Daphne Keller is the Director of Platform Regulation, and was formerly the Director of Intermediary Liability at CIS. Her work focuses on platform regulation and internet users’ rights. She has published both academically and in popular press; testified and participated in legislative processes; and taught and lectured extensively. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2015 Daphne was Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. She worked on groundbreaking Intermediary Liability litigation and legislation around the world and counseled both overall product development and individual content takedown decisions.

Representative Short Works, Filings, and Testimony

• A Primer on Cross-Border Speech Regulation and the EU’s Digital Services Act, CIS blog post, 2025
• Comment to the Council of Europe on draft recommendation regarding user empowerment laws, 2025
• Comment to Bluesky regarding interoperability, 2025
• Regulated Democracy and Regulated Speech, Tech Policy Press, 2025
• The Rise of the Compliant Speech Platform, Lawfare, 2024
• Don’t Let Texas and Florida Chew Up the Internet, Wall Street Journal, 2024 (with Francis Fukuyama)
• Amicus brief to Supreme Court on behalf of Francis Fukuyama, Moody v. NetChoice, 2024 (with Jack Balkin and Yale MFIA Clinic)
• Amicus brief to Supreme Court, Gonzalez v. Google, 2023 (with ACLU)
• Testimony about platform transparency to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, 2022
• Testimony and accompanying slides about EU Digital Services Act to EU Parliament IMCO Committee, 2021
• Testimony and Follow-Up Responses about U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and comparative international law to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, 2020
• Design Principles for Intermediary Liability Laws, working paper of the Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression, October 2019 (with Joris van Hoboken)

Representative Academic Work

• The NO FAKES Bill: A Terrible Speech Law for Our Times, Stanford Public Law Working Paper, August 2025
• Platform Transparency and the First Amendment, Journal of Free Speech Law, 2023
• Carriage and Removal Requirements for Internet Platforms: What Taamneh Tells Us, Journal of Free Speech Law, 2023
• Lawful but Awful? Control over Legal Speech by Platforms, Governments, and Internet Users, The University of Chicago Law Review Online, June 2022.
• The Future of Platform Power: Making Middleware Work, Journal of Democracy, July 2021 (companion blog post on technical solutions here)
• Amplification and Its Discontents, Knight First Amendment Institute, June 2021
• Facts and Where to Find Them: Empirical Research on Internet Platforms and Content Moderation, in Nathaniel Persily and Joshua Tucker, eds, Social Media and Democracy, Cambridge U.P., 2020 (with Paddy Leerssen)
• Facebook Filters, Fundamental Rights, and the CJEU’s Glawischnig-Piesczek Ruling, GRUR Journal of European and International IP Law, 2020
• Three Constitutional Thickets: Why Regulating Online Violent Extremism is Hard, George Washington University Program on Extremism Legal Perspectives on Tech Series (commissioned in conjunction with the Congressional Counterterrorism Caucus), 2019
• Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power Over Online Speech, Hoover Institution Aegis Series Paper, 2019
• Internet Platforms: Observations on Speech, Danger, and Money, Hoover Institution Aegis Series Paper, 2018
• The Right Tools: Europe’s Intermediary Liability Laws and the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2018