Moderated Content

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 a...

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...

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...

SHOW NOTES Stanford’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 Coun...

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...

SHOW NOTES Stanford’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 urge...

SHOW NOTES Stanford’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/ newslaund...

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...

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 t...

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 Platf...