Techdirt

Even among people who recognize the problems with holding platforms liable for user speech, there's an understandable temptation to treat the act of content amplification and recommendation differently, since that's something the platforms do themselves. While you can see the logic to this idea, the fact is it's just as difficult and fraught with problems as other intermediary liability proposals. This week, we're joined by frequent guest Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, to discuss her recent paper on the subject and why regulating amplification isn't the simple solution it might sound like. "Amplification and Its Discontents" by Daphne Keller: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-discontents Separately, this is the first time we've had a sponsor for the podcast! The Pessimists Aloud podcast is sponsoring today's episode. It's a new offering from the Pessimists Archive Twitter feed, which finds old articles that are skeptical of technology, which in retrospect turned out to be incorrect. The podcast takes those articles and has them artistically read (in an old-timey voice) aloud. We think fans of Techdirt will certainly enjoy the Pessimists Aloud podcast: https://anchor.fm/pessimistsaloud

It's no secret that the tech industry has lost much of the diversity that was present in its early days and grown into a male-dominated field rife with sexism and gender disparity. Today, many people are work to change this — and one such effort is the GirlCon, which is holding its fourth annual conference for women in tech from June 27th to 30th this year. On this week's episode, we're joined by GirlCon co-founder Kyla Guru and co-director Vidya Bharadwaj to discuss this year's event and the ongoing fight to empower the next generation of women in tech.

Earlier today, we announced the release of an open source playkit for Money City, our new game about the future of money that was designed and run for MozFest 2021. For this week's episode of the podcast, Mike is joined by two of the people who commissioned the game — Erika Drushka and Chris Lawrence from Grant For The Web — as well as our game design partner, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, to talk more about Money City and using games to explore serious topics and generate useful ideas. Money City Playkit: https://copia.is/projects/money-city/ Copia Gaming: https://copia.is/gaming/

The recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline has brought renewed public attention to cybersecurity issues. The field is always evolving, and the attack serves as a great starting point for understanding the current state of cybersecurity, so this week we're joined by three experts — Ross Nordurft and Alex Botting from Venable LLP, and Amy Mahn from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — to discuss the lessons from the pipeline attack, and how to take a risk management approach to cybersecurity.

It's no secret that we were not at all impressed with WIRED's recent cover story about Section 230. The resulting conversation sparked a Twitter debate with the story's author, Gilad Edelman, and we thought... why not bring it to the podcast? So on this week's episode, Gilad joins Mike to discuss and debate the story, our response, and Section 230.

Last week, the Oversight Board made its highest-profile decision yet: upholding Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump, though with the caveat that it needs clearer policy reasons to make the suspension indefinite. Unsurprisingly, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions on this, and we wanted to learn more about the decision from the source. Julie Owono is an Oversight Board member and the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières, and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss how this decision was reached and what it means for Facebook.

The past several years have done a lot to expose the failings of the "marketplace of ideas", as disinformation and harassment campaigns have shown an ability to spread and flourish despite ample amounts of counterspeech. This triumph of mob behavior, especially on Twitter, has challenged a lot of people's preconceptions about how free speech functions, and one person who has been exploring these issues is FIRE's Sarah McLaughlin, especially in two topical articles on her Substack. She joins us on this week's episode to discuss Twitter, free speech, and the challenge mob behavior presents to online discourse.

The way a lot of people talk about content moderation is disappointingly uncreative — most of all in the way they boil every decision down to the binary decision of "leave it up or take it down". But this framework is extremely limiting and doesn't reflect the way content moderation professionals work, and one person working to paint a better picture is Santa Clara Law Professor Eric Goldman. He joins us on this week episode to discuss the many different ways to approach difficult content moderation questions.

After a few cross-post episodes, we're back with a brand new conversation, and it's all about a big subject that intersects with the majority of what we cover here at Techdirt: rights. In his book How Rights Went Wrong, Columbia Law professor and Constitutional scholar Jamal Greene proposes a new way of thinking about rights and how they interact, and he joins this week's episode to discuss this paradigm-shifting idea that challenges many preconceptions about the subject.

It's one more podcast cross-post this week! A recent episode of the Institute for Justice's Short Circuit podcast dug into two very interesting legal cases: one that explores one of the more rarely-invoked pieces of Section 230, and another that tests the limits of the Fourth Amendment. Mike joined IJ attorney Josh Windham and host Anthony Sanders to discuss the cases themselves and what they mean for the law, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.