Who Controls Online Speech?

Nov 30, 2021

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The bots that try to moderate speech online are doing a terrible job, and the humans in charge of the biggest tech companies aren’t doing any better. The internet’s promise was as a space where everyone could have their say. But today, just a few platforms get to decide what billions of people see and say online.

What’s a better way forward? How can we get back to a world where communities and people decide what’s best for content moderation, rather than tech billionaires or government dictates?

Join Daphne Keller, from Stanford’s Centre for the Internet and Society, in conversation with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien about a better way to moderate speech online.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod103 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

— Why giant platforms do a poor job of moderating content

—What competitive compatibility (ComCom) is, and how it’s a vital part of the solution to our content moderation puzzle

— Why machine learning algorithms won’t be able to figure out who or what a “terrorist” is, and who it’s likely to catch instead

— What is the debate over “amplification” of speech, and is it any different than our debate over speech itself?

—Why international voices need to be included in discussion about content moderation—and the problems that occur when they’re not

—How we could shift towards “bottom-up” content moderation rather than a concentration of power

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators :