This dissertation analyzes the legal, social, and architectural dimensions of three sets of platform-specific reputational disputes in order to understand how people negotiate the reputational impact of personally critical speech. The cases involve individuals criticized on nominal “consumer review” websites, bloggers writing as “professional-amateur” journalists, and crowd-sourced criminal investigations on the social media platform Reddit.

Techno-utopian optimism about the decline of traditional media gatekeepers has given way to widespread lament over the apparent vulnerability of our “online reputations.” Such lament is steeped in a thoroughly neoliberal conception of increased personal responsibility to protect one’s reputation as an exchangeable asset. This perceived imperative has prompted several responses.

Some call for the law to afford greater control over the speech of others. Such calls challenge the conventional wisdom in First Amendment theory that “counterspeech” is the preferred remedy for critical speech that is not false or egregiously invasive. Yet efforts to compel search engines to de-index links or impose greater liability on platform operators for third-party speech are largely legal and political dead ends in the U.S. More vexing are some emergent combinations of law and private action that have conflicting implications within theories of free speech and democracy. The search engine optimization tactics of the “reputation management” industry often obviate litigation through direct counterspeech. My case studies demonstrate that some of its efforts achieve the kind of non-judicial resolution of reputational disputes that legal reformers have sought for decades.

On the other hand, reputation managers and their clients routinely use “reputational” concerns as a rhetorical pretext for silencing an expanded range of critical speech than is traditionally actionable. Reputation management thus simultaneously embodies a broader reactionary ethos regarding public discussion. This ethos is at odds with liberal speech norms that valorize the cacophony of competing views and the promotion of “republican virtue” when citizens collectively confront troubling ideas or sentiments. Ultimately, the paradox of reputation management demonstrates how the neoliberal imperative to fashion oneself as a “brand” perhaps threatens robust public discussion as much as overly stringent libel and privacy laws would.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) currently oversees the nation’s largest and only fully-subsidized healthcare system—a system that also happens to be one of the most successful by nearly any measure. And yet, in some ways, this system is fundamentally broken, exacerbating ongoing health crisis in the veteran community like suicide and persistent health and healthcare disparities. This dissertation examines the history of this system and how those who administer it utilize concepts of disability to determine care access, how that framing of disability has changed over time, and the potential ramifications of using disability as a precursor to care.

This dissertation examines the history of the veterans’ healthcare system, how it came to rest on medical authority to make disability—and thus access—determinations to create a federally-subsidized, initially hospital-based, healthcare system. It examines the role of public, political, and patient pressures in shaping that system and their implications for access. And it demonstrates how these historical forces continue to shape and affect modern issues like health and healthcare disparities and the persistent problem of veteran suicides.

While the VHA, like most modern medical organizations, is a forward-looking enterprise, this dissertation demonstrates that there is significant value in a historical perspective in examining and shaping health policy decisions in the future.