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Susan Benesch

Susan Benesch, who teaches at American University's School of International Service, founded and directs the Dangerous Speech Project, to study speech that can inspire violence—and to find ways to prevent this, without infringing on freedom of expression. To that end, she conducts research on methods to diminish harmful speech online, or the harm itself. She also serves tech companies as an external source of ideas and critique, and speaks and publishes on governance of online content, hate speech, and disinformation. Trained as a human rights lawyer at Yale, Benesch is also a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Among her recent publications on how best to limit harmful content online are: “The Insidious Creep of Violent Rhetoric,”Noēma, March 4, 2021; “But Facebook's Not a Country: How to Interpret Human Rights Law for Social Media Companies,” Yale Journal on Regulation, Sept. 14, 2020; “The Deadly Consequences of Trump's Gradual and Insidious Rhetoric,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 13, 2021.

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