Alex and Evelyn talk about what has been happening on social media, and the discourse about what has been happening on social media, in the run up to the 2024 US Election, how it compares to past US elections, and what to watch in the aftermath.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos

Alex and Evelyn sit down with New York Times technology reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger to talk about their new book on Elon Musk's acquisition (and destruction) of Twitter, Character Limit, and where they think Musk goes from here.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos, Ryan Mac, Kate Conger

Alex and Evelyn repeat the now-annual tradition of recording the podcast in front of probably their entire active listener base. They are joined by David Thiel, Brian Fishman, and Daphne Keller, to say goodbye to Theirry Breton and RT's accounts on Meta, talk about Zuckerberg's retreat from politics, and all the developments in the land of the Firs…

Alex and Evelyn are joined by Carlos Affonso Souza, a Professor of Law at Rio de Janeiro State University and the Director of the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro, to talk about Brazil's ban of X, the local legal and political context, and how this is similar or different to other show downs between regulators and American tech …

Alex and Evelyn discuss the arrest and charges against Telegram's CEO, Pavel Durov, in France, what we do and don't know, and what it means for the future of platform regulation, with Frédérick Douzet, Professor at the French Institute of Politics and the director of GEODE, and Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanfo…

Alex and Evelyn talk about Trump's return to X and other platforms, Thierry Breton's attempt to make it all about him, the hack and leak of Trump's campaign, the FBI's new rules around communicating with platforms about foreign interference, Apple imposing its 30% commission on Patreon, and a small little sporting event that happened recently.…

Evelyn sat down with Professor Genevieve Lakier, of the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the Supreme Court's decision regarding the Texas and Florida social media laws. Not the worst opinion the Supreme Court issued on July 1, but predictably there's a lot to complain about anyway.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Genevieve Lakier

The Supreme Court's decision in Murthy v. Missouri is finally here! Evelyn sat down with Professor Genevieve Lakier, of the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the good, bad and ugly of the opinions.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Genevieve Lakier

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: The attention grabbing 404 Media headline “Has Facebook Stopped Trying?” could be on to something. Alex discusses significant disinvestment in trust and safety at Facebook with lots of junk spreading (such as AI-generated Shrimp Jesus) and …

Alex and Evelyn sit down with the authors of two recently released books about our online information ecosystem and what to do about it: Annalee Newitz, author of Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and Renee DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: OpenAI published its first transparency report on covert influence operations using the company’s AI models finding the tools were used for existing campaigns by Russia, China, Iran and Israel with limited reach. - Ina Fried/ Axios, OpenAI …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: TikTok Tick-Tock A law requiring TikTok parent company ByteDance to divest or face a U.S. ban was passed and signed into law as part of a foreign aid and national security funding package. - Casey Newton/ Platformer, Rebecca Kern/ Politico,…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Shelby Grossman to discuss SIO’s just-released report on the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Online Child Safety Ecosystem. Read the report here. SIO is also calling for presentation proposals for its annual Trust and Safety Research Conference. Proposals are due …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by University of Washington professor Kate Starbird to discuss research on election rumors. Kate Starbird is an associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering where she is also a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. - Univers…

SHOW NOTES Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: X this week had its lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate thrown out by a Californian district court. It’s a good and important win for free speech. - Emma Roth / The Verge A Kremlin-linked group was spreading di…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek is joined by Professor Genevieve Lakier of the University of Chicago Law School to discuss the Supreme Court oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri. For one of their previous conversations on this topic, listen to this episode from September last year talking about the 5th Circuit’s decision in the case. They also discuss Stan…

Alex and Evelyn discuss the latest bill to ban TikTok and its many flaws; the Gemini image-generation public relations crisis; Apple's fight-picking in Europe; and Texas and Florida's latest great attempts to regulate online speech.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos

Alex and Evelyn are joined by Moderated Content's Supreme Court correspondent Daphne Keller to talk about the oral argument in the NetChoice cases this week and what the Supreme Court justices seem to be thinking about whether and how states can regulate internet platforms.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos, Daphne Keller

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Is the deepfake apocalypse finally here? Alex and Evelyn discuss the recent robocalls impersonating President Biden ahead of the New Hampshire primary and sexually explicit fake images of Taylor Swift that spread on X, resulting in the plat…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos talk to Riana Pfefferkorn and David Thiel of the Stanford Internet Observatory about the technical and legal challenges of addressing computer-generated child sexual abuse material. They mention: Riana’s new paper on the topic, “Addressing Computer-Generated Child Sex Abuse Imagery: Legal Framework and Policy…

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 P…

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 Stanfor…

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 h…

Alex and Evelyn discuss US military information operations, Threads testing ActivityPub integration, ridiculous statistics about TikTok, YouTube Magic Dust, the Meta Oversight Board moving with all deliberate speed, and First Amendment retaliation claims.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos

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 - Li…

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 a…

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/ T…

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 priv…

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…

Alex and Evelyn talk to Brian Fishman, the former Policy Director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations at Facebook/Meta, about the history of terrorism online, the challenges for platforms moderating terrorism, and the bad incentives created by misguided political pressure (looking at you, EU).…

Alex and Evelyn discuss how the horrific events in Israel over the weekend make clear how important social media is during fast-moving historical events, and how X/Twitter has fundamentally degraded as a source of information. They also discuss China's ramped up crack down on app stores, and the Supreme Court's cert grant in the Netchoice cases, th…

Alex and Evelyn record an episode in front of probably their entire active listener base. They talk about an update on SIO's investigations into child sexual abuse material on platforms; the fight for free speech in India; the poor outlook for election integrity at X in 2024, and what this might mean for other platforms; platform transparency manda…

Alex and Evelyn discuss reporting on a proposed deal between TikTok and the US government for it to continue to operate in the country, and the broader geopolitical context of US-China relations; how to think about search-term blocking; YouTube preventing Russell Brand from monetizing his videos on its platform; the Musk stories from the week that …

Evelyn sits down with Genevieve Lakier, a Professor at University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden, narrowing but affirming a district court injunction prohibiting large parts of the federal government from communicating with platforms about content moderation.…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: OpenAI published a blog promoting how the company’s most powerful large language model, GPT-4, is being used to update platform policy and enforce content moderation rules faster and more consistently than human reviewers. - Priya Anand/ Bl…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: X-Twitter Corner Twitter followed through on its threat to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The rationale has changed from a violation of the Lanham Act, a federal trademark statute, to a breach of contract and violations …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments. They’re joined this week by NYU’s Joshua Tucker and Stanford’s Jennifer Pan to discuss new studies released from an academic research partnership with Meta on the 2020 U.S. election. The X Files Elon Musk reinstated an account that posted c…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: ActivityPub Hub A new Stanford Internet Observatory report by David Thiel and Renée DiResta found a significant issue with child abuse content in the largest decentralized social media communities that make up the Fediverse. They argue that…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Threads v. Twitter Instagram’s Twitter competitor Threads is the fastest downloaded app, boasting more than 100 million users within five days despite pretty basic features. - Jay Peters, Jon Porter/ The Verge Instagram head Adam Mosseri sa…

On July 4, a district court issued an injunction prohibiting large swathes of the government from communicating with platforms about content moderation in almost any way. Evelyn sits down with Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, to talk about the opinion, the issue of government "jawboning" of platforms, and …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Twitter Corner Twitter continues to break its product, this time by limiting how many tweets people can see and requiring people to log in to view anything. Advertisers must be thrilled! - Aisha Counts/ Bloomberg News, Ashley Capoot/ CNBC, …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: A new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Thorn, a nonprofit working to counter online child sexual exploitation, examines the problem of increasingly realistic images generated with freely available tools to create sexual abu…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Elon Musk’s drastic layoffs, cost saving, and price raising measures were an inspiration for him as some of the most active users of his site went on strike, taking some of the largest subreddit forums private …

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos are joined by Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) Research Manager Renée DiResta and Chief Technologist David Thiel to discuss a new report on a months-long investigation into the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online. Large Networks of Minors Appear to be Selling Illicit Sexual Content Onli…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Stanford Internet Observatory research discovered serious failings with Twitter’s detection and removal systems for child abuse content. - Alexa Corse/ The Wall Street Journal, @stanfordio Twitter Corner In another welcome gift on Twitter C…

Alex and Evelyn discuss the Supreme Court decisions in Gonzalez and Taamneh; Montana passing its state-wide TikTok ban and the immediate legal challenge filed against it; Meta's $1.3 billion dollar fine under the GDPR; OpenAI's charm offensive; and just another Monday at Twitter.بقلم Evelyn Douek, Alex Stamos

Play the sad trombone 5 times for this week's Twitter Corner: Musk censors political content at the behest of the Turkish Government in the final days of a close and historically important election; Linda Yaccarino is announced as the new CEO; Tucker Carlson announces he's going to stream his new show to Twitter; the platform announces not-so-encry…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Pornhub and other pornography websites owned by MindGeek are blocking access for users in Utah with a video message protesting an age verification law that went into effect this past week. - Brian Fung/ CNN, Jonathan Edwards/ The Washington…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Twitter Corner As we predicted, Musk is complying with more government take-down orders than Twitter used to. - Russell Brandom/ Rest of World Don't expect more reporting though, Twitter has stopped sharing takedown orders with Lumen, which…

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments: Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn joins the show to discuss the latest developments in child safety policy on Capitol Hill. The EARN IT Act and STOP CSAM Act were officially introduced with civil liberties and…