses wrongly smeared by chatbots. He pointed out a lack of remedies for victims, with disclaimers and arbitration clauses shielding companies. With no federal framework and the courts’ high bar for actual malice, he suggested product-liability theories for defective AI outputs.
Balderas drew on two decades in news to show how political pressure, corporate mergers, and regulatory maneuvers chill speech. He recalled resisting scripted interview questions in 2016 and losing his job. He argued both left and right now weaponize levers of power to punish expression, replacing pluralism with conformity. Large corporations’ bottom lines often leap principle, leaving the First Amendment strained by silence and fear. Balderas urged defending offensive speech, teaching rights with responsibilities and restoring civil discourse.
Frazier argued technology has always reshaped news, but today’s “news deserts” magnify risks. He urged news outlets to redesign their workflow for AI-led gathering and drafting of news, with humans verifying and contextualizing. He pointed to legal questions around copyright and privacy, and AI personalization’s threat to shared facts. He stressed that humans remain indispensable as investigators, ethicists and storytellers.
Panel 3: Social Media, Censorship and AI
- Jeff Horwitz, tech investigations reporter, Reuters
- Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, Elon University
Moderator: David Levine, professor of law, Elon Law
Horwitz argued that social platforms now set our policy agenda because they’re engineered to maximize engagement. Inside Meta — about which he has reported extensively and authored the book, “Broken Code,” — he observed systems that rewarded resharing, structurally amplifying aggressive, high-emotion content without overt viewpoint targeting. Social media concentrates authority in a handful of companies while fragmenting audience experience, a bad combination, but academia and political leaders responses also chill speech. He cautioned that generative AI compounds these failures, and continue to weaken the news business. He pointed to a future where individuals, and particularly lawyers, will have to be their own fact-gatherers.
Rainie traced the arc from early internet optimism to the “techlash,” noting that social media optimized for attention drove tribalism, while coming AI agents will be optimized for intimacy — always present, affirming and potentially deepening fragmentation amid isolation. He emphasized that people now filter information through identity first, making shared facts scarce. AI exacerbates that effect. He sees hope: In crises, audiences seek credible sources, and local accountability matters more than partisan divide.