Moderated Content

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

TikTok Corner

• The Montana state legislature passed a statewide TikTok ban that prohibits app stores from making downloads available and bars the company from operating in the state. Republican Governor Greg Gianforte is expected to sign the bill into law, but legal challenges will likely prevent the bill from going into effect early next year. - John Perrino/ Tech Policy Press, Brian Fung/ CNN, David McCabe/ The New York Times, ACLU, SB 419 - An Act Banning TikTok in Montana (.pdf)
• Our colleague Riana Pfefferkorn warns that the legislation is “clearly unconstitutional” and “contrary to the vision of a free and open internet that the US has long promulgated abroad as part of our commitment to democracy.” - Lily Hay Newman/ Wired

Discord had a Week with the Leak

• Discord published a legal blog response to revelations that massive U.S. intelligence leaks stemmed from messages in a small private group on the platform. Don’t share classified documents on Discord, it’s against their terms of service! - Clint Smith/ Discord
• A failure to spot the leaks in private and then niche corners of the web have spurred calls for more counterintelligence monitoring, but that might be the best idea. - Carol E. Lee, Ken Dilanian, Dan De Luce/ NBC News, @drewharwel
• Our colleague Renée DiResta co-authored an analysis that highlights how “the future of counterintelligence will be digitally native.” - Renée DiResta, Jon Askonas/ Foreign Policy

Substack’s (lack of) Content Moderation Plans 

• Substack CEO Chris Best just launched a Twitter competitor, but he dodged questions about content moderation during a must-listen episode of the “Decoder” podcast. - Nilay Patel/ The Verge

Twitter Corner

• Elon is still CEO (or maybe his dog, Floki, is)
• In a post that seems like a blast from the past, a new Twitter 2.0 policy will display labels on content with limited visibility for violating a policy and provide a user appeal system. It pains us to say it, but good work! - Twitter Safety 
• Musk claims that the government was reading your Twitter DMs. That’s either taken out of context, or something that needs to be looked into as it would violate the law. We’re guessing it’s the former. - Olafimihan Oshin/ The Hill, Matt Young/ Daily Beast, Ari Blaff/ National Review
• But no, it's crazy and a witch hunt for the FTC to be investigating Twitter's privacy practices — this is the implication of the GOP subpoena to Chair Lina Khan this week. - Ryan Tracy/ The Wall Street Journal, Stef W. Kight/ Axios, Alayna Treene, Sara Murray, Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer/ CNN  
• NPR, PBS, and American Public Media have stopped posting on Twitter in protest of misleading government-funded media labels. If Starship is government-sponsored, should there be a giant label on the spaceship? - Sara Fischer/ Axios, Shelly Hagan/ Bloomberg News, David Folkenflik/ NPR, Paul Farhi/ The Washington Post
• Twitter backtracked and agreed to remove content in Brazil that supported recent attacks at schools. - Amanda Audi/ The Brazilian Report

Bot or Not

• Russian fake account operators boast of only being detected 1% of the time, according to recently leaked classified documents. - Joseph Menn/ The Washington Post 

Arkansas’ Unusual Definition of Social Media

• Google successfully lobbied to get an exemption for YouTube in an Arkansas law requiring parental consent and age verification to use popular social media, but it’s unclear whether the law actually covers TikTok or Snapchat as lawmakers claim. - Brian Fung/ CNN, Jess Weatherbed/ The Verge, SB 396 - Social Media Safety Act

Legal Corner

• The Supreme Court is hearing a case, Counterman v. Colorado, this week about when sending persistent unwelcome DMs to someone can be criminalized. -  Issie Lapowsky/ Fast Company
• In an amicus brief with Genevieve Lakier and Eugene Volokh, Evelyn argues the case has been misunderstood by the parties and the media, and this creates a risk that the Court will accidentally eviscerate a whole bunch of important protections against online stalking. - Supreme Court (.pdf)

Sports Corner

• Alex’s Sacramento Kings had a historic win against the Golden State Warriors in game one of the NBA playoffs first round. All four California NBA teams are still alive! - Kendall Baker/ Axios

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 had a ridiculous week, even by Twitter's new standards.
  • A senior lawyer working on FTC compliance issues resigned. We can't imagine why. - Ryan Mac, Kate Conger/ The New York Times 
  • Germany is gearing up to fine Twitter under its NetzDG law for a systemic failure to remove illegal hate speech. Fines could exceed  €50 million, but it’s the first Musk heard of this. - Natasha Lomas/ TechCrunch, @elonmusk
  • Musk also didn’t understand what “state-affiliated media” means, picking a fight with NPR over the new label and then changing it to “government funded media.” - Bobby Allyn/ NPR, Shelly Hagan/ Bloomberg News
  • Meanwhile, Twitter is no longer taking steps to limit the reach of Chinese and Russian state-controlled media outlets. - Wenhao Ma/ Wenhao’s Newsletter, Louise Matsakis, Bradley Saacks/ Semafor
  • And this week's “but I never thought the leopards would eat MY face” update is about Substack: 
    • Twitter took a bunch of steps to reduce engagement with Substack links this week, but ultimately reversed most of those limits. - Mitchell Clark, Jay Peters/ The Verge, Igor Bonifacic/ Engadget, Timothy B. Lee/ Ars Technica
    • Musk said he took action because “Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.” - @elonmusk
    • One thing not reversed? Twitter Files author Matt Taibbi was “disappeared.” Taibbi announced he had quit the platform and Musk unfollowed him for opposing the limits on Substack. - Robby Soave/ Reason, Taylor Lorenz/ The Washington Post
    • Poor Matt! He tried so hard to stay on Elon's good side last week during a viral MSNBC segment. - Mike Masnick/ Techdirt, Marcy Wheeler/ emptywheel, @MehdiHasanShow
• India amended its IT law to prohibit social media companies from publishing false or misleading information about the government — as determined by the government’s own fact checking unit. Violations can strip platforms of safe harbor protections for user content. - Manish Singh/ TechCrunch, Sarvesh Mathi/ MediaNama
• Everything is a content moderation problem, including the massive intelligence documents leak this week which seem to have first been posted on Discord gaming channels. - Aric Toler/ Bellingcat, Idrees Ali/ Reuters, Shane Harris, Dan Lamothe/ The Washington Post
• Arkansas is the latest state to join the “won't you think of the children” bandwagon with a new age verification and parental consent law heading to the governor’s desk. - Lindsey Millar/ Arkansas Times, Daniel Breen/ KUAR, Michael R. Wickline/ Northwest Arkansas Gazette

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!

Twitter is (partially) open sourcing its recommendation algorithm. In this special episode, Evelyn and Alex are joined by New York University Research Associate Professor Sol Messing to talk through what he found in the code.

• Twitter Corner
  • Musk is now the most followed person on Twitter, passing former President Barack Obama. Hope it was worth every cent! - Emma Roth/ The Verge
  • Twitter verification is officially pay-to-play as the platform began to slowly remove legacy blue ticks on April Fools’ Day. - Associated Press, Rachel Lerman, Faiz Siddiqui/ The Washington Post
• In a blow to Musk’s core constituency, @catturd2 and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) were upset about their temporary suspensions for sharing posts supporting a “Trans Day of Vengeance” protest. - @MattBinder, Barbara Ortutay/ Associated Press
• YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the company is looking into claims that videos from Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi are being artificially suppressed as he faces jail time for alleged defamation against the ruling party. - Newley Purnell/ The Wall Street Journal
• Midjourney took these content moderation capitulations and said “hold my beer.” The tool was recently used to generate a viral graphic of the pope in a white puffer jacket and visuals of Trump fleeing arrest in New York, but you can’t generate images of Xi Jinping — that’s too controversial. - Isaac Stanley-Becker, Drew Harwell/ 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:

• 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!

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Riana Pfefferkorn weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

• Update on last week’s segment on Law Enforcement Data Requests:
  • California passed a law last year that seeks to block warrants requesting information about abortions from tech companies. - Andrea Vittorio/ Bloomberg Law
  • California lawmakers are looking at ways to stop dragnet reverse warrants and keyword search warrants. - Tonya Riley/ CyberScoop
• The FTC Takes on Twitter
  • The Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Twitter still has the staff and budget to comply with a 2011 consent decree for privacy and data protection standards and reporting. - Ryan Tracy/ The Wall Street Journal, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, David McCabe/ The New York Times, Brian Fung/ CNN
  • House Republicans created an outrage fest about FTC investigations into Twitter’s compliance with its consent decree. - Jared Gans/ The Hill, Emily Brooks, Rebecca Klar/ The Hill
  • Not to say “we told you so,” but this FTC action was predicted in an episode last year which still provides a good primer on Twitter’s data security problems with the FTC. - Evelyn Douek, Whitney Merrill, Riana Pfefferkorn/ Stanford Law
• House Republicans passed an anti-jawboning law, H.R. 140, the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act. Of course, it does not apply to Congress, and it faces long odds in the senate. - Brian Fung/ CNN
• Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) introduced the RESTRICT Act, which would give the Secretary of Commerce authority to ban technology products from companies with ties to foreign adversaries, including TikTok. - Brian Fung/ CNN, Brendan Bordelon, Gavin Bade/ Politico
• Any user can lose access to social media accounts for refusing to verify their age and parental consent is required for children under 18 to create social media accounts under a bill, SB 152, that passed the Utah State Legislature and is soon expected to be signed into state law. - Kim Bojórquez, Erin Alberty/ Axios
• Twitter announced new enterprise packages for access to collect tweets through its API with the lowest tier priced at more than $500,000 per year. - Chris Stokel-Walker/ Wired
  • More: Academics currently receive free access. Now, most if not all academics will be priced out of even the lowest tier of data access.

Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn on Twitter at @evelyndouek.

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:

• TikTok bans accelerated with Canada and the EU’s diplomatic arm joining U.S. states and other government agencies in banning the app from devices and networks as the White House set a 30 day deadline for federal agencies to block and remove TikTok. - Christopher Nardi/ National Post, Paul Vieira/ The Wall Street Journal, Stuart Lau, Laurens Cerulus/ Politico, David Shepardson/ Reuters
  • The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill to give the president authority to ban TikTok nationwide, moving the legislation to the House floor on a party-line vote. Will someone think of the First Amendment? - Brendan Bordelon/ Politico, Amanda Silberling/ TechCrunch, Rebecca Klar/ The Hill
• TikTok will introduce a “screen time limit” that is not really a screen time limit. - Hope King/ Axios, Sheila Dang/ Reuters, Cormac Keenan/ TikTok
• Twitter has a new violent speech policy. It’s a lot like the old policy. Content moderation is hard. - Mitchell Clark/ The Verge, Karissa Bell/ Engadget, @TwitterSafety
• Meta said it would make changes to its controversial cross-check program, which provides additional protections before content is removed for certain high-profile accounts, in response to Oversight Board recommendations. - Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Nick Pickles/ Meta, @OversightBoard
• The FTC published a blog warning industry against making false claims as part of the “AI hype” around chatbots and other products. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Michael Atleson/ Federal Trade Commission
• Local law enforcement agencies around the country are looking to get information from social media companies to enforce abortion bans. Blaming the social media companies, however, is not the answer as this article making the rounds suggests. - Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert/ Insider
• A Texas Republican wants to block websites with information about getting an abortion pill or procedure. - Jon Brodkin/ Ars Technica
• Google released a civil rights audit with little fanfare and managing not to say much. Kudos to the Washington Post for making sure it didn’t fly under the radar, but it shows the risk of audits becoming a box-ticking exercise. - Cristiano Lima, Gerrit De Vynck/ 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:

• Meta released its latest quarterly adversarial threat report, outlining influence operations it took down that were linked to Russia, Serbia, Cuba, and Bolivia. - Ben Nimmo, Nathaniel Gleicher/ Meta, Renée DiResta/ @noUpside, Alex Stamos/ @alexstamos
  • More: Alex and Evelyn are among those warning that the Q4 2022 report might mark the last time Meta and Twitter collaborated on addressing influence operations and resisting government data requests. Twitter failed to release its own quarterly report on government requests for data and observed influence operations. - Adam Rawnsley/ Rolling Stone
• TikTok announced a research API, opening an application to academics at nonprofit universities. The application and API details have received criticism for restrictions that would fail to meet academic research standards or return limited data with potentially misleading findings. - Aisha Malik/ TechCrunch, Mia Sato/ The Verge, Joe Bak-Coleman/ Tech Policy Press, Emma Lurie, Dan Bateyko, Frances Schroeder/ Stanford Internet Observatory
• Twitter Corner
  • Twitter delayed changes to API access again (and again), with plans now pushed to some point in “the next few weeks.” But don’t worry, the delays and lack of information about the new deadline or pricing are just due to “an immense amount of enthusiasm for the upcoming changes with Twitter API.” - Ivan Mehta/ TechCrunch,  Lauren Leffer/ Gizmodo, Heidi Ledford/ Nature, Chris Stokel-Walker/ Wired
  • Elon Musk ordered changes to prioritize his tweets in all user timelines following the Super Bowl when the Twitter CEO’s (since deleted) tweet had lower engagement than President Joe Biden’s. - Casey Newton/ Platformer, Faiz Siddiqui, Jeremy Merrill/ The Washington Post
  • First it was the Taliban. Now it’s the Russians buying blue check marks which boost content and give a veneer of authority on Twitter. We’re shocked! - Joseph Menn/ The Washington Post  
  • Twitter will soon only provide SMS-based login authentication, or 2FA, for paid subscribers. While 2FA is the weakest form of multifactor authentication, it is also the most commonly used and significantly more secure than only using a password. - @ZoeSchiffer, Sean Hollister/ The Verge, Lily Hay Newman/ Wired
• Meta is introducing verification with a blue check mark displayed and higher visibility for posts. Déjà vu? - Emma Roth/ The Verge
• Facebook and Instagram are the first platforms to participate in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s “Take It Down” tool for people to submit non-consensual intimate photos or videos recorded of them when they were underage to be hashed and removed by participating platforms. - Antigone Davis/ Meta, Ginger Adams Otis/ The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Levine/ Forbes
• The European Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service banned TikTok on staff devices and personal devices with work-related apps, citing security concerns. - Emily Rauhala, Beatriz Ríos/ The Washington Post, Monika Pronczuk/ The New York Times, Stuart Lau, Laurens Cerulus/ Politico
• Companies including TikTok, Twitter, Meta, Pinterest, and Snapchat have confirmed they are VLOPs under the DSA and will need to comply with the strictest rules later this year. - Clothilde Goujard/ Politico
• Susan Wojcicki announced she’s stepping down as YouTube CEO in a massive blow to Evelyn’s “Wojcicki to the Hill” campaign. - Peter Kafka/ Vox
• A New York court blocked a state law requiring social media platforms to post policies on “hateful conduct.” - Eugene Volokh/ Reason
• Moderated Content Supreme Court correspondent (and director of Stanford’s Program of Platform Regulation) Daphne Keller was in the courtroom for oral arguments in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases. If you haven’t already, tune in for those episodes:
  • Tech Law SCOTUS Superbowl First Half: Gonzalez
  • Tech Law SCOTUS Superbowl Second Half: Taamneh

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!