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Jonathan Zittrain

  • Why I Changed My Mind panelists.

    HLS Beyond provides students with opportunties for less formal learning

    September 20, 2023

    An initiative led by the Harvard Law School Library offers workshops on cutting-edge topics and skills for life and lawyering.

  • An illustration depicts many staircases ending at an opening representing the internet as a figure searches the scene with a light.

    How to think about AI

    June 27, 2023

    Machine-generated output is raising a host of legal and ethical questions around authorship, fair use, copyright, and more.

  • The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social

    April 20, 2023

    Nearly two decades ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a site for students to stay in touch. Then came Twitter, where people posted about…

  • Two people at a table in a library having a conversation

    Notes and Comment

    March 29, 2023

    At this spring's Notes and Comment event, dozens of Harvard Law students working on writing projects met with faculty experts for advice and commentary on their work.

  • Opinion – A better kind of social media is possible — if we want it

    March 6, 2023

    Talk to almost anyone today about social media, and you’ll hear that it’s toxic. One might diagnose it with having an excess of outrage, another…

  • Ifs, ands and bots

    February 17, 2023

    An article by Jonathan Zittrain: If reading articles about cybersecurity has become a little tiresome, it’s because its curse has been deep and persistent. Our…

  • What Is ‘Shadow Banning’?

    January 13, 2023

    Your social media posts, as far as you can tell, are great, but they don’t they get any engagement. Are you being “shadow banned”? The…

  • Illustration of people carrying large social media like and dislike buttons against a blue background.

    Facebook and the problem of truth

    December 15, 2022

    In a new podcast, Harvard Law Professors Jonathan Zittrain and Jill Lepore road-test an idea to enlist high school students across the country as “advertisement juries.”

  • Trial by Teenager, Part 2

    November 10, 2022

    The fact-checking experiment gets scaled up with 40 students in two states. The Super Bowl of fact-checking, a final test of an idea that might…

  • Charles Ogletree in his Office

    Ogletree family donates the celebrated law professor and civil rights scholar’s papers to Harvard Law School

    October 13, 2022

    The Harvard Law School Library has been chosen as a steward of the papers of Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., the celebrated and influential Harvard Law professor and civil rights scholar.

  • Torts! casebook cover.

    Third edition of Torts!, an online, open casebook, expands with print edition

    August 18, 2022

    This year, Jonathan Zittrain and Jordi Weinstock published Torts! Third Edition as the first in their Open Casebook series of high-quality, low-cost text books designed to make these primary texts affordable to law students across the United States.

  • Institute for Rebooting Social Media fellows

    The Institute for Rebooting Social Media announces its inaugural cohort of visiting scholars

    April 8, 2022

    The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has announced its Institute for Rebooting Social Media’s inaugural cohort of Visiting Scholars.

  • Susan Hendrickson

    Berkman Klein Center welcomes Susan Hendrickson as executive director

    December 1, 2021

    The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has announced the appointment of Susan Hendrickson ’93 as its new executive director.

  • Woman talking into a microphone

    Is it time to swipe left on social media?

    October 12, 2021

    Leaked revelations about Instagram’s impact on teens have united Republicans and Democrats in considering legal reforms, say Harvard Law School scholars.

  • Facebook Blames ‘Faulty Configuration Change’ for Nearly Six-Hour Outage

    October 5, 2021

    Facebook Inc blamed a "faulty configuration change " for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The company in a late Monday blog post did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned. Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems. ... “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

  • Big Tech’s not-so-secret plan to monopolize your home

    September 29, 2021

    ... I’ve been writing a lot recently about the price you face as a consumer and a citizen for being trapped in a Big Tech economy. Here’s one it’s not too late to stop: Letting tech giants make your smart home more dumb. Their monopolistic mind-set makes your home more complicated, leaves you less choice and less privacy, and already resulted in less-capable smart speakers. ... Asking the most powerful companies in history just to have “elbows that are less sharp” isn’t going to work, said Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain during the Senate’s June hearing. “They’re trying to compete and they owe their shareholders that duty. Let’s set up the rules so that they know how to play to the chalk, but not go beyond it.”

  • Illustration showing Pinocchio caught in a spider's web with social media icons

    Oh, what a tangled web we weave

    July 7, 2021

    Deception spreads faster than truth on social media. Who — if anyone — should stop it?

  • Jonathan Zittrain testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee

    Towards more interoperable ‘smart’ home devices

    June 16, 2021

    Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 appeared as a witness for the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights on June 15 to discuss the current state of home technologies and antitrust.