Erez Levin
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist and former Google employee whose work focuses on the intersection of digital media systems, online advertising, and the health of public discourse. He has become a vocal critic of the incentive structures underpinning the modern attention economy, particularly the way engagement-driven platforms can amplify polarising and sensational content at the expense of context, nuance, and accuracy.
His work explores how these digital systems shape what societies perceive as normal or acceptable, and how they can contribute to the gradual erosion of informal social constraints around speech and behaviour. Central to his research is the argument that liberal democracies rely not only on legal frameworks, but also on informal moral “guardrails” — shared social taboos that limit the acceptability of overt hateful bigotry and dehumanising rhetoric.
Through his “Holding the Line” project, and writing on Substack, Levin examines how these norms form, weaken, and are reinforced over time, particularly in highly networked online environments. He is especially focused on the role of social and institutional consequences in maintaining boundaries around rhetoric that seeks to dehumanise or exclude entire groups.
More broadly, his work sits at the intersection of free expression, social cohesion, and democratic resilience, exploring how societies can preserve open discourse while maintaining clear limits around speech that undermines the basic conditions of pluralistic democracy.
