Moderated Content

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.

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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!

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”
• 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!