Scaling Laws

The attempted insurrection on January 6 is back in the headlines. This week, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot began its work with its very first hearing. So for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, Evelyn Douek interviewed Quinta Jurecic about social media’s role in warning of the riot. Specifically, they talked about an essay Quinta wrote in Lawfare on the FBI’s failure to examine social media posts announcing plans to storm the Capitol—and how FBI Director Christopher Wray’s explanations don’t hold water.So why does Quinta think Wray has been misleading in his answers to Congress on why the FBI didn’t review those posts from soon-to-be-rioters? What about the First Amendment issues raised by the U.S. government refreshing your Twitter feed? What role is social media playing in the Jan. 6 prosecutions—and what does that say about how tech companies should preserve online evidence of wrongdoing, rather than just taking it down? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're bringing you the breakdown of the heavyweight bout of the century—a battle over vaccine misinformation. In the left corner we have the White House. Known for its impressive arsenal and bully pulpit, this week it asked for the fight and came out swinging with claims that Facebook is a killer—and not in a good way. In the right corner we have Facebook, known for its ability to just keep taking punches while continuing to grace our screens and rake in the cash. The company has hit back with gusto, saying that Facebook has actually helped people learn the facts on vaccines. Period. Will either of them land a knockout blow? Is this just the first round of many match ups?On this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we devote the conversation to the latest slugfest between Facebook and the White House. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College, both of whom have been working on questions of online health misinformation. Let’s get ready to rumble. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companies, predictably, sued—and on June 30, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction against the law.The legislation, which purported to end “censorship” online by “big tech,” received a lot of commentary and a great deal of mockery from academics and journalists. Among other things, it included an exemption for companies that operate theme parks. But Alan Rozenshtein argues in a piece for Lawfare that though the law may be poorly written, the issues raised by the litigation are worth taking seriously. This week on our Arbiters of Truth miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alan—an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a senior editor at Lawfare—about the Florida legislation.What exactly would the law have done, anyway? Why does Alan think the judge underplays the potential First Amendment considerations raised by private companies exerting control over huge swaths of the online public sphere? And what’s with the theme park stuff? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The news business in America is in crisis. Between 2008 and 2019, newspapers in the U.S. lost half of their newsroom employees. Journalism jobs cut during the pandemic number in the tens of thousands. Local news is suffering the most, with cutbacks across the country and many communities left without a reliable source of information for what’s going on in their area.Why is this a crisis not just for journalists, but also for democracy?In today’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic turn to that question with Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School. She’s written a new book, titled “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Protect Freedom of Speech.” How should we understand the crisis facing American newsrooms? How has the U.S. government historically used its power to create a hospitable environment for news--and how should that history shape our understanding of what interventions are possible today? And what role does the First Amendment play in all this? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic bring you an episode they’ve wanted to record for a while: a conversation with Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Facebook. He runs the corner of Facebook that focuses on identifying and tackling threats aimed at the platform, including information operations.They discussed a new report released by Nathaniel’s team on “The State of Influence Operations 2017-2020.” What kinds of trends is Facebook seeing? What is Nathaniel’s response to reports that Facebook is slower to act in taking down dangerous content outside the U.S.? What about the argument that Facebook is designed to encourage circulation of exactly the kind of incendiary content that Nathaniel is trying to get rid of?And, of course, they argued over Facebook’s use of the term “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to describe what Nathaniel argues is a particularly troubling type of influence operation. How does Facebook define it? Does it mean what you think it means? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Camille François, the chief innovation officer at Graphika, about a new report released by her team earlier this month on an apparent Russian influence operation aimed at so-called “alt-tech” platforms, like Gab and Parler. A group linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency “troll farm” has been posting far-right memes and content on these platforms over the last year. But how effective has their effort really been? What does the relatively small scale of the operation tell us about how foreign interference has changed in the last four years? Has the media’s—and the public’s—understanding of information operations caught up to that changing picture?One note: Camille references the “ABC framework” for understanding information operations. That’s referring to a framework she developed where operations can be understood along three vectors: manipulative actors, deceptive behavior and harmful content. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TikTok has rapidly become one of the most popular apps for teenagers across the world for dancing, lip-syncing and sharing details about their lives. But if you cast your mind back to last year—specifically, August 2020—you may recall that the app’s future in the United States suddenly fell into doubt. The Trump administration began arguing that the app’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance raised problems of national security for the United States. ByteDance was ordered to divest from TikTok, and the app, along with the popular China-based chat app WeChat, faced U.S. sanctions.But you might have noticed that your teenager is still making TikTok videos. And President Biden issued his own executive order last week revoking Trump’s sanctions. So, what on earth is happening?On this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and Charles I. Francis Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, about what’s happened to TikTok over the past year. Bobby brought us up to speed with the Trump administration’s offensive on TikTok, why the app has survived so far and why TikTok shouldn’t breathe easy just yet about Biden’s executive order. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on the platform’s decision to ban President Trump’s account. The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off the platform, but criticized the slapdash way Facebook made that call and provided a long list of recommendations for Facebook to respond to.Well, now Facebook has responded—announcing that it will ban Trump from the platform for two years. And though the response hasn’t gotten as much coverage as the initial ruling, it’s arguably more important for what it says about both Facebook and the Facebook Oversight Board’s role in the future of content moderation.This week on the Lawfare Podcast's Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic interviewed Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz and Arbiters of Truth co-host Evelyn Douek about Facebook’s response to the board. What did Facebook say in addition to its two-year Trump ban? Why is Evelyn grumpy about it? And what’s next for Facebook, the Oversight Board and Trump himself? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Way back at the beginning of the Arbiters of Truth podcast series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited David Kaye to talk about international human rights law (IHRL) and content moderation. David is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and when he was first on the show, he was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression. It’s been a year and a half since then, and in the intervening time, David’s vision of IHRL as a guiding force for content moderation has become mainstream. So Quinta and Evelyn asked him back on to discuss the increasingly important role played by IHRL in content moderation—and what it really means in practice. They also talked about the rise of digital authoritarianism around the world and what international law and leading democracies can do about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In March 2019, a shooter carried out two mass killings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreaming the first shooting on Facebook. Two months later, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron convened the Christchurch Call—a commitment joined by both governments and technology companies “to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.”It’s now been two years since the Christchurch Call. To discuss those years and what comes next, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic of the Arbiters of Truth series of the Lawfare Podcast spoke with Dia Kayyali, who serves as a co-chair of the Advisory Network to the Christchurch Call, a group of civil society organizations that work to ensure that the signatories to the Call consider a more diverse range of expertise and perspectives when implementing its commitments. Dia is a long-time digital rights activist and the associate director for advocacy at Mnemonic, an organization that works to preserve online documentation of human rights abuses. What has their experience been like as a voice for civil society in these conversations around the Call? What should we make of the recent decision by the Biden administration to sign the United States on to the call? And what are the risks of potentially over-aggressive moderation in an effort to take down “terrorist” content? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.