Moderated Content: Recent Episodes
evelyn douek
Moderated Content from Stanford Law School is podcast content about content moderation, moderated by assistant professor Evelyn Douek. The community standards of this podcast prohibit anything except the wonkiest conversations about the regulation—both public and private—of what you see, hear and do online.
Alex and Evelyn sit down with New York Times technology reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger to talk about their new book on Elon Musk's acquisition (and destruction) of Twitter, Character Limit, and where they think Musk goes from here.
Alex and Evelyn repeat the now-annual tradition of recording the podcast in front of probably their entire active listener base. They are joined by David Thiel, Brian Fishman, and Daphne Keller, to say goodbye to Theirry Breton and RT's accounts on Meta, talk about Zuckerberg's retreat from politics, and all the developments in the land of the First Amendment and platform regulation.
Alex and Evelyn are joined by Carlos Affonso Souza, a Professor of Law at Rio de Janeiro State University and the Director of the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro, to talk about Brazil's ban of X, the local legal and political context, and how this is similar or different to other show downs between regulators and American tech platforms.
Alex and Evelyn discuss the arrest and charges against Telegram's CEO, Pavel Durov, in France, what we do and don't know, and what it means for the future of platform regulation, with Frédérick Douzet, Professor at the French Institute of Politics and the director of GEODE, and Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.
Alex and Evelyn talk about Trump's return to X and other platforms, Thierry Breton's attempt to make it all about him, the hack and leak of Trump's campaign, the FBI's new rules around communicating with platforms about foreign interference, Apple imposing its 30% commission on Patreon, and a small little sporting event that happened recently.
Evelyn sat down with Professor Genevieve Lakier, of the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the Supreme Court's decision regarding the Texas and Florida social media laws. Not the worst opinion the Supreme Court issued on July 1, but predictably there's a lot to complain about anyway.
The Supreme Court's decision in Murthy v. Missouri is finally here! Evelyn sat down with Professor Genevieve Lakier, of the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the good, bad and ugly of the opinions.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The attention grabbing 404 Media headline “Has Facebook Stopped Trying?” could be on to something. Alex discusses significant disinvestment in trust and safety at Facebook with lots of junk spreading (such as AI-generated Shrimp Jesus) and a sextortion challenge. - Jason Koebler/ 404 Media
- YouTube announced it is testing a feature for users to add notes under videos with context or fact checks. - YouTube
- The U.S. military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation on social media intended to discredit China’s COVID vaccine in the Philippines. - Chris Bing, Joel Schectman. Reuters
- U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms in a New York Times opinion essay. - Vivek Murthy/ The New York Times,“The Daily”, Erin Burnett/ CNN
- Not everyone agrees with his recommendation (not to mention the First Amendment or existing evidence). - Clay Calvert/ AEI, Deidre McPhillips/ CNN, J. Nathan Matias, Janet Haven/ Tech Policy Press, Mike Masnick/ The Daily Beast, Caroline Mimbs Nyce/ The Atlantic
- They reference this report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine - National Academies
- And this one pager
- New York state lawmakers passed and Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act prohibiting social media companies from using “addictive” algorithmic feeds for minors under 18 without parental consent. - Anthony Izaguirre/ Associated Press, Carolyn Thompson/ Associated Press, Mark Wilson/ Fast Company, Kat Tenbarge/ NBC News, Austin Jenkins/ Pluribus News, Anthony Ha/ TechCrunch, Common Sense Media, Governor of New York
- Negotiations at the end of the state legislative session on June 6 limited a restriction on overnight notifications and removed the right to take private legal action against social media companies for alleged violations.
- Tech trade associations oppose the legislation arguing it is unconstitutional with free speech restrictions that make children less safe with less curation of social media feeds. - Chamber of Progress, NetChoice
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn sit down with the authors of two recently released books about our online information ecosystem and what to do about it: Annalee Newitz, author of Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and Renee DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.
Alex and Evelyn talk about OpenAI's first threat intel report, California's flurry of AI regulations, the latest on the TikTok ban bill, and a Downunder Special Segment.
Alex and Evelyn discuss the TikTok ban bill, the EU's investigation into Meta for violations of the DSA, the passage of the REPORT Act, and the Supreme Court's denial of a stay of Texas' age verification law.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Shelby Grossman to discuss SIO’s just-released report on the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Online Child Safety Ecosystem. Read the report here.
SIO is also calling for presentation proposals for its annual Trust and Safety Research Conference. Proposals are due April 30. Details are here: https://io.stanford.edu/conference
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on your favorite social media platform that doesn’t start with “X.”
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by University of Washington professor Kate Starbird to discuss research on election rumors.
Kate Starbird is an associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering where she is also a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. - University of Washington
- House Judiciary Committee Kate Starbird interview transcript
- House Judiciary Committee Alex Stamos interview transcript
Sports Corner
Noted American sports expert Evelyn Douek discusses the NCAA women’s basketball championship in this slam dunk segment. Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks defeated superstar Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes 87-75 on Sunday in what is expected to be the most watched women’s basketball game of all time with an average ticket price hovering around $500. - Jill Martin/ CNN, Alexa Philippou/ ESPN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on your favorite social media platform that doesn’t start with “X.”
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
SHOW NOTESStanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- X this week had its lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate thrown out by a Californian district court. It’s a good and important win for free speech. - Emma Roth / The Verge
- A Kremlin-linked group was spreading divisive stories about Kate Middleton as online rumors swirled about her whereabouts. Why? - Mark Lander and Adam Satariano / The New York Times
- In the aftermath of the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, the destruction of X as a platform for useful information about breaking news was all too clear. - A.W. Ohlheiser / Vox
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Meta is shutting down its transparency tool, CrowdTangle. Brandon Silverman joins to talk about the tool and what this means for the future of platform transparency. - Vittoria Elliott / Wired
- Brandon’s substack is Some Good Trouble
- A group of civil society organizations and researchers wrote an open letter objecting to Meta’s decision - Mozilla
- GW’s tracker of Platform Transparency Tools & The Brussels Effect
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on your favorite social media platform that doesn’t start with “X.”
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek is joined by Professor Genevieve Lakier of the University of Chicago Law School to discuss the Supreme Court oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri.
- For one of their previous conversations on this topic, listen to this episode from September last year talking about the 5th Circuit’s decision in the case.
- They also discuss Stanford’s amicus brief in the case, and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s blog post summarizing factual errors that have pervaded the case.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on your favorite social media platform that doesn’t start with “X.”
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn discuss the latest bill to ban TikTok and its many flaws; the Gemini image-generation public relations crisis; Apple's fight-picking in Europe; and Texas and Florida's latest great attempts to regulate online speech.
Alex and Evelyn are joined by Moderated Content's Supreme Court correspondent Daphne Keller to talk about the oral argument in the NetChoice cases this week and what the Supreme Court justices seem to be thinking about whether and how states can regulate internet platforms.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Is the deepfake apocalypse finally here? Alex and Evelyn discuss the recent robocalls impersonating President Biden ahead of the New Hampshire primary and sexually explicit fake images of Taylor Swift that spread on X, resulting in the platform blocking searches for one of the most famous people in the world.
Let’s Get Meta
- Meta will start labeling AI-generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. The company is working with other technology and media companies to develop standards for identifying and labeling AI generated content, but will that be effective?
- In other democracy saving announcements by Meta, Threads will not “proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow.” Good thing they disclose what political content means… oh wait.
- Also in full transparency, Meta removed the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with little explanation of the decision which comes months after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
X/Twitter Corner
- Meanwhile, X is selling checkmarks to terrorists and failing to remove Chinese influence operations.
In Full Transparency
- TikTok is restricting searches in its Creative Center tool, used to track hashtag trends and popularity. The change comes after the tool was used to scrutinize content related to the Israel-Hamas war. The data was never that great, but this is a loss for everyone.
- Don’t worry, the Digital Service Act comes into full force this weekend with transparency requirements, and it’s definitely fully sorted out without legal challenges and with EU country regulators ready to enforce.
Legal Corner
- A federal judge blocked an Ohio law requiring parental consent law from going into effect shortly after technology trade association NetChoice filed a challenge.
- The Kids Online Safety Act was updated and now has a filibuster-proof majority of 62 co-sponsors. The bill could pass the Senate this year, but still faces long odds in the House where there is dysfunction and no companion legislation. Fewer legislation gets passed in an election year, and opponents say the updates amount only to a new coat of paint with the same structural issues in potential violation of the First Amendment.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on your favorite social media platform that doesn’t start with “X.”
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos talk to Riana Pfefferkorn and David Thiel of the Stanford Internet Observatory about the technical and legal challenges of addressing computer-generated child sexual abuse material. They mention:
- Riana’s new paper on the topic, “Addressing Computer-Generated Child Sex Abuse Imagery: Legal Framework and Policy Implications” - Riana Pfefferkorn / Lawfare
- David’s report documenting Child Sexual Abuse Material in a major dataset used to train AI models - David Thiel / SIO; Samantha Cole / 404 Media
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos talk about the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Tech CEOs about “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.” They mention:
- The Stanford Internet Observatory’s work on Self-Generated CSAM - David Thiel, Renée DiResta and Alex Stamos / SIO
- The REPORT Act - Riana Pfefferkorn / Tech Policy Press
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by Casey Newton of Platformer and Hard Fork to talk about his decision to move his newsletter off of Substack.
- Casey explains his decision here: Why Platformer is leaving Substack
- And talks about it on his podcast here: Why Casey Left Substack
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Stanford Internet Observatory’s David Thiel wrote a report documenting Child Sexual Abuse Material in a major dataset used to train AI models - David Thiel / SIO; Samantha Cole / 404 Media
- Lots of DSA news from the EU:
- Three new platforms have been designated Very Large Online Platforms – how did the adult sites get overlooked before? Woops! Jon Porter / The Verge
- The Commission has announced a formal investigation into X - Martin Husovec / DSA Newsletter
- Researchers have reason to doubt the information platforms are submitting to the DSA Transparency Database - Amaury Trujillo, Tiziano Fagni, Stefano Cresci / arXiv
- Content moderation controversies around the Israel/Gaza conflict continue.
- The Meta Oversight Board released its “expedited” decisions on the topic - Oversight Board
- Human Rights Watch released a report alleging suppression of pro-Palestinian content by the company - Human Rights Watch
- Substack has a Nazi Problem - Ken White / The Popehat Report
- The Netchoice Restatement of the Law continues to expand, with the trade group bringing a challenge to the Utah Social Media Law - Hannah Schoenbaum / AP
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn discuss US military information operations, Threads testing ActivityPub integration, ridiculous statistics about TikTok, YouTube Magic Dust, the Meta Oversight Board moving with all deliberate speed, and First Amendment retaliation claims.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Elon Musk told advertisers to go f* themselves in an interview with Jona–... sorry, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NYT. Is this a good business strategy? - Kate Conger and Remy Tumin / The New York Times
- Linda doing clean-up on Aisle Elon - Linda Yaccarino / X
- Meta is still algorithmically promoting child sexual abuse material on its platforms. - Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt / WSJ
- They say they’re still working on it: Meta
- On the flip side, Google’s risk-averse approach to CSAM and its poor customer service creates a different problem for people who suddenly find themselves locked out of their entire accounts. - Kashmir Hill / New York Times
- Meta says it is adopting the same approach as in the past for the 2024 election season. - Nick Clegg / Meta
- Except this time, the government apparently will not be giving them any tip-offs about foreign interference. Such communication has been stalled since july. - Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski / The Washington Post
- As Meta detailed in its quarterly adversarial threat report, though, this is not because such interference has stopped. - Meta
- A district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing Montana’s state-wide ban from going into effect in the new year. - Sapna Maheshwari / New York Times; US District Court
- Doritos has had the most important AI breakthrough of the year, with its crunch-cancellation software for gamers who like to snack. - Sydney Page / The Washington Post
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- In one of the most surprising (and rapidly developing) tech stories of the year, Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI. The reasons are still unclear, and the story still changing as we were recording. But at least partially the story is about AI safety, and what it means to pursue responsible development of AI - Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic
- Meta is advocating for online safety legislation that requires parental approval for children under 16 to download apps, shifting the burden to app stores for age verification and parental controls. - Sarah Perez/ TechCrunch, Cristiano Lima, Naomi Nix/ The Washington Post, Antigone Davis/ Meta
- Meta announced it is opening up its Content Library and API more broadly - Nick Clegg / Meta
- Everything is content moderation, and India is the most important jurisdiction for the future of online free speech, streaming platform edition, with Netflix and Amazon Prime self-censoring the content they serve in the country - Gerry Shih and Anant Gupt / The Washington Post
- Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America on TikTok didn’t seem to go viral until the media drew attention to them. Would be nice to know for sure though! - Drew Harwell and Victoria Bisset / The Washington Post, Scott Nover / Slate
- Musk launches a ridiculous lawsuit against Media Matters for reporting that Musk doesn’t like but admits is true. That’s not surprising at this point. But more surprising, and scary, is the State AGs who are willing to go along with it and have announced their own investigations. - Adi Robertson / The Verge
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Alex participated in the fifth Senate AI Insight Forum focused on AI and its impact on elections and democracy. It turns out politicians can be reasonable and bipartisan when the cameras are off. - Oma Seddiq/ Bloomberg Law, Gabby Miller/ Tech Policy Press, Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Christopher Hutton/ Washington Examiner, Office of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
Label Your AI
- Meta will require political advertisers to disclose if content has been digitally altered to make content potentially misleading. - Aisha Counts/ Bloomberg News, Katie Paul/ Reuters, Will Henshall/ Time, Facebook
- Meta will also let political ads on Facebook and Instagram question the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. - Salvador Rodriguez/ The Wall Street Journal
- Microsoft announced a free tool for politicians and campaigns to authenticate media with watermark credentials. - Margi Murphy/ Bloomberg News, Brad Smith/ Microsoft
- YouTube will require creators to disclose realistic AI-generated content with new labels. Users can also request to remove manipulated video “that simulates an identifiable individual, including their face or voice.” - Olafimihan Oshin/ The Hill, Jennifer Flannery O'Connor, Emily Moxley/ YouTube
TikTok Tick Tock
- There’s been a burst of new calls to ban TikTok over allegations that it is boosting anti-Israel and pro-Hamas content. - Alexander Bolton/ The Hill, Cecilia Kang, Sapna Maheshwari/ The New York Times
- TikTok denies these allegations and faults inaccurate news reporting. - TikTok
- Verified transparency about this would be good, but there’s no real evidence for the claim. There may be a conflation of “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Hamas” content. Many people have pro-Palestinian views, especially TikTok’s young userbase. It also turns out that other platforms have similarly prevalent content. - Drew Harwell/ The Washington Post
- The renewed calls for TikTok to be banned because of content on it that lawmakers don’t like gives the lie to the argument that calls for a ban are not about speech, which is... a First Amendment problem.
- Nepal, however, doesn’t have a First Amendment so it banned TikTok citing disruption to “social harmony” including “family structures” and “social relations” - Niha Masih, Sangam Prasai/ The Washington Post
A Trip to India
- Nothing massively new here, but worth highlighting this WaPo report: “For years, a committee of executives from U.S. technology companies and Indian officials convened every two weeks in a government office to negotiate what could — and could not — be said on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.” - Karishma Mehrotra, Joseph Menn/ The Washington Post
- Meanwhile, Apple has been notifying opposition politicians in India that they are “being targeted by state-sponsored attackers.” - Meryl Sebastian/ BBC News
Transparency Please
- The first batch of DSA transparency reports have been submitted and Tech Policy Press is tracking. - Gabby Miller/ Tech Policy Press
- The unsurprising news is that X is devoting far fewer resources to content moderation than its peers. Shocker! - Foo Yun Chee, Supantha Mukherjee/ Reuters
- “X's 2,294 EU content moderators compared with 16,974 at Google's YouTube, 7,319 at Google Play and 6,125 at TikTok.”
Legal Corner
- The Supreme Court struggled with two cases about when public officials can block critics online. Much of the debate came down to whether there is a difference between personal and official social media accounts. - Josh Gerstein/ Politico Pro, John Kruzel, Andrew Chung/ Reuters, Ian Millhiser/ Vox, Ann E. Marimow/ The Washington Post
- Overall, the Court sounded sympathetic to the claim that they shouldn’t be able to block people whenever they please, but much less clear on what the test should be.
Sports Corner
- Is there a Big Game in California this weekend? Alex has a lot to say for someone rooting for the team with a losing record in the 126-year series.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence today. The sweeping EO includes standards setting for generative AI watermarking and red teaming. It will also set rules to mitigate privacy and bias risks before AI systems can be used by federal officials. - Maria Curi, Ashley Gold/ Axios, Mohar Chatterjee, Rebecca Kern/ Politico, Mohar Chatterjee/ Politico, John D. McKinnon, Sabrina Siddiqui, Dustin Volz/ The Wall Street Journal, Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- The EO is a good step forward, but the measures are limited in power without congressional action.
- App store rules are restricting access to some Hamas-affiliated channels on Telegram where content moderation action is rare, allowing terrorist organizations to share messaging. The restrictions are inconsistent, with some channels only blocked on the Google Play store app in some cases. - Clare Duffy, Brian Fung/ CNN, Kevin Collier/ NBC News, Wes Davis/ The Verge
- It’s another reminder of the power of content moderation rules in the stack — at the infrastructure or distributor level, like app stores.
X-Twitter Corner
- It’s been one year since Elon Musk flipped the bird (and struggled to carry a sink into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters). Our original episode on this, “Musk Flips the Bird,” held up pretty well — especially the prediction that this would be very good news for Mark Zuckerberg.
Legal Corner
- It’s not all good news for Zuck though. The state attorneys general of 41 states and D.C. sued Meta, alleging Instagram and Facebook harm kids with addictive features and privacy violations. - Barbara Ortutay/ Associated Press, Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Rebecca Kern/ Politico, Cecilia Kang, Natasha Singer/ The New York Times, Cristiano Lima, Naomi Nix/ The Washington Post, Daphne Keller/ @daphnehk
- This is a relatively novel legal argument, and it appears to be an uphill battle to sue for design harms and not content. Still, the alleged privacy violations could hold up and the political posturing alone may prove to be a winner in the multi-pronged legal, policy, and regulatory battle.
- The king got involved and we can’t ignore the UK Online Safety Bill Act anymore. The legislation received royal assent, becoming law last week. - Imran Rahman-Jones, Chris Vallance/ BBC News, Jon Porter/ The Verge, Peter Guest/ Wired
- Alex and Stanford Internet Observatory graduate researcher Sara Shah published a guide on trust and safety issues in the Fediverse with tips for running a Mastodon instance.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of venture capitalism firm Andreessen Horowitz and the Netscape web browser, wrote a lengthy blog post with an ode to technology. He also manages to declare trust and safety “the enemy” in the rambling screed of more than 5,000 words. - Dan Primack/ Axios, Marc Andreessen/ Andreessen Horowitz
- Have you “properly glorified” technology today?
Moderating the War
- Meta got a headline you never want in 404 Media: “Instagram ‘Sincerely Apologizes’ For Inserting ‘Terrorist’ Into Palestinian Bio Translations.” - Samantha Cole/ 404 Media
- But don’t worry, Meta said it is “sorry” for “inappropriate Arabic translations.” - Liv McMahon, Joe Tidy/ BBC News
- The Wall Street Journal had a big story on the tensions and challenges within Meta over moderation of speech in Palestinian territories. - Sam Schechner, Jeff Horwitz, Newley Purnell/ The Wall Street Journal
- The jawboning continues: The European Commission issued formal requests for information to Meta and TikTok about how the social media companies are removing illegal content and curbing disinformation during the Israel-Hamas war to comply with the Digital Services Act. - Kelvin Chan/ Associated Press, Clothilde Goujard/ Politico, Charlotte Van Campenhout, Bart H. Meijer/ Reuters, Natasha Lomas/ TechCrunch, Emma Roth/ The Verge
- Dozens of civil society organizations sent a letter to European Commissioner Thierry Breton alleging a misunderstanding of key components of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in letters sent to major social media companies about how they are handing information related to the Israel-Hamas war. - Clothilde Goujard/ Politico Pro
Legal Corner
- Speaking of jawboning, the Supreme Court will hear a jawboning case out of the Fifth Circuit which ruled that a broad swath of the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in their engagement with social media platforms. - Lawrence Hurley/ NBC News, Julia Shapero/ The Hill, Adam Liptake/ The New York Times, Supreme Court (.pdf)
- Go deeper with our previous discussions on this case with University of Chicago Law professor Genevieve Lakier:
- “The 5th Circuit's Jawboning Ruling”
- “Government, Platform Communication, Jawboning, and the First Amendment”
- Go deeper with our previous discussions on this case with University of Chicago Law professor Genevieve Lakier:
- Threads is still working out what it wants to be and says suppression of search terms on controversial news topics. - Sarah Perez/ TechCrunch
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn talk to Brian Fishman, the former Policy Director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations at Facebook/Meta, about the history of terrorism online, the challenges for platforms moderating terrorism, and the bad incentives created by misguided political pressure (looking at you, EU).
Alex and Evelyn discuss how the horrific events in Israel over the weekend make clear how important social media is during fast-moving historical events, and how X/Twitter has fundamentally degraded as a source of information. They also discuss China's ramped up crack down on app stores, and the Supreme Court's cert grant in the Netchoice cases, that could reshape the internet.
Alex and Evelyn record an episode in front of probably their entire active listener base. They talk about an update on SIO's investigations into child sexual abuse material on platforms; the fight for free speech in India; the poor outlook for election integrity at X in 2024, and what this might mean for other platforms; platform transparency mandates with Daphne Keller; and challenges to age verification laws with Alison Boden, the Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition.
Alex and Evelyn discuss reporting on a proposed deal between TikTok and the US government for it to continue to operate in the country, and the broader geopolitical context of US-China relations; how to think about search-term blocking; YouTube preventing Russell Brand from monetizing his videos on its platform; the Musk stories from the week that matter; and the enjoining of the California Age Appropriate Design Code by a California judge.
Evelyn sits down with Genevieve Lakier, a Professor at University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden, narrowing but affirming a district court injunction prohibiting large parts of the federal government from communicating with platforms about content moderation.
Alex and Evelyn discuss a bunch of things that happened while they were on "summer break": OpenAI recommending using GPT-4 for content moderation, but not enforcing its own political content moderation rules for ChatGPT; the EU's Digital Services Act coming into force and a report from the Commission that has us worried; Meta rejecting its Oversight Board's recommendation to suspend Hun Sen's account; a bunch of First Amendment decisions; and much more!
Alex and Evelyn discuss Ex-Twitter's latest examples of "free speech absolutism"; Apple removing an independent Russian media outlet's podcast from its podcast app; the Cambodian Prime Minister's return to Facebook; TikTok's new For EU measures; skyrocketing demand for Perspective API to moderate LLM hate speech; the reasons the dismissal of a First Amendment challenge to Utah's age verification law is so scary; and your weekly dose of random sports news.
Alex and Evelyn discuss some of the week's headlines, including Ex-Twitter's continued trust and safety, er, best practices and a baseless threat to try shutdown research it doesn't like, before being joined by Josh Tucker and Jen Pan, two academics part of a research partnership with Meta to examine the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the US 2020 election. The group released the first four papers this week and Josh and Jen discussed their findings and what they mean for platform design.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
ActivityPub Hub
- A new Stanford Internet Observatory report by David Thiel and Renée DiResta found a significant issue with child abuse content in the largest decentralized social media communities that make up the Fediverse. They argue that current online safety tools must be adapted for decentralized social networks. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- Meta’s Threads announced future support for ActivityPub, the technical protocol that powers the Fediverse, but Alex doesn’t think that will ever happen. - Casey Newton/ Platformer
- Instagram’s Adam Mosseri and his Threads communications team insist it’s coming. - @threadsapp
- So what kind of trust and safety and legal headaches might this create? Alex has plenty of ideas.
- One consequence might be another boon for the booming trust and safety as a service industry. - Tim Bernard/ Tech Policy Press
- That is, so long as “decentralized” doesn't become a synonym for “we don't need to invest in trust and safety.” Speaking of which, Bluesky finally responded to its failure to block usernames with racial slurs after weeks of controversy and radio silence. - Jay Graber/ Bluesky
X Corner?!
- If you drink enough of the kool aid, eventually you spill a steady stream of corporate buzzwords when you find out your company was renamed to “X” overnight by your CTO. - @lindayacc
- Shockingly, the company formerly known as Twitter continues to have “negative cash flow” and “heavy debt” as ad revenue drops 50%. - Amanda Macias, Lora Kolodny/ CNBC, Jahnavi Nidumolu, Krystal Hu/ Reuters
- Meanwhile, the “CEO” is trying to convince advertisers to come back while Bloomberg published an investigation into reports that hateful and harmful content has increased on Twitter since Elon Musk’s acquisition last year, including SIO findings that known CSAM was appearing on the site. - Aisha Counts, Eari Nakano/ Bloomberg News
- The reporting clearly got under the skin of Twitter’s leadership team with a lengthy response from Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino with a whole bunch of unverifiable buzzwords about how the article was wrong. - @lindayacc
- Case in Point: “99.99% of Tweet impressions are healthy. And we’re achieving this while defending our users’ right to free speech.”
- The problem is that nothing is verifiable anymore since all the access to data for researchers has been cut off.
- The reporting clearly got under the skin of Twitter’s leadership team with a lengthy response from Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino with a whole bunch of unverifiable buzzwords about how the article was wrong. - @lindayacc
TikTok Corner
- The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University brought a challenge on behalf a group of independent researchers and journalists, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, challenging a Texas state government ban on accessing TikTok, arguing the law violates First Amendment rights by inhibiting academic freedom to research and teach about the popular social app at public universities. - Melissa Mahtani/ CNN, Sapna Maheshwari/ The New York Times, Talal Ansari/ The Wall Street Journal, Drew Harwell/ The Washington Post, Knight First Amendment Institute
- The flashy rollout of the European Union’s Digital Services Act continues. Last week, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and his team carried out a so-called “stress test” at TikTok’s Dublin offices and gave them a failing grade, but an “A” for agreeing to public humiliation. - Alex Barinka/ Bloomberg News
Alex's Cyber Doom and Gloom Corner
- Alex is among those saying a recently discovered Microsoft vulnerability exploited in a Chinese espionage campaign to access the unclassified emails of top administration officials is even worse than you think and not getting enough attention. - Shir Tamari/ Wiz, Sumathi Bala/ CNBC, Julian Barnes/ The New York Times, Jonathan Greig/ The Record by Recorded Future
Sports Corner
- Evelyn has an Aussie sports update and asks everyone to say a prayer for Chelsea and national team striker Sam Kerr's calf. - Naaman Zhou/ New Yorker
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn discuss the very successful launch of Meta's Twitter competitor Threads, and the content moderation challenges ahead. Elon's taking it very well. Europe and the US reached a data sharing agreement -- Alex has thoughts. Scary rhetoric out of the EU about banning platforms makes Evelyn sad. A US Court upholds FOSTA.
On July 4, a district court issued an injunction prohibiting large swathes of the government from communicating with platforms about content moderation in almost any way. Evelyn sits down with Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, to talk about the opinion, the issue of government "jawboning" of platforms, and how the First Amendment has, should and shouldn't think about this problem.
This week, Musk continues to hamstring his own product and his "CEO" is nowhere to be found; apropos of nothing, Meta is launching its Twitter competitory Threads on July 6; the Meta Oversight Board set up a show-down for the company in Cambodia with its recommendation that the company suspend the Prime Minister's account; an Indian court dismisses Twitter's challenge to governmental blocking orders, and Evelyn fails miserably at some sports trivia.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- A new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Thorn, a nonprofit working to counter online child sexual exploitation, examines the problem of increasingly realistic images generated with freely available tools to create sexual abuse material. - Issie Lapowsky/ The New York Times, @det@hachyderm.io
- The mutiny in Russia unfolded in real time on Telegram with unreliable information spreading as few other sources of news or information were available from the country. - Jon Allsop/ Columbia Journalism Review, Matt Binder/ Mashable, Ben Smith/ Semafor, Joseph Menn, Mary Ilyushina, Shera Avi-Yonah/ The Washington Post
Twitter Corner
- Elon Musk has clearly been focused on top priorities with a late night tweet declaring the terms “cis” and “cisgender” are “slurs” that can result in suspensions. - Sawdah Bhaimiya/ Insider, Sarah Fortinsky/ The Hill
- Meanwhile, Musk met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said Tesla will be in India “as soon as humanly possible.” - Hyunjoo Jin, Shivangi Acharya/ Reuters
- In the ongoing back and forth between Twitter and the EU, the company said it would comply with the Digital Service Act which goes into force in late August. Twitter was the first company to do a voluntary compliance “stress test” (whatever that means) at its San Francisco headquarters during EU industry chief Thierry Breton’s Silicon Valley tour last week. - Kelvin Chan/ Associated Press, Brian Fung/ CNN, Clothilde Goujard, Gian Volpicelli/ Politico, Lisa O'Carroll/ The Guardian, Alexa Corse, Sam Schechner/ The Wall Street Journal, Cat Zakrzewski/ The Washington Post
- Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued a legal notice requiring Twitter to provide information about what it is doing to address reports of an increase in hate speech since Elon Musk acquired the company and laid off most staff. - Josh Taylor/ Australian Associated Press, Ina Fried/ Axios, Byron Kaye/ Reuters, Frances Vinall/ The Washington Post, Julie Inman Grant/ Tech Policy Press
- YouTube showed up Spotify by removing a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for spreading vaccine misinformation in conversation with podcast host Jordan Peterson. - David Ingram, Ben Goggin/ NBC News
- It turns out that big social media companies may have the upper hand over users as Reddit removed moderators on popular subreddits who didn’t comply with a warning about continuing protests over the company’s decision to charge for API access. - Matt Binder/ Mashable, Jay Peters/ The Verge
- After giving Vietnamese a platform to share posts about police abuse, government corruption, and debunk government propaganda, Facebook is now complying with the authoritarian country’s demands to censor political dissent with an internal list of ruling party officials who cannot be criticized. - Rebecca Tan/ The Washington Post
Legal Corner
- The Supreme Court issued its decision in Counterman without acknowledging the very real harm that can be done by online stalkers, even when they don't explicitly threaten their victims. - Jan Wolfe, Jess Bravin/ The Wall Street Journal, @ma_franks
- The majority opinion held that prosecutors must show that a person was reckless when they sent threatening messages, and not merely that the messages were objectively threatening
- Justice Sotomayor's concurrence got it right in saying that this was a case about stalking, not threats, but we'll have to wait and see whether lower courts pay attention, or whether they assume that the majority opinion means online stalking is protected by the First Amendment, as long as the stalker doesn't say anything threatening.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Elon Musk’s drastic layoffs, cost saving, and price raising measures were an inspiration for him as some of the most active users of his site went on strike, taking some of the largest subreddit forums private in protest against the changes. - David Ingram/ NBC News
- Huffman is trying to force changes against the will of his user base by claiming he represents the “will of the people,” and comparing subreddits moderators, who the company does not pay, to a “landed gentry” that got there first and will pass communities down to their descendants.
Twitter Corner
- Linda Yaccarino published her first memo since starting as CEO, writing that “Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. We’re on the precipice of making history—and that’s not an empty promise. That’s OUR reality.” The emphasis is hers, and this is all a bit… self-refuting. - Alex Heath/ The Verge
- While Linda was writing her memo, Musk was writing tweets about wanting a modern day Roman dictator. How is that for brand safety? - @elonmusk
- Meanwhile, former CEO Jack Dorsey confirms what we all knew: India threatened to shut down Twitter in the country unless it restricted accounts that were critical of the Modi administration. - Shilpa Jamkhandikar, Aditya Kalra, Kanishka Singh/ Reuters
- In response, a government official said Twitter repeatedly violated Indian law during Dorsey’s tenure, but that the company had been in compliance since June 2022, which coincidentally seems to align with Musk’s takeover bid for the company announced in April 2022 and completed in October.
- Spotify continues to let Joe Rogan promote guests who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines. Spotify and Rogan signed an exclusivity deal in 2020 that is worth more than $100 million. - Wes Davis/ The Verge
- Meta announced that its “Covid-19 misinformation rules will no longer be in effect globally” and outlined further changes to roll back its policies in published responses to the Oversight Board’s recommendations on updating the rules. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Nick Clegg/ Meta
- The announcement came right at the deadline for responding to the Oversight Board’s recommendations and the Board took so long in delivering a decision that the World Health Organization lifted the declaration of a global emergency two weeks later, rendering many of the recommendations moot.
- In other news, the Oversight Board also released its 2022 annual report in which it said that it received nearly 1.3 million appeals and… published 12 decisions. So not only do the cases take forever, but there are very few of them! - Oversight Board
Legal Corner
- Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed legislation that would ban kids under 18 from joining many social media sites without parental content. Kudos to The Verge for covering this! - Makena Kelly/ The Verge
- A Louisiana bill that would similarly require parental consent for users under 18 received a lot more press as it was the foundation for copycat state legislation. - Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Natasha Singer/ The New York Times
- But the Texas bill has a bunch of other provisions focused on protecting minors from “harmful content.” Tech trade group NetChoice said the law “violates the First Amendment many times over,” so it’s probably just a matter of time until another new social media law faces another tech industry lawsuit.
- The “Florida Digital Bill of Rights” was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). - Rebecca Kern/ Politico Pro, Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Office of Governor Ron DeSantis
- SB 262 includes some basic consumer rights, such as the right to know the information companies have collected about an individual, the right to correct and delete certain information, and the right to limit some data disclosures. However, the measures only apply to the largest tech companies.
- In addressing the most pressing problems for online privacy, the bill also prohibits government officials in the state from making requests for social media companies to remove content, and requires search engines to disclose whether search results are influenced by “political partisanship or political ideology.”
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Evelyn and Alex talk to David Thiel and Renée DiResta, Alex's two co-authors on a report released by the Stanford Internet Observatory last week with findings from an investigation into the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online. They talk about the findings, how social media companies should be and have been responding, and the public and political response to the report.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Stanford Internet Observatory research discovered serious failings with Twitter’s detection and removal systems for child abuse content. - Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal, @stanfordio
Twitter Corner
- In another welcome gift on Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s first day, leaked documents show Twitter’s ad revenue is down nearly 60% from last year. - Ryan Mac, Tiffany Hsu/ The New York Times
- Four Democratic senators sent a letter to Elon Musk and Yaccarino inquiring if there are still enough people at Twitter to comply with the company’s FTC data privacy agreements. - Brian Fung/ CNN
- Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, and head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, resigned after Musk reversed their decision to limit the reach of a Daily Wire documentary. - Kylie Robison/ Fortune, Sheila Dang/ Reuters, Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal, Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal
- Twitter planned to limit the visibility of the documentary for misgendering, but Elon Musk overturned the decision and issued an apology to Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing saying the content is allowed and blaming his staff for a “mistake.” - Todd Spangler/ Variety, @elonmusk
- Twitter is demanding researchers delete data acquired through academic data access agreements within 30 days after the contracts expire unless they pay a new rate of at least $42,000 per month — a near exponential increase — for an enterprise API that provides less access. - Chris Stokel-Walker/ i newspaper
- Let’s hope Linda is feeling good about DSA compliance which will start in August for Twitter.
- Twitter dropped out of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. - Kelvin Chan/ Associated Press, Ewa Krukowska/ Bloomberg News, Justin Hendrix/ Tech Policy Press, Natasha Lomas/ TechCrunch, @GlobalAffairs
- The European Commission will conduct a voluntary content moderation compliance test with Twitter for the forthcoming Digital Services Act regulations during a visit to Twitter headquarters in San Francisco later this month. - Sam Schechner/ The Wall Street Journal
- Meanwhile, YouTube announced it will stop enforcing its 2020 election misinformation policy. Good thing there’s no big events coming up in the next year where the amount and importance of such claims is likely to increase! - Sara Fischer/ Axios, YouTube
- Instagram lifted its account suspension for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday, saying it was a mistake not to reinstate him after he launched a presidential campaign in April. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- Kennedy’s account was previously suspended for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about vaccines and COVID-19. His nonprofit, the Children’s Health Defense, is still suspended from the platform.
- TikTok has been sharing user data on an internal messaging tool that is accessible to ByteDance employees in China. - Sapna Maheshwari and Ryan Mac/ The New York Times
- The surgeon general released a report on the effect social media has on young people, noting benefits, but warning about specific harms and calling for action by social media companies, policymakers, researchers, children, and parents and guardians. - Casey Newton/ Platformer, Taylor Hatmaker/ TechCrunch, Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson, Michael Levenson/ The New York Times, Department of Health and Human Services, Vivek Murthy/ The Washington Post(commentary)
- Conservative groups are hoping to take advantage of a legislative response to child safety concerns to remove pro-LGBTQ and similar content on social issues and sexual health and identity. - Mike Masnick/ Techdirt
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn discuss the Supreme Court decisions in Gonzalez and Taamneh; Montana passing its state-wide TikTok ban and the immediate legal challenge filed against it; Meta's $1.3 billion dollar fine under the GDPR; OpenAI's charm offensive; and just another Monday at Twitter.
Play the sad trombone 5 times for this week's Twitter Corner: Musk censors political content at the behest of the Turkish Government in the final days of a close and historically important election; Linda Yaccarino is announced as the new CEO; Tucker Carlson announces he's going to stream his new show to Twitter; the platform announces not-so-encrypted messaging; and continues its ad hominem content moderation practices. Also: Singapore, Pakistan, Russia all crack down on internet freedom, and the European Court of Human Rights releases a wild ruling holding politicians responsible for third-party comments on their Facebook pages.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Pornhub and other pornography websites owned by MindGeek are blocking access for users in Utah with a video message protesting an age verification law that went into effect this past week. - Brian Fung/ CNN, Jonathan Edwards/ The Washington Post, Samantha Cole/ Vice News
- In completely unrelated news, VPN downloads spiked dramatically in Utah. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- The adult entertainment industry followed up by filing a lawsuit against the state challenging the law on First Amendment grounds. - Ben Winslow/ Fox 13 News, Free Speech Coalition
Twitter Corner
- Graphic videos from a mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas went viral on Twitter without a warning screen or similar labeling. The glaring issue suggests Musk's staffing cuts have left the platform ill-equipped to deal with difficult, real-time content moderation problems that arise in these kinds of crises. - Benjamin Mullin/ The New York Times, Aimee Picchi/ CBS News
- Meanwhile, Musk is focusing on the real issues, like whether NPR is going to start tweeting again. - Bobby Allyn/ NPR
- But at least our benevolent leader will allow some verified public announcement and emergency services free API access. - Sareen Habeshian/ Axios, Jon Fingas/ Engadget, Ivan Mehta/ TechCrunch, @TwitterDev
- Meta released its quarterly adversarial threat report, highlighting the takedown of a pro-China influence campaign with a network of accounts posing as news organizations and a think tank. - Donie O'Sullivan, Sean Lyngaas/ CNN, Ben Nimmo, Nathaniel Gleicher/ Meta
Legal Corner
- The Ninth Circuit threw out a jawboning case brought by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others against Elizabeth Warren for a letter she sent Amazon criticizing the online marketplace for recommending their vaccine denial book. - Bob Egelko/ San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit(.pdf)
- There is a big show-down going on in Brazil over a “fake news” bill that the government is trying to ram through, suggesting a worrying level of appetite on both sides of the aisle in Brazil to crack down on internet freedom. - Anthony Boadle/ Reuters
- Decentralized Twitter alternative Bluesky is not allowing heads of state at the moment… that’s one way to deal with a content moderation challenge! - Kylie Robison/ Fortune
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
Twitter Corner
- As we predicted, Musk is complying with more government take-down orders than Twitter used to. - Russell Brandom/ Rest of World
- Don't expect more reporting though, Twitter has stopped sharing takedown orders with Lumen, which is how this data was compiled. - @lumendatabase
- It’s okay though, we have… this? What is this? Is this supposed to be a transparency report? - Twitter
- Meanwhile, Twitter is one of 19 online services designated as a very large online platform (VLOP) or very large online search engine (VLOSE) under the EU’s pending Digital Services Act. Those companies will have to comply with the regulation earlier than smaller platforms and have the most burdensome requirements. - Sam Schechner, Kim Mackrael/ The Wall Street Journal
- More: The other companies on the list are pretty much what you’d expect, except something called Zalando (we’ll save you a VLOP visit, it’s an online fashion retail company) — good for it!
- Looks like someone in Montana finally talked to a First Amendment lawyer. The state’s recently passed TikTok ban is being held up as the governor seeks amendments to make it broader. If this is an attempt to make it less constitutionally suspect, it isn't a very effective one. - Meghan Bobrowsky/ The Wall Street Journal
- In another disappointing moral panic, the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act was introduced with bipartisan backing in the U.S. Senate. The bill would ban kids under 13 from using social media, implement age verification for all users, require parental consent for kids 13-17, and ban recommendation algorithms for minors. - Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Brian Fung/ CNN, Justin Hendrix/ Tech Policy Press, Morgan Sung/ TechCrunch, Matt Laslo/ Wired
- The decentralized Twitter-alternative Bluesky took off over the past week. The fast-growing social network is still in beta mode and not yet ready for the many trust and safety challenges that lie ahead — it didn’t even have a blocking function until Friday. - Jay Peters/ The Verge
Sports Corner
- Alex is holding his head up high after a historic season came to an end for his beloved Sacramento Kings. - Alex Kramers/ Sacramento Kings
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn joins the show to discuss the latest developments in child safety policy on Capitol Hill.
- The EARN IT Act and STOP CSAM Act were officially introduced with civil liberties and online privacy advocates raising concerns. - Joe Mullin/ Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sophia Cope, Andrew Crocker, Mario Trujillo/ Electronic Frontier Foundation
- The EARN IT Act would remove websites' immunity from civil lawsuits and state criminal charges stemming from child sex abuse material (CSAM) on their services, and create a commission to develop best practices for addressing child sexual exploitation online. - Lawrence Bonk/ Engadget, Mike Masnick/ Techdirt, Senate Committee on the Judiciary
- Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the STOP CSAM Act which would expand child sexual abuse reporting laws for social media companies, require annual reports on efforts to protect children online, and specify that platforms are liable to civil lawsuits for the storage or distribution of CSAM. - Senate Committee on the Judiciary
- In a new Lawfare piece, Riana warns that mandated transparency reporting could do more harm than good if bad actors are able to exploit the disclosures, and she compares and contrasts several online safety bills' approaches to this dilemma.
- The Department of Justice brought charges against 40 members of the Chinese national police for deploying a troll farm using “fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents, and attempting to get the dissidents’ accounts removed from a platform operated by a “U.S. telecommunications company.” - Department of Justice
Twitter Corner
- Professor Alexandra Roberts weighs in on whether Twitter could face legal liability for shoving blue check marks on people who don't want it. - @lexlanham
- Twitter quietly removed a line with explicit protections for transgender users in its hateful content policy. - Jess Weatherbed, Emma Roth/ The Verge, GLAAD
- Twitter removed all “government-funded” and “state-affiliated” labeling for public news broadcasters, state media organizations, and affiliated journalists. - Jahnavi Nidumolu/ Reuters, Sara Fischer/ Axios, Nick Robertson/ The Hill, Michael Levenson/ The New York Times
- Meanwhile, Facebook laid off most of its information problems team. - Anusuya Lahiri/ Benzinga
- The Oversight Board, the quasi-independent entity funded by Meta to guide its content moderation decisions and policy, released an advisory report on Thursday calling for continued enforcement, but a reassessment of the types of claims Meta should remove under its current COVID-19 misinformation policies. The opinion took nine months to come down, but was the equivalent of a shruggie emoji in terms of how much concrete guidance it gave Meta. - Oversight Board
Legal Corner
- Breaking News: The Supreme Court continues to use Evelyn's course syllabus as their docket guide and granted cert in two cases about when and whether government actors can block critics on social media. - Jay Peters/ The Verge
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn are joined by John Perrino to discuss Montana's TikTok ban bill, passed this week, and other things to watch on the TikTok front. Then they discuss why people's ideas to content moderate away the Discord leaks problem won't work; Substack's ill-thought-out thoughts on content moderation; a blog post from Twitter that seems to have slipped through a wormhole from the past; an important case the Supreme Court is hearing this week that could have big ramifications for protections against online stalking; and much more.
Alex and Evelyn discuss what was a ridiculous week for Twitter, even by its new standards: Germany is threatening to fine it over poor content moderation of illegal content; it made a hash of state-affiliated media labelling; and got into a fight with Substack. Meanwhile, India continues its forward march in cracking down on the internet; everything is a content moderation story, including the recently leaked US intelligence documents; and Arkansas is the latest state to join the "won't you think of the children" bandwagon.
Alex and Evelyn chat with Sol Messing, Research Associate Professor at New York University with the Center for Social Media and Politics, about what to make of the open source info Twitter provided on its ranking algorithm. They also chat about the blue tick debacle, concerns about YouTube's treatment of political videos in India, and Midjourney's pretty not-okay approach to content moderation.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The TikTok Tick Tock
- Of course, we had to lead with the TikTok hearing. CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee during a five-hour grilling last Thursday. There was bipartisan support for comprehensive data privacy and protection legislation, a TikTok ban or restrictions, and children’s online safety policy. - Ashley Gold/ Axios, Gopal Ratnam/ Roll Call, Cat Zakrzewski, Jeff Stein/ The Washington Post
- Alex wrote for CNN that U.S. national security policy guarding against Chinese data collection and influence operations must include but look beyond TikTok. He calls for comprehensive privacy legislation and researcher access to social media data.
- Over the weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the case that TikTok should not be banned in her first TikTok by focusing on the broader need for data privacy and protection rules.
- The hearing was bad for TikTok and Chew did not demonstrate he could stand up to China. He conceded that Chinese employees can access U.S. user data but evaded most questions and refused to condemn Chinese persecution of the Uyghur population.
- There are also likely First Amendment challenges to banning a single social media application without a clearly demonstrated national security threat. -Jameel Jaffer/ The New York Times, PEN America
- India continues to crack down on online speech, and platforms (cough, Twitter) continue to acquiesce. - Samriddhi Sakunia/ Rest of World
- People were freaking out about generative AI images of Donald Trump being arrested, which seemed to convince more people that the AI apocalypse was finally here than convinced anyone that Trump had been arrested. - Manon Jacob/ AFP, Ashley Belanger/ Ars Technica
- In further proof that everything is a content moderation issue, Midjourney, the company that developed the software used to generate the images, banned journalist Elliot Higgins for creating the images. - Chris Stokel-Walker/ BuzzFeed
- The governor of Utah signed into law a crazy social media bill that gives parents and guardians complete access to their children’s accounts. Start the countdown until the legal challenge. - Sam Metz, Barbara Ortutay/ Associated Press
- Completely unrelated, the tech industry group NetChoice launched a litigation hub to track and respond to lawsuits on platform safety with amicus briefs. - Cat Zakrzewski/ The Washington Post
- Twitter Corner
- Musk is still CEO.
- No changes to the API.
- The algorithm is still not open source.
- Twitter announced it will start deleting legacy verifications on, no joke, April Fools’ Day. - Alyssa Lukpat/ The Wall Street Journal, Jay Peters, Mitchell Clark/ The Verge, @verified
- It will be good to have a signal of who not to pay attention to, although Twitter Blue subscribers might soon be able to hide their blue checkmarks. - Mitchell Clark/ The Verge
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The TikTok Tick Tock
- The Department of Justice is investigating TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, for surveilling American users, including journalists. - Emily Baker-White/ Forbes, Glenn Thrush, Sapna Maheshwari/ The New York Times
- The Biden administration is pushing for ByteDance to divest from TikTok or face a U.S. ban. - David McCabe and Cecilia Kang/ The New York Times, John D. McKinnon/ The Wall Street Journal
- TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to testify before a House committee on Thursday where he will face scrutiny from both parties. - House Energy and Commerce Committee
- Getting Trumped
- Trump was reinstated on YouTube and posted a video clip to Facebook and YouTube on Friday marking the first time he has posted on reinstated accounts. - Mark Niquette and Mario Parker/ Bloomberg News, Reuters, Brett Samuels/ The Hill
- YouTube's “explanation” of why Trump was reinstated is pathetically thin, fitting into two tweets. - @YouTubeInsider
- The reinstatement, based on a lower threat to real-life violence, came just in time for Trump to incite a riot in New York. - Michelle L. Price/ Reuters
- Twitter Corner
- We are taking bets on how long Musk will remain CEO and whether his promise that the recommendation algorithm will be made open source on March 31 will come to fruition. - @elonmusk
- No changes appear to have been made to the API.
- Musk said he’ll solve the problem of influence operations with AI. - @elonmusk
- Legal Corner:
- The New York attorney general is appealing a ruling that halted a law to compel social media companies to report hateful conduct. - Eugene Volokh/ Reason
- The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Secretary of State’s Office of Election Cybersecurity did not violate the First Amendment in using Twitter’s Partner Support Portal to flag tweets potentially violating the platform’s civic integrity policy. - Isaiah Poritz/ Bloomberg Law, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (.pdf)
- Sports Desk
- We need to address the BIGGEST STANFORD SCANDAL. The top-seeded Stanford Cardinal women’s basketball team was knocked out in the second round of March Madness, losing to eight-seed Ole Miss, a school that just hired this guy. - Alexa Philippou/ ESPN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
SIO's Riana Pfefferkorn joins Evelyn this week to talk warrants for abortion related data and California laws post-Dobbs looking at ways to protect sensitive information; why the FTC asking Twitter for information about its privacy practices is totally unsurprising; an anti-Jawboning bill on the Hill; this week's TikTok tick tock; and a Utah "think of the children" social media bill.
Alex and Evelyn discuss the snowballing TikTok bans (won't someone remember the First Amendment!); their new "screen time limit"; Twitter's "new" violent speech policy; Meta's response to the Oversight Board's recommendations on its X-Check program; FTC's blog post on AI hype; post-Dobbs data requests and content demands on tech platforms; and Google's "civil rights audit."
Alex and Evelyn chat about Meta's latest report on information operations; TikTok's announcement of a researcher API; the last two weeks in Twitterland; Meta's announcement of paid verification and participation in "Take It Down", a new platform run by NCMEC for people to get sexually explicit images of under 18-year-olds removed; Europe's DSA is coming; Susan Wojcicki is going; and a New York online hate speech law is on hold.
Evelyn speaks with Moderated Content's Supreme Court correspondent Daphne Keller again to discuss the oral arguments in Twitter v. Taamneh, and the big elephant that was missing from the courtroom.
Evelyn speaks with Moderated Content's Supreme Court correspondent Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, to discuss their quick takes on the Supreme Court oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google.
Alex and Evelyn discuss the House Oversight Committee hearing last week about, supposedly, Hunter Biden's laptop. and why Alex was name-checked; Twitter's restriction in Turkey in the aftermath of the disaster; what to make of journalism finding bias in AI tools used to detect sexual suggestiveness; a China-linked deepfake information operation; The Balloon and geopolitics; and oh btw Donald Trump has his Facebook account back.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Twitter Corner
- Twitter announced it is ending free API access, potentially cutting off hobbyist developers and their weird and helpful content and tools. - Ryan Browne/ CNBC
- Musk said the change would help rid the site of malicious bots. But cats might save the internet once again, as the Twitter owner later backtracked, replying to @PepitoTheCat that he might still allow “bots providing good content that is free.” - Ivan Mehta/ TechCrunch
- The change has stark implications for public interest researchers and journalists who use the Twitter API to analyze current events, conduct studies on important societal issues, and develop open source tools that democratize online research. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Justin Hendrix/ Tech Policy Press, Coalition for Independent Technology Research
- The New York Times and the Canadian Center for Child Protection found child sexual abuse material continues to spread on Twitter with more than 200,000 engagements and hundreds of accounts sharing explicit content. - Michael H. Keller, Kate Conger/ The New York Times
- Twitter trust and safety head Ella Irwin outlined how Twitter makes decisions about whether to suspend accounts for “restricted content,” such as threats and calls to violence or. She also said removal reasons will be made public soon — we’ll see about that! - @ellagirwin
- More: Irwin said the company pushes back against government demands, but “Not everyone has a sense of humor.”- @ellagirwin
- Speaking of questionable orders:
- India set up its government-appointed panels that will review user appeals of social media content moderation decisions. - Scroll
- Wikipedia was blocked in Pakistan for blasphemous content, and then restored after three days (just before recording). - Kamran Haider/ Bloomberg News
- Meta denies its moderation of the Ukraine war is biased. The company’s response may be raising more questions than it answers. - Jacob Turowski/ Meta
- Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) introduced the Social Media Child Protection Act to ban children under 16 from accessing social media. It's almost certainly unconstitutional. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Office of Representative Chris Stewart
- The battle to get rid of TikTok has inevitably resulted in pressuring app stores. Senate Intelligence Committee member Michael Bennet (D-CO) sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google last week calling on them to ban TikTok from their digital marketplaces. - John D. McKinnon/ The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Flatley/ Bloomberg News
- Former Twitter executives will testify before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. They will be grilled on the decision to limit a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Take a drink of (Irish) coffee for every mention of “jawboning.” - Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Anders Hagstrom, Chad Pergram/ Fox News
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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A little over a year ago, Evelyn interviewed Josh Parecki, Zoom's Head of Trust & Safety and Associate General Counsel, and Josh Kallmer, Zoom's Head of Global Public Policy and Government Relations, about how Zoom thought about content moderation. And since then, they've been doing some rethinking. So Evelyn asked them back to talk about what's changed in the way they think about trust and safety, the change in regulatory landscape even in the last year, and the difficult problems that pop up for every communications platform.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
India Update
- At least some of the YouTube, Meta, and Internet Archive takedowns of clips from a BBC documentary that examines Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political rise were due to copyright claims made by BBC, rather than requests made by the Indian government. Maybe they could have mentioned that a bit earlier? - Rishi Iyengar/ Foreign Policy, Russell Brandom/ Rest of World, Internet Archive
- Luckily, Twitter owner Elon Musk chimed in with a tweet reply that he hadn’t heard of the issue, adding “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.” - @elonmusk
- Twitter reinstated Indian Hindu nationalist accounts previously suspended for hate speech against Muslims. - Newley Purnell/ The Wall Street Journal
Twitter Corner
- A new Twitter Files thread on the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton 68 project, which tracked Russian influence operations on Twitter, illustrates the dashboard’s flawed methodology. That doesn’t change the fact that there was Russian interference during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. - @mtaibbi
- Musk made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with House leadership to ensure that Twitter will be “fair to both parties.” We are sure there will be tons of transparency. - Tony Romm, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Adela Suliman/ The Washington Post
- Twitter will allow anyone to appeal an account suspension, starting this Wednesday, February 1. - @TwitterSafety
- And Twitter is re-suspending some of those accounts. White supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was suspended less than 24 hours after his account was reinstated. - Julia Shapero/ The Hill
- In completely unrelated news, Twitter is being sued in Germany over failing to remove antisemitic hate speech. - Molly Killeen/ Euractiv, Aggi Cantrill, Karin Matussek/ Bloomberg News
TikTok Offensive
- TikTok is going on the offensive with public engagements explaining its private negotiations with the U.S. government. Executives are briefing members of Congress, academics, and think tank researchers about Project Texas, the company’s plan to audit content recommendation systems and securely store and process U.S. user data in partnership with Oracle. - Cecilia Kang, Sapna Maheshwari, David McCabe/ The New York Times
- Researchers briefed on TikTok’s proposal to continue operating in the U.S. said that a new subsidiary, TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. (USDS), will house all of its U.S. content moderation under the governance of an independent board that will report to the U.S. government (CFIUS) — not to ByteDance. Plans also call for TikTok’s source code and content recommendation systems to be audited by Oracle and a third-party inspector. - David Ingram/ NBC News, Matt Perault, Samm Sacks/ Lawfare (commentary)
Other stories
- The messy business of operating in China caught up with Apple again as the company’s Safari web browser seems to have quietly adopted a Chinese government website block list. - Sam Biddle/ The Intercept
- Google plans to sunset a pilot program that stopped political campaign emails from winding up in the spam folder as it seeks to dismiss a lawsuit from the Republican National Committee claiming that Gmail filters have political bias. - Isaac Stanley-Becker/ The Washington Post, Ashley Gold/ Axios
- The Financial Times had a miserable experience attempting to run its own Mastodon instance, facing “compliance, security and reputational risks” in addition to cloud hosting costs and creepy factor issues, such as seeing direct messages by default. - Bryce Elder/ Financial Times
Sports Corner
- Did Alex receive a call from the San Francisco 49ers football team during their NFL playoff game this weekend? No, not for that cyber issue last year. Things get “Purdy'' desperate when a team’s first four quarterbacks are injured. - Nick Wagoner/ ESPN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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Evelyn sits down with Nate Persily, Professor at Stanford Law School, and Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, to discuss Meta's decision that it is reinstating former President Trump's accounts. Nate is pragmatic, Alex is cynical, and Evelyn is a naive little formalist about it all. Here's their quick takes.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- This should be a far bigger story: India is ordering platforms to take down content related to a BBC documentary. The widely predicted and highly consequential dramatic escalation in India’s legal battles with platforms is here, and we better be watching - Hannah Ellis-Petersen/ The Guardian
- The UK Online Safety Bill was back in the House of Commons last week, but the Sunak administration is biding time in negotiations over the wording of a new criminal liability provision for social media executives. An amendment also adds videos that show people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light” to a list of illegal content that must be proactively blocked from users. Dan Milmo/ The Guardian, Dan Milmo/ The Guardian, Dan Milmo/ The Guardian, BBC News
- An investigative report highlights the mental health challenges and low wages for workers in Kenya that reviewed text snippets of disturbing situations and hateful speech in support of an OpenAI system to detect and prevent toxic content from appearing in ChatGPT and other tools. - Billy Perrigo/ Time
- The Federal Election Commission tossed out claims made by the Republican National Committee that Google’s Gmail spam filters are biased against conservatives because they send a higher percentage of GOP fundraising emails to spam. - John McKinnon/ The Wall Street Journal
- Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is formally petitioning Meta to reinstate his social media accounts in a written letter. And Trump wants to get out of an exclusivity agreement to post first on his own social network, Truth Social, as his campaign plans to ramp up later this year. - Marc Caputo, Jonathan Allen/ NBC News, Asawin Suebsaeng, Adam Rawnsley/ Rolling Stone
- TikTok has an internal tool for staff to manually amplify individual videos, picking and choosing brands and creators to go viral without disclosing that recommended content for users. - Emily Baker-White/ Forbes
- Courtroom Corner:
- The Supreme Court has put two state content moderation cases on hold, asking the Biden administration to weigh in on challenges to Texas and Florida laws that would restrict social media companies from removing posts with political opinions. - @steve_vladeck, Adam Liptak/ The New York Times, Andrew Chung/ Reuters
- Nearly 50 amicus briefs were filed last week in support of Section 230 in Gonzalez v. Google. - SCOTUSblog
- It turns out that international soccer star Messi's record for the most-liked picture on Instagram was the result of coordinated authentic behavior. Following Argentina’s World Cup victory, fans organized to like Messi’s post and unlike the picture of an egg that previously held the title of the most liked Instagram post. - Lucía Cholakian Herrera/ Rest Of The World
- Because of course, members of Taliban leadership were among the Twitter Blue subscribers paying for a blue check mark verification badge on their accounts. The badge was removed from the accounts following intense backlash, but what do the blue checks even mean anymore? - Abdirahim Saeed/ BBC News, Ramon Antonio Vargas/ The Guardian
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Alex and Evelyn get Josh Tucker, a professor at New York University, and Solomon Messing, a Visiting Researcher Georgetown University, to talk them through the results of two major studies about the effects of online speech; they also discuss Twitter cutting off API access; public universities cutting off TikTok access; Apple promising more transparency about app store take-downs, and an update from the courtrooms.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- An EU regulator is putting behavioral advertising at risk and leveling more than $400 million in fines against Meta for Facebook and Instagram privacy violations. - Sam Schechner/ The Wall Street Journal, Vincent Manancourt/ Politico, Adam Satariano/ The New York Times, Stephanie Bodoni/ Bloomberg News
- More: Meta plans to appeal the ruling against its legal basis for processing data to provide targeted posts and ads based on user activity. - Meta
- Google is implementing an appeals process for users suspended for sharing child sexual abuse materials on its platforms and will provide more information about why an account is suspended. - Kashmir Hill/ The New York Times
- The move follows New York Times reporting on fathers who lost access to their accounts after sharing requested photos of their children’s genitals for medical treatment. Criminal investigations found them innocent, but Google refused to restore their accounts. - Kashmir Hill/ The New York Times
- Twitter announced it relaxed policies for cause-based U.S. advertising and will expand permitted political advertising as ad revenue declines under Musk’s ownership due in part to brand safety concerns. - @TwitterSafety, Brian Fung/ CNN
- More: Many platforms banned or limited political advertising ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Analysis by Duke University researchers found there is little evidence those bans achieved their intended effects of limiting the spread of false or misleading information about elections. - J. Scott Babwah Brennen, Matt Perault/ Duke University
- Facebook wants out of politics, but there is no escape! Efforts to reduce political or socially divisive topics had unintended consequences as users saw more spam content and less hard news. - Jeff Horwitz, Keach Hagey, Emily Glazer/ The Wall Street Journal
- Facebook’s self-imposed deadline for deciding whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account has come and gone with any action and a public announcement expected in the coming weeks. - David Ingram/ NBC News
- The Oversight Board released a new decision overturning Meta’s removal of a Facebook post with a slogan used to protest the Iranian government, literally translating to “death to Khamenei,” in reference to ousting the current political regime led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. - Oversight Board, Katie Paul/ Reuters
- Members of the January 6 special committee staff who specialize in technology research and policy highlighted important findings that Trump received special protections on platforms despite red flags raised by trust and safety staff, however, right-wing networks with everyday people drove extremist views and organizing. They argue for increased transparency as the first legislative step to hold social media companies accountable. - Dean Jackson, Meghan Conroy, Alex Newhouse/ Tech Policy Press (commentary)
- WhatsApp added a feature that makes it easier for users in repressive regimes to bypass internet censors that attempt to ban or block access to the service. - Andrew Jeong/ The Washington Post
- The Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit filed against the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group that claims the company is responsible for the illegal surveillance of 1,400 individuals to proceed. - Jessica Davis/ SC Media
- Researchers are raising the alarms that Brazilian far-right activists were organizing in the open across social media platforms far in advance of this week’s violent attacks on government buildings in protest of the recent presidential election. - Elizabeth Dwoskin/ The Washington Post, @det
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman, Amy Klobuchar, and Bill Cassidy introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) on Wednesday. The Bill would give researchers at universities and nonprofit organizations in the U.S. access to study data from the largest social media companies and provide public transparency on the most widely shared posts, advertising, content moderation practices and recommendation algorithms. - John Perrino / Tech Policy Press
- More: Nate Persily puts in a cameo appearance to explain the bill and its history. Nate has been working on platform transparency for years. - Tara Wright / SLS News
- An internal investigation by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, found that employees tracked the location and user data of multiple journalists, in an attempt to identify leakers at the company - Emily Baker White / Forbes
- More: One of the reporters who was tracked, Emily Baker White, has a good toot-thread of the reporting on the company that she has done over the past year that led to her being tracked. - Emily Baker White / Mastodon
- The password manager LastPass dropped a lovely Christmas present on its users, announcing a major security breach. Yikes. - Karim Toubba / LastPass
- Over at Twitter:
- Musk is still CEO.
- No, the US Government is not paying Twitter millions of dollars to censor information (Musk on Twitter). It reimburses the company for the costs of complying with orders to hand over data under the Stored Communications Act. - 18 U.S. Code § 2703, § 2706
- The Twitter Files finally had some interesting reporting about US Government covert information operations. - Lee Fang / The Intercept
- No, it’s not news that platforms struggled with content moderation during the pandemic and often made mistakes. Yes, there should be a proper review of content moderation during the pandemic. - David Zweig / Twitter
- Elon Musk has a worrying lack of understanding of Twitter’s data security obligations. - Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post
- Here’s a primer of what he should know and why he should be worried Moderated Content prepared earlier - “Elon puts rockets into space, he's not afraid of the FTC”
- And for Orin Kerr’s take on why he really, really shouldn’t share people’s DMs, listen to MC Weekly Update 12/12
- Everything has a content moderation angle – Leo Messi’s post celebrating his world cup win has become the most-liked Instagram post of all time. - Dan Ladden-Hall / The Daily Beast
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Extra special thanks this week to the production team, Brian Pelletier, Alyssa Ashdown and Ryan Roberts for making sure this reached you during winter shutdown.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
A bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S. and could be extended to other social media companies with ties to “foreign adversaries” was introduced in the House and Senate, but lacks Democratic co-sponsors in the upper chamber. - Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Rebecca Shabad/ NBC News
Meta released its annual report on “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Enforcements,” noting the milestone of 200 takedowns. - Ben Nimmo, David Agranovich/ Meta, Alexander Martin/ The Record by Recorded Future, @DavidAgranovich, @benimmo
Tech trade association NetChoice sued the state of California in an attempt to block the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act over First Amendment protections for content moderation. The law would go into effect next year with broad online privacy and safety components for children. - Natasha Singer/ The New York Times, Cat Zakrzewski/ The Washington Post, Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Lauren Feiner/ CNBC, Rebecca Kern/ Politico Pro
The Supreme Court schedule is set for hearings on Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh on February 21 and February 22. The cases are focused on content moderation and recommendation algorithms. - Adi Robertson/ The Verge, @GregStohr
"Former President Trump said Thursday that he’d ban the U.S. government from labeling any domestic speech as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ if he returns to the White House.” - Julia Mueller/ The Hill
Matt Taibbi named the Election Integrity Partnership in a Friday afternoon version of the Twitter Files. - @mtaibbi
Twitter suspended over 25 accounts that track private planes and nine journalists — including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post — who shared links about the @elonjet account which posts public information about the location of Musk’s private jet. Most reporter accounts have since been reinstated after Musk conducted a Twitter poll on whether to enforce his new policy against sharing flight trackers and similar information. - Jason Abbruzzese, Kevin Collier, Phil Helsel/ NBC News, Ashley Capoot/ CNBC, Ryan Mac/ The New York Times, Paul Farhi/ The Washington Post, Jordan Pearson/ Vice
Musk banned linking out to other platforms… and then conducted a Twitter poll, subsequently reversing the decision, with 87% of voters opposed, and taking down the tweet announcement and blog page on the policy. Some users are still unable to post links to Mastodon and other social media sites in tweets. - Mack DeGeurin/ Gizmodo, @JuddLegum
Musk conducted a scientific Twitter poll asking if he should step down as CEO. Nearly 58% of the more than 17 million respondents voted for him to step down. - Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal
It was coincidentally just after he was at the World Cup with Jared Kushner and... a bunch of Emiratis. Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer quipped that twitter’s content moderation panel looks different these days. - @ianbremmer
Sports balls were kicked and a team scored more points than the other team after time was added, and then stopped, and then added, and then people lined up to kick more balls into the net than the other team. Congratulations to Argentina! - Ben Church/ CNN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Apple announced plans to expand end-to-end encryption data protections from messages and content on the device to the iCloud service used by many to backup their files and media for access anywhere. - Robert McMillan, Joanna Stern, Dustin Volz/ The Wall Street Journal, Joseph Menn/ The Washington Post, Lily Hay Newman/ Wired, Frank Bajak/ Associated Press
- Cue the music for the Twitter Files!
- Musk tweeted an excerpt of former trust and safety lead Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation to falsely insinuate he supports the sexualization of children, opening up harassment and potential violence against the staffer he once praised. - Dana Hull, Kurt Wagner/ Bloomberg News
- The Oversight Board released a long-awaited policy advisory opinion (PAO) with dozens of recommendations for improving Meta’s murky and controversial cross-check program which gives VIP Twitter accounts a higher level of scrutiny for enforcement of platform policies with little transparency. - Jeff Horwitz/ The Wall Street Journal, Oversight Board
- Morocco’s win over perennial power Portugal and Ronaldo in the World Cup was a historic first for an African or Arab country to reach the semifinals of the tournament. They will next face France, the nation that colonized Morocco. - Issy Ronald/ CNN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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In the wake of the Buffalo shooting in May, New York passed a law imposing certain obligations on social media networks regarding "hateful conduct" on their services. It went into effect at the start of December and Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA Law who runs a legal blog, is challenging the law as unconstitutional. Evelyn sits down with Eugene and Genevieve Lakier from UChicago Law to discuss.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Using a powerful AI language model developed by OpenAI, the new ChatGPT tool allows anyone to generate short text that is indecipherable from written text and that draws upon vast amounts of publicly available information. - Janus Rose/ Vice, Ina Fried/ Axios
- More: ChatGPT has fun and informative uses, but is also easy to abuse — from generating recipes or funny movie scripts, to the spread of misinformation or nefarious tips to get away with crimes.
- TikTok and Bumble are adopting a tool developed by Meta with international charity SWGfL’s Revenge Porn Helpline. The tool uses hashing technology for submitted content to identify and block non-consensual intimate media from participating platforms. - Olivia Solon/ Bloomberg News
- More: Victims make a tradeoff on whether a single human reviewer seeing their intimate image outweighs its spread across the social media and dating services using the technology. - @oliviasolon
- Rumble and the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog run by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, are challenging a New York law that prohibits hate speech in a federal lawsuit, claiming it would violate First Amendment free expression protections. - Chris Dolmetsch/ Bloomberg News
- The “Twitter Files” were released in a staggered thread of more than 40 tweets on Friday evening. The string of tweets includes screenshots of Twitter staff’s internal communications and external email correspondence which lack any smoking gun. Instead, the thread is most likely to reinforce existing beliefs about the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and related content. - Cat Zakrzewski, Faiz Siddiqui/ The Washington Post
- Twitter CEO Elon Musk disputed news reports on research by advocacy and civil rights groups that found hate speech slurs were more prevalent on the platform. Musk claimed the data actually shows a decrease in the reach of hate speech on the platform since his acquisition and said the Twitter safety team will publish weekly reports on the data going forward. - Mohar Chatterjee/ Politico
- More: As University of California, Berkeley researcher Jonathan Stray points out, both sides can claim they are right depending on the data and measurement of success. More transparency and collaboration could move these efforts in the right direction. That seems unlikely for now, but could be required under the EU’s new digital regulations.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- As protestors against China’s zero-Covid policy fill the streets, images of them fill the internet and China’s censors are struggling to contain them. – Liza Lin, Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal
- This is partly because the Chinese people have had years of practice at evading censors and know a trick or two. – Paul Mozur / Twitter
- So China is trying to bury that content with its own spam about escorts, porn and gambling. – Jon Porter / The Verge
- Some of that spam includes … an AI-generated image of Alex with horns? – Alex Stamos / Twitter
- Elon doesn’t seem too concerned though. He’s too busy picking a fight with Apple. – Elon Musk / Twitter
- And maybe drawing up plans for his own phone if Apple kicks Twitter out of the app store?– Elon Musk / Twitter
- Meta published its quarterly adversarial threat report this week, which included information about accounts it took down conducting information operations that had links to the US government. – Meta
- Alex walks us through the report Stanford Internet Observatory wrote with Graphika on these operations and what they found. – Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory
- As a result of this report, the Pentagon ordered a review of information operations conducted by the US military. – Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post
- Alex gives Evelyn an apparently now-weekly update on Stanford football news.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- How else would Elon Musk decide to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account than a Twitter poll? Okay, well maybe the content moderation council he proposed to deal with reinstatement decisions. - Faiz Siddiqui, Drew Harwell, Isaac Arnsdorf / The Washington Post
- Musk’s mind is also made up on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones whose account will not be reinstated on the platform. - Brian Fung/ CNN
- Former Twitter trust and safety lead Yoel Roth penned a New York Times opinion piece on why he left Twitter and the influence that app store operators have on content moderation. - Yoel Roth/ The New York Times (commentary)
- The EU might just scare Musk straight. After the Financial Times reported the headline “Elon Musk’s Twitter on ‘collision course’ with EU regulators,” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager responded that “We are never on a collision course with anyone because we consider ourselves a mountain.” - Javier Espinoza/ Financial Times, Silvia Amaro/ CNBC
- Mastodon might not be the paradise we hoped we could toot freely and safely in. Content moderation is hard and there’s less control or quality assurance in a federated model, as Block Party CEO Tracy Chou already knew too well before she had a post blocked and now faces torrents of harassment. - @triketora, @mmasnick
- A Mastodon server administrator is deciding who is a journalist while other server operators block those verified journalists from being seen on their “instances.” - Mathew Ingram/ Columbia Journalism Review
- Meta “has fired or disciplined more than two dozen employees and contractors over the last year whom it accused of improperly taking over user accounts, in some cases allegedly for bribes.” - Kirsten Grind, Robert McMillan/ The Wall Street Journal
- FBI Director Chris Wray testified that TikTok poses a national security challenge for the United States because the Chinese government may be able to access extensive data collected by the app or even use recommendation algorithms to push the country’s influence operations on users. - Chris Strohm, Daniel Flatley/ Bloomberg News, David Shepardson/ Reuters, Suzanne Smalley/ CyberScoop
- Sport ball is happening in Qatar “without controversy,” and Meta is using the moment to highlight its recently introduced anti-harassment features on Instagram to block or limit offensive messages aimed at players and encourage fans to think twice before sending potentially abusive content. - Jess Weatherbed/ The Verge, Meta
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Come for the discussion of whether Musk is going to find himself in hot water with the FTC, stay for the discussion of privacy and data security regulation more generally. Evelyn discusses Twitter’s data security problems and what this says about privacy regulation more generally with Whitney Merrill, the Data Protection Officer and Privacy Counsel at Asana and long-time privacy lawyer including as an attorney at the FTC, and Riana Pfefferkorn, a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The Election Integrity Partnership, led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, analyzed narratives with the potential to interfere in or delegitimize the 2022 midterm elections. - Election Integrity Partnership, @EI_Partnership, EIP Post-Election Update (.pdf)
- A divided Congress will likely mean more gridlock with a lot of smoke but no fire on Capitol Hill. - Ashley Gold, Peter Allen Clark/ Axios, Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Frank Konkel, Mariam Baksh, Kirsten Errick, Alexandra Kelley/ Nextgov, Anna Edgerton/ Bloomberg News
- A lot happened at Twitter:
- Chief Twit Elon Musk got into a Twitter feud with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) over impersonation issues on the site. - Ashley Capoot/ CNBC
- Twitter may have violated a Federal Trade Commission consent decree with the top brass who would be held responsible resigning the day the company’s reporting was due. Musk dismissed potential personal liability, although Uber’s former CSO knows that risk is real. - Brian Fung/ CNN, Department of Justice, @Riana_Crypto
- Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn and data protection and privacy law expert Whitney Merrill will dig into this more with Evelyn later this week!
- Twitter is at serious risk of a breach with departures by the security, privacy, compliance, and trust and safety leaders last week and a drastic staff reduction. - John Sakellariadis/ Politico, @alexstamos
- Musk tweeted that he is “turning off the ‘microservices’ bloatware” and seemingly fired an employee for tweeting that Musk didn’t know what he was talking about. Now, two-factor authentication may be broken. - @elonmusk, Michael Kan/ PC Magazine, @josephmenn
- Musk tweeted about Brazilian politics this morning… we are sure that will end well! He’s previously promised to look into allegations of censorship in the country by far-right political figures in the country. - @elonmusk, Andrew Downie/ The Guardian
- A spoofed Twitter account resembling Eli Lilly and Co. with a purchased blue “verified” check mark tweeted that “insulin is free now,” causing the real company’s market cap to drop $15 billion. Now, the company paused its Twitter ads, worth millions of dollars, and may pursue legal action. - Kyle Barr/ Gizmodo, Drew Harwell/ The Washington Post
- Evelyn has her calendar marked for the Big Game, a matchup of two 3-7 teams on Saturday at 2:30 p.m. PT. “Give ’em the axe, the axe, the axe!” - ESPN
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Elon Musk announced that Twitter will start charging $8 for users to keep or gain blue check marks on the platform, changing the meaning of the symbol to indicate subscribers to the “Twitter Blue” service. The company then delayed launch until after the midterms. - Ines Kagubare/ The Hill, @elonmusk
- Blue-chip companies including General Mills, Pfizer, and Volkswagen have all paused advertising on Twitter over concerns that Musk will limit content moderation on the platform. - Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin/ The Wall Street Journal
- After single-handedly hosting a call for Twitter with civil society and advocacy organizations, many of those participants were among the more than 60 advocacy and civil society organizations that called for an ad boycott on the platform. - Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Rebecca Kern, Mark Scott/ Politico
- Elon Musk responded to a right-wing influencer’s tweet suggesting he “has tortious interference claims” against activist groups involved in the ad boycott campaign. (spoiler: he doesn’t) - @elonmusk, Mark Frauenfelder/ Boing Boing
- People are leaving Twitter and fleeing to… Mastodon? - Rachel Metz/ CNN
- Rumble has suspended services in France, blaming government rules banning Russian state media and government accounts. - @rumblevideo
- Rumble is building its own cloud services, a move similar to Parler, but that would require a more expansive scale for more highly trafficked video content. - Kaitlyn Tiffany/ The Atlantic, Taylor Hatmaker/ TechCrunch
- “The Intercept had a big story this week that is making the rounds, suggesting that ‘leaked’ documents prove the DHS has been coordinating with tech companies to suppress information. The story has been immediately picked up by the usual suspects, claiming it reveals the ‘smoking gun’ of how the Biden administration was abusing government power to censor them on social media.” - Mike Masnick/ Techdirt
- More: “The only problem? It shows nothing of the sort.”
- The Election Integrity Partnership published a blog on rumors and false and misleading narratives to expect on and after Election Day. - Election Integrity Partnership
- India is amending an IT law that regulates social media content moderation by adding a panel with three government-appointed members to review social media grievances. - Manish Singh, Jagmeet Singh/ TechCrunch, Scroll
- A revised Online Safety Bill is expected to head back to the UK House of Commons later this month with amendments that limit the government from forcing platforms to take action on “harmful but lawful” content. - Dev Kundaliya/ Computing, Chloe Chaplain/ i newspaper
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
SHOW NOTESStanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- Elon Musk has been busy since officially acquiring Twitter.
- He tweeted that the company will form “a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.” That sparked comparisons to Meta’s Oversight Board while others noted that Twitter already has a Trust and Safety Council, but wondered if Musk was aware.
- He also said no major decisions will be made about reinstating accounts or changing content rules until that body comes together and reiterated in a quote tweet that no changes have been made to Twitter’s content moderation policies, likely in response to a reported rise in specific hate speech terms on the platform. - Emma Roth/ The Verge
- Indian authorities conducted searches at The Wire newsroom and the homes of four editors after a complaint was filed by the ruling party official at the center of reporting that was retracted by the news publication. - Scroll
- The Election Integrity Partnership published an analysis of social media platform policies finding that many election rules are vague and lack transparency for how they are enforced. - Election Integrity Partnership
- Elon Musk tweeted and then deleted a link to a conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack in reply to a tweet from Hillary Clinton. - Gina Martinez/ CBS News, Kurtis Lee/ The New York Times, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui/ The Washington Post
- Meta was fined nearly $25 million by Washington state for violating campaign finance disclosure laws and ordered to pay the state’s legal fees. - Associated Press, Rebecca Falconer/ Axios, Eli Sanders
- The Digital Services Act (DSA) was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The publication provides the final text of the DSA and begins the countdown for the DSA to enter into force and its application for large and then all covered platforms and search engines. - Luca Bertuzzi/ Euractiv
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Evelyn and Alex talk about, what else, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. He says he’s freed the bird, but there’s a whole bunch of restraints he clearly hasn’t thought about. He’s got some not-so-fun meetings and phone calls coming up.
When we talk about content moderation, we often focus on companies at the application layer of the internet, like the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. But there are a whole bunch of other companies in the internet stack that have the power to knock things offline. So what is similar or different about content moderation when it moves into the infrastructure layers of the internet? Evelyn spoke with Alissa Starzak, the Vice President and Global Head of Public Policy at Cloudflare and Emma Llanso, the Director of CDT’s Free Expression Project to explore this increasingly pressing question.
SHOW NOTESStanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The Wire retracted recent coverage of Meta and will conduct an internal review of past coverage by staff involved with the reporting. - The Wire
- French police are investigating severed fiber-optic cables that disrupted internet and phone services in the Marseille area. Alex urges caution before jumping to any conclusions. John Leicester/ Associated Press
- Turkey's parliament voted to adopt a law that could send social media users to jail for up to three years for spreading false information to "create fear and disturb public order" despite free speech and media freedom concerns. - Reuters
- Brazilian authorities granted the power to order that online platforms remove content to the country’s elections chief who also sits on the supreme court. - Jack Nicas/ The New York Times
- Kiwi Farms was available at its original URL over the last month but is back down. - Ellie Hall/ BuzzFeed
- The Republican National Committee sued Google over alleged spam filtering bias. It still has not enrolled in a new pilot program Google created with FEC approval to address those concerns. - Sara Fischer, Ashley Gold/ Axios
- Elon may very well buy Twitter — could an alternative platform pop up? - Perry Bacon Jr./ The Washington Post (commentary)
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
SHOW NOTESStanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- An article with bombshell allegations against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, appears to be based on forgeries, but the news outlet continues to stand by the reporting and now claims a technical expert at the publication was hacked. - Aditi Agrawal/ newslaundry, OpIndia
- More: Last week, an article was published by The Wire, a nonprofit Indian digital news organization, claiming an internal Instagram report revealed an official in charge of social media for India’s ruling party, the BJP, had special privileges to report pieces of content to Instagram and have them taken down automatically.
- Meta spokesperson Andy Stone denied the report saying that that was not how the XCheck program worked, and that the “the underlying documentation appears to be fabricated.”
- But Wait, There’s More: The next day, The Wire published a new article claiming to have an email in which Meta’s Stone asked employees how the document leaked.
- Meta CISO Guy Rosen denied the allegations and explained how he determined the evidence and email were forgeries.
- Then: This weekend, The Wire released another story standing by their reporting with evidence that the internal email and report URL were real. The story included a video explanation of their technical analysis.
- Meta’s Rosen responded debunking new claims, and other experts (including Alex) pointed out flaws with purported technical evidence that the internal emails were real.
- We’re Still Not Done: Meta released an updated blog post debunking the purported internal system shown in The Wire’s video as an external account created after the story was reported.
- The Wire responded in a statement saying that the reason why Meta keeps denying their reporting is to try and get them to publish more information that will reveal their sources but they “are not prepared to play this game any further.” The statement was later edited to delete the description of a “personal” relationship with a source.
- Got All That? Here’s Some Context: India is pushing ahead with legislation that would create a government-appointed panel to review user complaints about social media content moderation decisions. - Megha Mandavia/ The Wall Street Journal
- Meta officials are also reported to leniently apply policies, such as those barring hate speech, for the Indian ruling party. Newley Purnell, Jeff Horwitz/ The Wall Street Journal
- More: Last week, an article was published by The Wire, a nonprofit Indian digital news organization, claiming an internal Instagram report revealed an official in charge of social media for India’s ruling party, the BJP, had special privileges to report pieces of content to Instagram and have them taken down automatically.
- Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has reached an agreement to buy the conservative social media platform Parler. The move marks a growing trend of billionaires buying social media companies when their posts are moderated. - Ryan Browne/ CNBC, Marlene Lenthang/ NBC News, Bobby Allyn/ NPR, Kelly Hooper/ Politico
- The Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week bracket voting tournament was marred by an attempt to artificially inflate votes for 435 Holly over Bear 747 in the semifinal round. Luckily, the organizers caught the fishy business and preserved the sanctity of the tournament which had a record of more than one million total votes. - Miles Klee/ Rolling Stone
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court granted cert in two cases concerning the scope of platform liability for content on their services: Gonzalez v. Google, about whether platforms lose section 230 immunity when they recommend content to users, and Twitter v. Taamneh, about whether platforms can be found to have aided and abetted terrorism if they are found to have been insufficiently aggressive in removing terrorist content from their sites. The cert grants were a surprise, and the cases are complicated. Evelyn sat down with Daphne Keller, the podcast’s Supreme Court Correspondent, to dig into the details.
Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
- The Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases that could determine the scope of liability for websites and social media platforms that host and promote user content. - Rebecca Kern/ Politico, Rachel Lerman/ The Washington Post, David Ingram/ NBC News
- Gonzalez v. Google is the case getting the most attention because somehow the words “Section 230” have become clickbait — quite an achievement for a random provision of federal law. The question in Gonzalez is whether platforms lose Section 230 protections for content that they promote. The family of a victim of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks brought the suit.
- But we also really want to highlight Twitter Inc. v. Taamneh, which is about whether platforms can be found to have “aided and abetted” terrorism by having terrorist content on their services. The case was brought by the family of a victim of a 2017 terrorist attack in Istanbul which claims Twitter, Google, and Facebook aided and abetted terrorism by allowing the Islamic State on their platforms in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act.
- Meta took down influence operations linked to China and Russia. The Chinese campaign was the first to target U.S. politics ahead of the midterms, but was clearly fake and had low engagement. The larger Russian network replicated media organizations to spread pro-Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine. - Steven Lee Myers/ The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan/ CNN, Ben Nimmo/ Meta, Nika Aleksejeva, Roman Osadchuk, Sopo Gelava, Jean Le Roux, Mattia Caniglia, Daniel Suárez Pérez, Alyssa Kann/ DFRLab
- Spotify announced it is acquiring content moderation company Kinzen, bringing expertise and proprietary tools in house to improve trust and safety. - Sarah Perez/ TechCrunch
- PayPal is facing blowback after proposing rules that would have allowed it to fine users $2,500 for promoting misinformation — which the online payment service has since called an error. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- California passed a “cyberflashing” law that allows recipients of unwanted sexual imagery to take legal action against the sender for up to $30,000 in civil damages. California is the third state to pass a law that provides legal recourse for this form of sexual harrassment and abuse. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post
- More: The dating app Bumble played a significant role pushing for the new law. The app requires women to send the first messages to matches in an attempt to create a better dating experience.
- Context: The new law may be a sign of a trend across state legislatures which are increasingly passing measures against online harms and abuse. A Bumble executive to The Washington Post the company plans to push for similar legislation in Maryland, New York and D.C.
Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.
Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.
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Last week the Fifth Circuit upheld a Texas social media law that, among other things, prevents platforms from discriminating against users based on their viewpoint. The leading opinion declared that a bunch of things we thought we knew about how the First Amendment and content moderation work are wrong. Next stop: the Supreme Court.
evelyn talks with Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, and Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law and the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at the University of Chicago, about what the ruling said and what it means—to the extent that’s decipherable.