Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are used by billions and have enabled the moral right to communication to be exercised on a vast scale. But there has also been an exponential increase in the spread of fake news, hate speech and propaganda, notably from President Trump, leading to a violent attack by his supporters on the US Congress. A host of difficult practical ethical problems have arisen, e.g. Who is to decide what is fake news and what is fact or what is hate speech or what the limits of religious freedom of communication are – the tech giants themselves?

Professor Seumas Miller currently holds research appointments in philosophy at Charles Sturt University, Delft University of Technology (The Hague) and the University of Oxford. He is the Principal Investigator on a European Research Council Advanced Grant on counter-terrorism ethics. He has authored or co-authored over 200 academic articles and 22 books, including Moral Foundations of Social Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Institutional Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2017).