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 p...

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...

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 verificat...

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...

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 ByteDa...

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...

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...

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 thos...

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.

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: A full-day House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter’s decision to temporarily block a New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop delivered on political theater, but failed to produce much new information or a “gotcha” moment from the former executives on the panel who agreed the de...

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...

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...

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 me...

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 Guardi...

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: A new study found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” - Gregory Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker/ Nature Commun...

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...

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 com...

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 it...

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 Wa...

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 inf...

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 kno...

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 al...