MC Weekly Update 1/30: No One Expects the Copyright Order

Jan 31, 2023

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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 mentioned that a bit earlier? - Rishi Iyengar/ Foreign Policy, Russell Brandom/ Rest of World, Internet Archive
Luckily, Twitter owner Elon Musk chimed in with a tweet reply that he hadn’t heard of the issue, adding “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.” - @elonmusk
Twitter reinstated Indian Hindu nationalist accounts previously suspended for hate speech against Muslims. - Newley Purnell/ The Wall Street Journal

Twitter Corner

A new Twitter Files thread on the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton 68 project, which tracked Russian influence operations on Twitter, illustrates the dashboard’s flawed methodology. That doesn’t change the fact that there was Russian interference during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. - @mtaibbi
Musk made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with House leadership to ensure that Twitter will be “fair to both parties.” We are sure there will be tons of transparency. - Tony Romm, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Adela Suliman/ The Washington Post
Twitter will allow anyone to appeal an account suspension, starting this Wednesday, February 1. - @TwitterSafety
And Twitter is re-suspending some of those accounts. White supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was suspended less than 24 hours after his account was reinstated. - Julia Shapero/ The Hill
In completely unrelated news, Twitter is being sued in Germany over failing to remove antisemitic hate speech. - Molly Killeen/ Euractiv, Aggi Cantrill, Karin Matussek/ Bloomberg News

TikTok Offensive

TikTok is going on the offensive with public engagements explaining its private negotiations with the U.S. government. Executives are briefing members of Congress, academics, and think tank researchers about Project Texas, the company’s plan to audit content recommendation systems and securely store and process U.S. user data in partnership with Oracle. - Cecilia Kang, Sapna Maheshwari, David McCabe/ The New York Times
Researchers briefed on TikTok’s proposal to continue operating in the U.S. said that a new subsidiary, TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. (USDS), will house all of its U.S. content moderation under the governance of an independent board that will report to the U.S. government (CFIUS) — not to ByteDance. Plans also call for TikTok’s source code and content recommendation systems to be audited by Oracle and a third-party inspector. - David Ingram/ NBC News, Matt Perault, Samm Sacks/ Lawfare (commentary)