Techdirt

The podcast explores the need for open source trust and safety tools for smaller websites. It discusses the emergence and benefits of open source solutions and the challenges they face. Content moderation, measurement, and transparency in trust and safety infrastructure are also discussed. The role of open source tools in trust and safety is explored, including existing tools and funding sources. The potential of decentralized trust and safety tooling is also examined.

We've got a slightly unusual (at first glace) crosspost episode for you this week! Recently, Mike joined Dave Cooper, CEO and Founder of brand protection agency IPSecure, on the company's Owning The Buy Box podcast. As you probably know, we're pretty skeptical of brand protection companies here at Techdirt, but Dave has a history of heeding our criticisms and being thoughtful about policy and court rulings, enabling an interesting and insightful discussion about a recent legal decision and the brand protection space as a whole.

Earlier this year, we had an episode looking at Canada's proposed social media link tax and the many ways it would be terrible. Since then, that link tax has become law (though not yet come into effect), and unsurprisingly proven that the dire predictions were correct. Also since then, the Cato Institute's Paul Matzko published an excellent paper on link taxes in general, and Paul joins us on this week's episode to discuss the many reasons that a link tax won't save the newspaper industry. Read the paper: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/link-tax-wont-save-newspaper-industry Listen to our previous episode on Canada's link tax: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/04/techdirt-podcast-episode-349-link-taxes-are-bad-canada-edition/

We've got a another cross-post episode for you this week, on a subject near and dear to our hearts: protocols over platforms, and restoring decentralization online. Mike recently joined Danny O'Brien on the DWeb Decoded podcast to talk all about these topics, as well as tell a little story about Danny's role in the founding of Techdirt, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

Social media isn't the first phenomenon to spark a moral panic about its impact on people's (and especially young people's) mental health, and it surely won't be the last — but for now, it's the star of the show. A lot of people will gladly latch on to, and casually misrepresent, any research that might strengthen their belief in social media's harms. But that doesn't mean there are no harms: it's just that good research needs to account for the complexity of the subject and social media's myriad impacts, good and bad. One person doing such research is Professor Andy Przybylski from the University of Oxford, who joins us on this week's episode for a more detailed and meaningful discussion about social media and mental health.

If you didn't know who Gigi Sohn was before her stalled-out FCC nomination and the ridiculous smear campaign that came with it, you surely do by now. And if you read Techdirt, you know she's one of the most experienced and passionate experts around when it comes to broadband. This week, she returns to the podcast after quite some time to discuss her new role at the American Association for Public Broadband and the fight for more community-owned broadband in the US.

As you may recall, we weren't fans of The Social Dilemma, the documentary manipulated people with misinformation in the course of complaining about that exact practice. But now there's a much better and more interesting documentary in the space, and one that's worth your time: The YouTube Effect by Alex Winter. It takes a deep dive into the good and the bad of YouTube, and grapples with the fact that it has helped radicalize a lot of people. This week, Alex joins Mike (who still contests some of the points in the movie) on the podcast to discuss (and debate) the documentary and the role of YouTube in our culture. Watch The YouTube Effect: https://www.yteffect.com/

We've long believed in the power of online platform interoperability and the power it gives to users to curate their own experiences. One of the prime examples of this is Block Party, created by Tracy Chou, which has had to suspend its operations following ExTwitter's API changes. Tracy joined us on the podcast once before to discuss Block Party, and now she's back to talk about her new service, Privacy Party, as well as the broader topic of platform interoperability and whether it could be mandated with regulations.

Okay, now we're getting back to the plan. Two weeks ago we featured an excerpt from the audiobook of Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow's new (and excellent) novel, and promised that we'd soon be joined by Cory himself. And now, we deliver! Listen to this week's episode for a long and far-reaching conversation between Mike and Cory about the book and it's themes and subjects, plus plenty of interesting tangents. Red Team Blues: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/redteamblues

Last week, we promised an upcoming episode featuring a conversation with Cory Doctorow — and that conversation has been recorded and is arriving next week! But we decided to take a brief intermission this week, since things in the social media landscape are changing so quickly. Mike recently appeared on The Neoliberal Podcast with Jeremiah Johnson to talk about the ongoing nonsense at Twitter, the dawn of Meta's Threads, the situation at Reddit, and all the other chaos engulfing the world of social media. You can listen to the entire conversation right here on this week's episode. The Neoliberal Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/social-media-in-chaos-ft-mike-masnick/id1390384827?i=1000621423264