Scaling Laws

Almost immediately since he was banned from Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, Donald Trump has been promising the launch of a new, Trump-run platform to share his thoughts with the world. In February 2022, that network—Truth Social—finally launched. But it’s been a debacle from start to finish, with a lengthy waitlist and a glitchy website that awaits users who finally make it online.  Dr...

Over the last several weeks, Russian aggression toward Ukraine has escalated dramatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Russia would recognize the sovereignty of two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, Donetsk and Luhansk, whose years-long effort to secede from Ukraine has been engineered by Russia. Russian troops have entered eastern Ukraine as supposed “peacekeeper...

Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company acquired CrowdTangle, a startup designed to provide insight into what content is performing well on Facebook and Instagram, and he left in October 2021, in the midst of a debate over how much information the company should make public about its plat...

The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the most popular podcast in the world—and it’s been at the center of a weeks-long controversy over COVID misinformation and content moderation. After Rogan invited on a guest who told falsehoods about the safety of COVID vaccines, outrage mounted toward Spotify, the podcasting and music streaming company that recently signed an exclusive deal with Rogan to...

We talk a lot on this show about the responsibility of major tech platforms when it comes to content moderation. But what about problems the platforms can’t—or won’t—fix? Tracy Chou’s solution involves going around platforms entirely and creating tools that give power back to users to control their own experience. She’s the engineer behind  Block Party , an app that allows Twitter users...

As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened. This week on...

In December 2020, ten state attorneys general  sued Google , alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The lawsuit is ongoing, and just this January, new allegations in the states’ complaint were freshly unsealed: the states have  accused  Google of tinkering with its ad auctions to mislead publishers and advertisers and expand its own pow...

Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published an  analysis  of how popular podcasters on the American right used their shows to spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. These are the same issues that led tech platforms to crack down on misinformation in the runup to the election—and yet, the question...

One year ago, a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power as the president of the United States. The internet played a central role in the insurrection: Trump used Twitter to broadcast his falsehoods about the integrity of the election and gin up excitement over January 6, and rioter...

In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the  Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation —a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential...

On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. The  Platform Accountability and Transparency Act , sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process...

We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day,  someone  has to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with  “The Decider” —Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-chee...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with some of the people behind the app that, by this point in the pandemic, you’re probably sick of: Zoom. Quinta and Evelyn sat down with Josh Kallmer, Zoom’s head of global public policy and government relations, and Josh Parecki, Zoom’s associate general counsel and head of trus...

For Thanksgiving, we’re bringing you something a little different—an episode of Rational Security, our light, conversational show about national security and related topics. This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest, Quinta's co-host of the Arbiters of Truth series on the  Lawfare  podcast feed  Evelyn Douek ! They sat down to discuss: —“Getting Rittenhoused”: A...

It’s been roughly a year since the Facebook Oversight Board opened its doors for business—and while you may mostly remember the Board from its decision on Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, but there’s been a lot going on since then. So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment in platform governance is faring. In October, the Board released its  first transparenc...

Content moderation in video games turns out to be just as much of a bummer as content moderation everywhere else, perhaps even more so. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Daniel Kelley, the director of strategy and operations for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society. He studies how com...

There’s been a lot of news recently about Facebook, and a lot of that news has focused on the frustration of employees assigned to the platform’s civic integrity team or other corners of the company focused on ensuring user trust and safety. If you read reporting on the documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, you’ll see again and again how these Facebook employees raised concern...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we’re talking about a subject that doesn’t come up much on the  Lawfare Podcast : the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has made waves with her congressional testimony and the many damaging news stories being reported about Facebook based on the documents she released. But b...

On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Pickles, Twitter's senior director for global public policy strategy, development and partnerships. They discussed a new paper just released by Twitter, “ Protecting the Open Internet: Regulatory Principles for Policy Makers ”—which sketches out, in broa...

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress has set in motion a renewed cycle of outrage over the company’s practices—and a renewed round of discussion around what, if anything, Congress should do to rein Facebook in. But how workable are these proposals, really? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jur...

In the last few weeks, the Russian government has been turning up the heat on tech platforms in an escalation of its long-standing efforts to bring the internet under its control. First, Russia forced Apple and Google to  remove an app  from their app stores that would have helped voters select non-Kremlin-backed candidates in the country’s recent parliamentary elections. Then, the gover...

Just two days ago, on September 28, CNN  announced  that it was turning off access to its Facebook pages in Australia. Why would the network cut off Facebook users Down Under? It’s not a protest of Facebook or… Australians. CNN’s move was prompted by a  recent ruling  by the High Court of Australia in  Fairfax Media and Voller ,  which held that media companies can be...

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. We’ll be talking about “ The Facebook Files ”—a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal about Facebook’s failures to mitigate harms on its platform. There’s a lot of critical reporting about Facebook out there, but what makes the Journal’s series different is that it’s based on docu...

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. In a 2018 Senate hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question about how his company makes money with a line that quickly became famous: “Senator, we sell ads.” And indeed, when you open up your Facebook page—or most other pages on the internet—you’ll find advertisements...

Let’s say you’re a freedom-loving American fed up with Big Tech’s effort to censor your posts. Where can you take your business? One option is Parler—the social media platform that became notorious for its use by the Capitol rioters. Another is Gettr—a new site started by former Trump aide Jason Miller. Unfortunately, both platforms have problems. They don’t work very well. They might leak your pe...