Graduate convocation speaker talks democracy, social media—and being part of the solution
Public Policy Professor and Alum Philip Napoli to Address the Class of 2026
Philip Napoli arrived at COM, in the early 1990s, trying to decide how he was going to make a living as a writer.
In undergrad, at the University of California, Berkley, he oscillated between interests in PR, screenwriting and copywriting. Napoli (’94) ended up with a double-major in film and rhetoric and, along the way, realized he liked the stressful-but-fun process of writing two theses at the same time. So, in his graduate program at Boston University’s College of Communication, he naturally gravitated toward academic research and writing, which then inspired him to pursue a Ph.D at Northwestern University.
One of the reasons we are able to regulate broadcasting the way that we do is that broadcasting uses what we call a “public resource,” which is the spectrum, the airwaves…. Social media also uses a public resource, and that public resource is the aggregation of our user data.
Philip Napoli
Today, Napoli is the James R. Shepley Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, where he researches media regulation and democracy. And, ever the writer, he’s also published four books on the topic.
Napoli, who will address COM’s graduate convocation on Friday, May 15, spoke with COMtalk about social media, the political moment, and his message to today’s college graduates.
Q&A
with Philip Napoli
COMtalk: In your 2019 book, Social Media and the Public Interest, you proposed some solutions for how we regulate social media. Tell me about that.
Philip Napoli: This book contained one of my crazier ideas, and I think it’s gotten less crazy over time. One of the reasons we are able to regulate broadcasting the way that we do is that broadcasting uses what we call a “public resource,” which is the spectrum, the airwaves. And it’s on those grounds that there are some public interest obligations that broadcasters have to follow.
I made the case that social media also uses a public resource, and that public resource is the aggregation of our user data. So when they build a business on these aggregations of user data that we are voluntarily providing them, just like broadcasters receive the spectrum that is technically owned by the people, there’s actually commonality there.
COMtalk: Clearly, your research on media regulation and democracy is very connected to the current political moment. How do you see that?
Philip Napoli: I’ve been very interested these days in how the norms and the regulatory frameworks that we have had in place can be misappropriated for intentions that they were not created for. We’re seeing the Federal Trade Commission use its authority in ways that really were never intended, to try to attack what they call media bias. We’re seeing the Federal Communications Commission do the same thing. We’re seeing the federal government cancel all grants related to disinformation research, under the logic that disinformation is not a real thing, that disinformation is only a term that applies to ideas you disagree with, and that there is no such thing as objective falsity, and that there is no, absolutely, no reason to try to understand how disinformation flows through social media platforms, for example.
These are all these disparate things that, when we pull them all together, create a pretty unnerving portrait of what’s happening right now. So a lot of my work is trying to pull all of these disparate strands together and present the whole picture.
COMtalk: How has this field of study changed since you started in academia?
Philip Napoli: We’ve almost watched this space move from the periphery to the center. There was a time, when if you said you did research on media and democracy, people would say, “Oh that’s interesting. Nice little niche field for you to be spending your time in.” I don’t think anybody thinks that way anymore. We’re in an era now, you hear phrases like, “Every company is a media company,” or “Now everyone is a journalist.” Our cars are communication devices, our refrigerators are communication devices. It’s just so intertwined into every aspect of politics, the economy, culture. You see the kind of research I do now get published in journals like Science and Nature—big premier research outlets—and you never used to see that in the past.
COMtalk: Do you have an idea of what you plan to say to the Class of 2026?
Philip Napoli: Here are all these people graduating, and there’s going to be all kinds of opportunities that are available to them. I want to encourage people to pursue the opportunities that would make them part of the solution, and not part of the problem. The incentives to be part of the problem are just always going to be so much more powerful, and so much more appealing, than the incentives to be part of the solution.
