On today’s internet, the boundaries of acceptable speech are set by a few massive platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and a handful of others. If those companies find something unacceptable, it can’t travel far — a restriction that’s had a massive impact for everyone from copyright violators to sex workers. At the same time, vile content that doesn’t violate platform rules can find shockingly broad audiences, leading to a chilling rise in white nationalism and violent misogyny online. After years of outcry, platforms have grown more willing to ban the worst actors online, but each ban comes with a new political fight, and companies are slow to respond in the best of circumstances. As gleeful disinformation figures like Alex Jones gain power — and the sheer scale of these platforms begins to overwhelm moderation efforts — the problems have only gotten uglier and harder to ignore. At the same time, the hard questions of moderation are only getting harder.
In a sitdown with Verge EIC Nilay Patel on Decoder, the 44th president discussed Joe Biden’s recently-signed executive order about AI, why Obama disagrees with the idea that social networks are a “common carrier,” and which iPhone apps he uses the most, now that he’s no longer president and he can use an iPhone.
After 30 years teaching law, the internet policy legend is as worried as you’d think about AI and TikTok — and he has surprising thoughts about balancing free speech with protecting democracy.
The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.
An appeals court limited the terms of the ban last month but paused the process to see if the Supreme Court would weigh in. Now it will hear the DOJ’s appeal, over dissent from three justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch).
In a recommendation adopted today, it asks countries to quickly designate an authority for a network of Digital Services Coordinators under the EU-wide Digital Services Act, despite having several months left until the official February 2024 (Right now, the recommendation says under 10 percent of members have done so.) The network will help coordinate takedowns of illegal content on social media platforms, an effort the EU says it’s kicking into high gear following Hamas’ attack on Israel earlier this month.
The potential result? Even stricter efforts to make services like X and YouTube remove disinformation or terrorist posts — if member states play ball.
Hamas is banned from most social media as a designated terrorist organization, but as The Washington Post lays out, it’s used a popular Telegram account to “strengthen supporters’ resolve, stir up anti-Israel rage in neighboring countries, defend its militants’ brutality and induce sympathy to the plight of Gaza.” As The New York Times wrote yesterday, it’s also recently hijacked hostages’ social media accounts to spread terror and propaganda — in ways that are particularly hard to safeguard against.
[The Washington Post]
I worked my way through Trust & Safety Tycoon, and I was right: the brony call came back to haunt me. I encourage you to beat my score.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has helped put together a followup to online moderation simulator Moderator Mayhem, and I’ve barely gotten started, but it looks like just as much fun. You can find out more about Trust & Safety Tycoon on Techdirt or play it here.
First was X, then came Meta, now TikTok has put out a blog post on its moderation policies in response to EU commissioner Thierry Breton. The video platform says it’s removed over 500,000 videos and 8,000 livestreams in the region since the attacks on October 7th, and has also added more Arabic and Hebrew-speaking moderators to its ranks.
How a tall tale from a California water official tested the Constitution’s limits.
Courtesy of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where law goes to die. The rule (requiring age verifications and health warnings on sites with a high percentage of adult content) was blocked in August through a lower court decision that’s now been overturned — without any explanation from the appeals court, which I guess we should expect by now.
Copyright law can’t seem to keep up with how fast YouTube and streaming trends evolve, so creators have long taken it upon themselves to set up industry norms for “react”-style videos.
Recently, Twitch and Kick star xQc caught a lot of heat for breaking those norms after posting what essentially amounted to reuploads of content by smaller creators.
He challenged YouTuber Ethan Klein to a debate over the merits of fair use, but the conversation devolved into... xQc doing the worm? I think there’s a real discussion to be had about copyright and content creation, but this definitely wasn’t it.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee keep saying they’re investigating “collusion” between the Biden administration and Big Tech to “censor” conservatives, but they’re starting to act more like an Elon Musk fan club than anything else.
On top of investigating the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Musk’s Twitter takeover, they’re now going after the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for its role in this “censorship regime.”
Musk, of course, sued CCDH just two days ago, accusing the non-profit of unlawfully accessing Twitter data and cherry-picking posts to make the platform look more hateful than it is.
