The way we conceptualize the internet and social media—as a sort of “printing press” protected by the First Amendment—is widely taken for granted, like an obvious and inevitable legal framework.

But the way Morgan Weiland sees it, it didn’t have to be this way. And perhaps more to the point, she argues that it shouldn’t be; the metaphor of the printing press led to a largely deregulated internet that continues to pose risks to democracy.

“We came to take for granted that private platforms like Meta and X should dictate the terms of public speech. And that arrangement is bad for democratic discourse,” says Weiland, the BU College of Communication’s newly-hired Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Assistant Professor of Communication Law.

One need not look far to see the negative consequences of an internet where a handful of tech billionaires control the public square, as it were. To take just one example: In the weeks before President Donald Trump took office for the second time, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his platforms would sunset their fact-checking operation, allowing misinformation to run wild.

What does the First Amendment mean when it says ‘the press?’ Who are we talking about? And who should we be talking about?

—Morgan Weiland

In her work, Weiland zooms out from these discrete incidents to interrogate the larger systems that enable them. “We should be asking how and why someone like Mark Zuckerberg should even be in this position in the first place. We should be asking: why are we even here?” she says. “We’re just missing the mark when we’re obsessively focused on little content moderation questions. That’s like missing the forest for the trees.”

Redefining the Press

Weiland came to BU from Stanford University, where she had developed the first joint degree program between the communication department and the law school there. Fittingly, in addition to her professorship at COM, she holds a courtesy appointment at the BU School of Law. Since arriving at BU in July 2025, she has hit the ground running as she continues to investigate internet regulation and public speech. 

Weiland’s interest in democratic discourse dates back to her undergraduate days, when she was focused on how the institutional media failed in its coverage of the war in Iraq. She found herself drawn to issues of media accountability in graduate school. “I was really interested in how the practice of journalism was changing. Who counted as a journalist was radically up for grabs. The question was: ‘You’re on Twitter and you’re a blogger. Are you a journalist?’” she says. “What do these changes mean for the quality of democratic discourse, which matters for the health of our overall democracy?”

We came to take for granted that private platforms like Meta and X should dictate the terms of public speech. And that arrangement is bad for democratic discourse.

—Morgan Weiland

She eventually realized these questions were not only the domain of communication scholars, but also of legal experts. “We had to start asking legal questions like, what does the First Amendment mean when it says ‘the press?’ Who are we talking about? And who should we be talking about?”

Weiland created the space to explore these issues in the JD–PhD program she developed at Stanford. She came to see the existing legal framework for the internet, problematic as it may be, as “the water in which we swim,” a substance that is difficult to recognize or look beyond.

A Powerful Metaphor

Weiland’s dissertation—“Making Internet Law: How Cyberspace Was Socially Constructed as a First Amendment Speech System”—gives shape and urgency to this history.  

She is developing the dissertation into a book and says it’s a cautionary tale about how a network of activists, lawyers and policymakers made the internet into a “speech technology,” therefore naturalizing the power of private social media platforms over public discourse. It’s a series of decisions that Weiland believes we risk making again today with artificial intelligence.

The story, as Weiland’s research tells it, stretches back to the 1940s, the moment when a scholar seeded the idea that the internet should be seen as a speech system. That metaphor, adopted by activists in the 1990s, became crystallized as law in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Reno v. ACLU, which gave internet speech the same level of First Amendment protection as printed media (rather than, say, broadcast media, which is subject to stricter regulations). 

Weiland argues that this created a regulatory vacuum for online speech—one that allowed social media companies to decide the architecture for public speech governance. In the current moment, where generative AI is developing rapidly, Weiland worries that we risk making a similar mistake.

“We have a path dependency when it comes to thinking about technology and technology law, that deregulation is the default,” she says. “That is a presumption that didn’t necessarily exist 30 years ago.”

Indeed, because this legal framework for the internet was socially constructed, Weiland sees potential for us to construct a different one for AI. “We can make other technology laws differently. We could make it something pro-social. We could build accountability into the framework,” she says.

And it’s not only lawyers who have the power to shape this next wave of technology regulation. The metaphor of the internet as a printing press, powerful as it was, shows that communicators also hold a lot of power. “I say this to my students in media law and policy at BU. I tell them, if you’re going to go and be an advertising executive, or you’re going to work at a PR firm, or say you work for an AI company: You could have just as much power as a lawmaker,” she says. That is, the power to shape AI regulation may lie less in the hands of policy wonks, but, as with the internet, those who coin the technology’s defining metaphor.