YouSaid · the spoken record

Daphne Keller

lines on the record: 65
first: 2021-01-12
most recent: 2021-01-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Honestly, I would hope that it involves sitting down and thinking about what is a competition question and what are the legal competition tools to respond? What's a privacy question and what are the legal privacy tools like say federal privacy legislation that might respond to that? And what is a question about speech and CDA 230? Because recently we've seen CDA 230 has all this name recognition and interest and so people propose laws to change it in order to solve problems that are really about privacy or really about competition. And so I hope we'll see more care about that. I'm going to declare myself an optimist on that even though the events of the last year may or may not support optimism.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At all. I think there are a lot of difficult legal questions that we should never ask platforms to decide, like whether a news report about a politician is defamation. I want a court on that. I do not want Facebook's trust and safety team to have to decide things like that.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a good question. Everybody wants to know. And this was already an object of great speculation before the insurrection and the invasion of the Capitol building last week. And so how that changes things is also a very big question. You know, I am hoping that we will see more careful and responsible proposals from Democrats, things that are more like the Pact Act, which came from a bipartisan act from Senator Schotz and Thun that do use courts and that do have processes and that don't just assign platforms responsibility for getting things right under vague standards like reasonableness and under the threat of getting in lots of trouble if they don't meet these unclear standards. I hope we don't have that. I hope we do have real clarity about what platforms are and are not supposed to do to the extent that we have changes.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cleared a big legislative hurdle this week. Both of those laws have an idea that platforms are going to use automation to identify which speech is legal and which speech is illegal. And there is definitely no automation that can do that. You know, those laws garnered letters from UN human rights officials, from civil society organizations, from coalitions of retired judges, just all kinds of people saying hold the presses. You can't take the kind of legal decision that we rely on courts to do with respect for constitutional rights or fundamental rights. You can't take those decisions and assign them to a machine because the machines can't tell the difference between a video used in ISIS recruitment and the same video used in news reporting or counter speech or academic research. And that's a huge”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is getting better than it was as a technical matter. It still has massive problems. When the big platforms had to send a lot of their content moderators home because of COVID and resort to using automated filters more, they were thankfully pretty public about it. And also fairly public about saying, hey, a lot more mistakes happened as a consequence. You know, the automation does not do as good a job as the humans do. And people like activists on the ground in Tunisia who had their Facebook accounts cut off definitely think that they were victims of this kind of automated moderation mistake. Nonetheless, we see in the new European copyright directive and also in their very frightening terrorist content regulation, which just”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Is it necessary for people to do the work? I mean, Facebook itself talks about algorithmic moderation a lot. There is an awful lot of algorithmic copyright moderation in the world, content idea, YouTube. There's also just a lot of false positives. There's a lot of gray area. Is the sort of let the computer do it side of the equation getting meaningfully better in a way that it can actually scale?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Says overly sexual content, for example. I worry, if we did get to this world of lots of outsourced moderation, I worry about that being a force for homogeneity. You know, it's much easier to hire a vendor to do your content moderation if you just go ahead and use the same rules Facebook does. And I would much rather have an internet with a great diversity of different platforms with different speech policies for different functions so that, you know, if I want raunchy speech, I can go to ranchispeach.com and get that set of rules. And if I want kid appropriate speech, I go somewhere else. And if I want speech that's just for dog lovers and you can't talk.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really good question, and I actually think what has happened is we saw that develop and then contract a little bit. There's some firms that, you know, went into this as kind of maybe as a sideline to consulting or things like that, and then discovered it's hard. And not all of them are necessarily doing it anymore. I mean, I think as a kind of game theory economic prediction, it makes sense that those outsourced vendors should emerge. But there are a lot of problems that come with that. One is the sort of labor and workplace conditions issues that you were flagging before, especially for people who are working in Bangalore or Manila doing this work. Another is it's harder for platforms to define and enforce really consistent policies when they're being enforced by kind of scattered teams all over the globe with different understandings of, you know, what counts.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To run a meaningful competitor to Facebook, you need to run a trust and safety and policy and a moderation team at Facebook scale. Mark Zuckerberg is very fond of saying, more people work in trust and safety at Facebook than work on Instagram. Is that, I think your colleague Alex Thamos has said eventually there's going to be an ecosystem of firms providing trust and safety services. You're going to be able to outsource it just like you can outsource payment systems or whatever. Have you seen that developing? Is that a necessary precondition to competition”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what they're supposed to do. You know, we'll know what a company with 30,000 moderators is supposed to do. But in terms of setting precedent that anyone smaller could possibly comply with or possibly use to know kind of from in the first instance what they're supposed to do, I don't think we will get to something useful. And I think there's a dangerous misunderstanding in Congress about the idea that we will get to clarity somehow relatively quickly and relatively cheaply if CDA 230 goes away. And I think that's fed in part by people thinking that the First Amendment will require an outcome so similar to CDA 230 that will just quickly arrive at something like the status quo today. And while I think the First Amendment does put limits on what liability we can put on platforms, like very meaningful limits, that is not some simple answer that we will arrive at quickly.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That lawsuit. The false accusation problem that I mentioned before, where you get things like the government of Ecuador using bogus copyright claims to take down police brutality videos and critical journalism, or you get things like scientists whose work has been disproven taking down the online evidence of that or competitors trying to knock their competition out of Google Web Search so that they get more business, like all these false accusations will succeed much, much more. You'll have a problem the Supreme Court is called the Heckler's veto problem. So I think both of those things happen right off the bat. And then in terms of, well, won't we litigate and get to some clarity? I think the big platforms that can afford to litigate a bunch of cases and have a long-term interest in getting to an outcome will litigate.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the first thing that would happen in that scenario is that a bunch of small platforms would just shut down because they cannot afford that kind of litigation. And I'm thinking here of like your preschool's blog where parents can post comments, a local newspaper that has comment sections, a retailer that lets users post reviews of sweaters or, you know, hardware. You know, there's just this broad swath of companies or private or, you know, they don't necessarily have to be for profit, but entities that are very small that depend on 230 or whose primary business is something else and they would cut off the user speech portion of what they do. A second thing that would happen is that among small companies whoever survives would be very much incentivized to just take things down to avoid.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professional standards about what kind of support they should get, what the promotion criteria should look like, what is the expertise you need to do this work. So there's more and more attention to it. And I think a growing body of resources, but not nearly enough understanding on Capitol Hill.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So occasionally they are considered in Germany's NetzDG law, for example, part of the requirement is disclosure about the working conditions and the psychological support services available to people doing content moderation. In the U.S., I think lawmakers are pretty blind to that issue. I think There are so many things we need to get more sophisticated about and that's absolutely one of them. There's an organization, and I'm an advisor to them that I should disclose, the Trust and Safety Professionals Association, TSPA, that's been around for maybe a year now, that has some great senior people who worked in content moderation for years running it. And their goal is precisely this, is to be a resource for the people doing the work to help identify.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I always think about in the context of, okay, we've established a process that's transparent. Now we're going to do the work is, well, there are actual human beings that have to do the work. And at Verge, we've covered extensively the impact that the work has on the actual human beings. It gives them PTSD that causes other mental health issues. They're not paid enough. Where in the world of content moderation debate do those workers actually lie? Are they considered? Are they because it basically we're saying we want you to moderate better? But another way of saying that.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Response to those things. But I also think bigger picture looking at other pressures on them for content moderation. If the ask is for process and transparency, like in the Santa Clara principles, then there's a clear path forward to getting better. If the ask is set the right content policies, take down the bad stuff, and leave up the good stuff, there's no public consensus on what stuff is bad and what stuff is good. And so there's no way to measure, you know, when they've arrived at the right thing because a huge chunk of the population will always disagree with whatever it is that they arrive at.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think some of it is gradually taking hold. For example, the Santa Clara principles, which is a civil society effort, their ask is for notice, numbers, and appeals. So they want users to get notice when their content has been taken down. They want public transparency about the number of things taken down and under which policies and how many were appealed. And then the third demand is appeals for users to be able to challenge a takedown and get it reviewed by somebody other than the person who initially took it down. If you look at what big platforms like, you know, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have been doing, they are incrementally getting better on all of those fronts. They're far from perfect. There's plenty more to ask for. And I think smaller platforms are also incrementally getting better. So I think there is motion in.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thus is the story of America. So there's a sort of collectivized advertising industry approach to regulating the industry, but there are content moderation policy boards, groups of academics. There is the Facebook Oversight Board. There was a group, there was a convention Santa Clara that proposed something called the Santa Clara Principles for Moderation around transparency and stuff. Why hasn't that stuff taken hold, right? In the way that like the IAB, the Internet Advertiser Board literally is like, here are the standard sizes for banner ads and this is what we're doing. The whole industry works this way. Why hasn't that taken root on the content moderation side?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strings. But the other big source of power is countries that can threaten to levy huge fines or cut off access to lucrative markets. So governments and advertisers are my big two as sources of power over platforms, speech policies.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they do have that power. I mean, I think the YouTube apocalypse was real. This is when advertisers said, YouTube, if you don't change your policy on violent extremist speech, we're going to pull our accounts and you'll lose money. And YouTube changed its policies pretty much overnight in a way that was pretty clumsy because it is hard to get policy in this space right. And then a whole lot of independent filmmakers who were not violent extremists lost their revenue. And now there's this effort GARM is the acronym. It's an ads industry effort to in a more systemic way set policies for platforms that determine which kinds of content can get advertising revenue. I think at the end of the day I was going to say the greatest source of power over platforms is the advertisers because they control the purchase.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The advertisers have that power. I feel like we've lived through however many YouTube ad apocalypses, we live through the massive sleeping giants color of change pressure campaign on Facebook. The changes at best were minimal in the advertisers came right back.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That leaves us in a situation where we should worry about platform power and people do, but we should also worry a lot about who has leverage over platforms. Will they effectively take down what a foreign government wants them to take down, which definitely happens in the case of European demands and probably happens in many cases based on Chinese demands, you know, in ways that are not necessarily visible to us? I'm not saying that about the major platforms. Are they just doing what advertisers want? And, you know, is that how we want things to work? Do we want advertisers to ultimately be the ones driving online speech policy because they're the ones with leverage over platforms? So there's a deep question about whose power and whose speech preferences we're going to get in this world where we turn to platforms to set the rules.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we want them to do it anyway, then we are in a world of asking private, unaccountable power to decide what speech disappears. That's where we are. That's the trap that we're in. And some people, a lot of people in academia and civil society try to sort of get out of that trap by saying, well, let's make the private power more accountable. You know, let's have the Facebook oversight board look at 30 cases a year or whatever they're going to look at. Let's have more transparency. And those things are all good, but they're very weak compared to the kind of due process and accountability that we expect from actual laws. So, you know, we're kind of in a weird situation having huge public demand for platforms to take action and not having Congress be able to define in a democratically accountable way and a way with constitutional checks and balances what that action should be.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Hamstrong is a fair word for it. We're in a situation where most people would like platforms to take down speech that is legal, you know, to take down hate speech and extreme harassment that's barely legal, you know, all of this lawful but awful content that we talked about earlier. Certainly on the democratic side of the aisle, that seems to be what most members of Congress want. I think most Republicans do too. Like the Christchurch shooting video was a horrible piece of content, but it's legal to share in many cases. And yet there was just consensus, it appeared to me, that platforms should as a moral matter take it down. But if we want them to take down speech that is first amendment protected, we cannot use the law to dictate what they take down and how they take it down. The Constitution forbids that.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The enforcement mechanism because it's the only one we can trust because it's developed. And we don't spend a lot of time talking about what we want is for the government, the democratically elected government to make speech regulations because we don't really want Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to do it, but the government cannot. What is the best argument to get past it?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't help but feel like we are just talking about ways to overcome the First Amendment, right? What we want is for Congress to do something and they are hamstrung, maybe hamstrung is the wrong word, but they are limited in what they can do by the existence of the First Amendment, which grants an enormous amount of leeway to the platforms, which in this country we cherish, and which basically says the government can't do these things unless we find some other rationale, right? That is not really the issue for copyright. So you build an entire infrastructure of notice and takedown for copyright and there are the people who say that are on the margin are fair use determinations have some first.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Notice and take down all along for copyright and defamation and invasions of privacy and hate speech that's illegal there. And so their political discussion is talking about things like protections for speech and counter notice and penalties for bad faith accusations for all of those things and has been all along. The Digital Services Act package, which was introduced in December, which is a huge overhaul of EU law, is absolutely focused on those things.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to object. If the accusation that caused them to be silenced was sent in bad faith, which happens a lot, there's a great deal of abuse by notifiers in these systems, the person doing that can be penalized. So that's just built into the copyright discussion and has been for a long time. The people who come to this just from CDA 230 and don't have copyright experience tend to propose rules like, well, platforms should take things down if they know about it or they should be reasonable or, you know, standards that leave platforms completely unsure what to do when they receive an accusation like the one I mentioned, the Turkish politicians saying that news coverage was defaming him. So there's a ton that the 230 discussion should learn from copyright. And there's a very clear contrast between the discussion here and the discussion in Europe. Europe has had effect.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think you're absolutely right to point to copyright law. And so much of what we're seeing now already happened in copyright law. The copyright lawyers have been pointing out these issues for years. In particular, there's an academic named Anne-Marie Bridey who wrote a great piece on payment processors cutting people off in the copyright context, which is completely relevant now, and also wrote a great piece about the difference between the obligations, what we want from edge providers and what we want from infrastructure providers. I think in the US, the copyright discussion is well developed because we started from the beginning with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA, which sets out a detailed process for notice and takedown and has ideas like the user who's being silenced should be notified and have an opportunity to.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That seems to constantly be happening in copyright space. Why doesn't that work happen in the 230 sort of speech area? Is it because there isn't that well-money third-party interest of record labels and artists?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas if you are eliminated by DNS providers in your country or you're eliminated by Cloudflare and you're vulnerable to hacking, it might be you literally are not on the internet anymore. And that's much more consequential.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think there is another YouTube. There's daily motion. There used to be other YouTubes like VO and Vimeo. I guess Vimeo's still there, but some of them got sued out of existence on copyright claims that ultimately failed. You know, they went bankrupt despite being right defending against copyright claims. I think there is a competition problem, but I don't think it's literally correct to say there's nowhere to go if you get kicked off of YouTube. There are places to go. They just don't have audiences that are as big. Or, you know, if you got kicked off of Twitter, you could go to parlor until recently. I'm not saying there's no argument to be made. There absolutely is. And this question about attention scarcity is important and so forth. But it's not like you literally disappear from the internet if you can't be on YouTube or you can't be on Twitter. There are alternatives.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Network, but as we were discussing before, there is scarcity or gatekeepers in the large-scale hosting space like Amazon Web Services or in ISPs, other infrastructure providers deeper in the network.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You to carry certain things. Both of those things, there are great limits on what the government can do, but they can at least do it sometimes, we know, in broadcasts because of the special attributes of broadcast. But the internet, at least at the platform level, at the level of people speaking on websites, doesn't have that kind of scarcity. You can always put up one more website, or you can always build another platform to get your speech heard. And so the scarcity that's the justification for laws in broadcast doesn't extend to the internet. Now you can push back on that. There are people who push back saying, well, now we have a scarcity of attention. And, you know, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are the gatekeepers controlling access to that scarce resource. So you'll see arguments building on that more from the left. You can also say, well, maybe there's no scarcity at the edge of the”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we will see a debate about that. But what the Supreme Court said in ACL UV Reno and what people have been assuming for a very long time is you can't extend that reasoning for broadcast regulation to the internet because the foundation of the broadcast regulation is spectrum scarcity. There's not enough of it to go around and that justifies the government coming in and allocating it, including allocating some for public use. And that justifies the government being able to say, hey, some speech is legal, but you can't say it on broadcast because it will be heard by children or it will offend people. You know, that's why we have rules against profanity during prime time, things like that. It also can justify the government coming in and saying, hey, you have to carry certain speech in order to ensure that all viewpoints are heard. We are going to compare.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that brings me back to the broadcast framework. My understanding of it, which is a little fuzzy because for obvious reasons, the Verge does not spend a lot of time on broadcast regulation, is that the reason that Congress is able to reach sort of beyond the power of the First Amendment and regulate broadcast networks is because broadcast networks make use of wireless spectrum, which is a scarce resource owned by the public. And they can step through it and say, okay, we're managing the use of the public airwaves for the greatest common good. And then they find other ways to justify those decisions beyond that. But there's a very basic foundation of broadcast networks operate on the public's radio spectrum. So the government has an interest in making regulation there. Is there an analog to the internet?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Follow a particular set of moderation rules, that is not consistent with the First Amendment. That's not something that is within Congress's reach.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If they choose to take things down, that's where a lot of the focus has been recently on the question of what can they choose to take down. And as I'm sure you know, there have been a lot of lawsuits, some of them quite high profile, many from political conservatives saying, hey, platform, you have to reinstate my speech. You have to carry my videos or my lectures or whatever. And the platforms always win those. They win them sometimes based on CDA 230, which gives them a relatively quick and easy win, but they also win them based on their own First Amendment rights to set editorial policy. And that's really important because it tells us what Congress does and doesn't have leeway to change. They can't change the platforms' First Amendment rights. And so even if Josh Hawley or someone drafts a bill that says platforms have to carry particular speech or have to”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it might be easier to start with what the platforms have to do. Platforms are subject to federal criminal law the same as anyone else. There's no special immunity under CDA 230 or anything else for that. So for things like child sexual abuse material, supportive terrorism, anything that's covered by federal criminal law, they may have to take things down. And they do take things, particularly for child sexual abuse material. There's huge systems in place to get that off of platforms. Another big chunk is copyright. For copyright, there's a detailed notice and takedown process for removal. And then the third big chunk is the kind of speech covered by CDA 230, so things like defamation. And for those platforms or immunized, if they leave it up, but they are also encouraged and protected by the law.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the things I think about all the time is YouTube Kids. And if you just say all the platform companies have to abide by the First Amendment and the limitations of the First Amendment that the government has to abide by, I don't know that YouTube kids could exist because it effectively filters out a whole bunch of YouTube that they would not be allowed to filter out in that way. And that to me is, I think, the reality on the ground of what people expect from the service providers, what they're legally able to do, and then are discomfort with their power. It doesn't seem to be, I would say there's no framework for a regular person to understand all of those interactions. So how would you describe the broad framework that exists outside of the competition concern? There's the First Amendment, there's some stuff that's just like outwardly illegal, and then there's the platforms themselves.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they also expected, and the Reno court expected, for there to be tools for end users, you know, you and me, to really exercise control over what content we're seeing, you know, ways that we could put, as they saw it then, like settings in our browsers so that we're the ones setting the rules for the speech that we see. And we've kind of gotten away from that. We've moved to a world where the nexus, the locus of control sits with moderators at Facebook or Twitter. And I think a lot of people are saying, well, what about that 90s idea that the control should sit with the end user, that we should have dials and knobs to adjust what it is that we want to see or ways that we can opt into different content moderation rules from different sources? And this is actually something that Jack Dorsey at Twitter talked about in his congressionals testimony the last two times he testified is the idea of introducing some competition in the province.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's interesting when you talk to Senator Wyden and Senator Kuhns, who they were the bipartisan duo that crafted 230, they anticipated a ton of competition. That's what they wanted. And that comes back all the way to your point of there needs to be some reckoning with the lack of competition. And it's of effect on speech because the legal framework we're operating under was built with an expectation of competition.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, just a law that has a pro free expression intent, which is certainly part of it, but it also has a clear intent, and Congress said this. It's not a question, clear intent to let platforms go out and moderate and take down not just illegal stuff, but the kind of lawful but awful speech we”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it is a really weird history, you know, that a single act of Congress, well, it was part of the 1996 telecoms package, but a single piece of that, the communications decency act, it contained both these pro-censorship rules, saying platforms have to take down indecent speech. There wasn't platforms at the time. People on the internet. And that's what the Supreme Court struck down. And they said quite ringingly, you know, free expression is protected on the internet. There are no special limits. This is not like broadcast where in primetime you can't use profanity. This is a crucial forum for public discussion. So most of that law got struck down. And then what's left is CDA 230. And CDA 230, I think, is widely misunderstood as just a law that lets platforms leave user speech up.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I think would reach the Supreme Court about whether they're allowed to do that. And it's a really tough question because the Internet is different. And, you know, the last time the Supreme Court seriously took a look at this question, they completely rejected the idea of using communications law. This is in the Reno case in 2000, the sort of seminal U.S. First Amendment case for the Internet. They totally rejected the idea of using a communications law framework. But a lot of people would argue that things have changed. And certainly if we look at Europe, you know, they are using literally broadcast law to regulate companies like YouTube now. So to be clear, I'm not advocating for this, but I do think it's a direction we should expect the law to move in.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do see that expanding, but I think it can only expand in a way that is really hard, like that will take a lot of hard work. You know, historically, the area of US law that sits at this nexus of competition and speech is telecoms law and communications law. You know, it's the rules that the FCC provides for broadcast and for cable. And the internet is very different from broadcast and cable. We can't just export those laws, but we do have a long history of thinking about, you know, what should the rules be when there are a small number of gatekeepers for the channel that ordinary people rely on for communication? You know, so I wouldn't be too surprised if at some point several years out, not this year, Congress tries to do something serious modeled on communications law. And then if that happened, we would have massive”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you think the current antitrust debate? There were a bunch of antitrust hearings last year. There was an antitrust report. That was very focused on marketplaces, on Amazon using its data to come up with products and then competing with the sellers on Amazon, on Apple and the App Store. The conservatives in this country did do a lot of work to try to hijack that antitrust conversation and make it about 230 in content moderation. They were mostly laughed out of the room. Do you see that expanding? Do you see us getting to a place where we're saying, okay, yep, there's a bunch of problems with Apple's 30% cut on the App Store, but also Apple is a massive gatekeeper to social media platforms as evidenced by their takedown of Parlor and Apple needs, we need to know what Apple's standards for content moderation are as expressed to the apps on its platform.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out bullying and porn and pro-anorexia content and just the tide of garbage that would otherwise inundate the internet. I think the question that in the US it's conservatives who have been raising this question, but globally people all across the political spectrum raise it. The question is Are the really big platforms at this point such de facto gatekeepers in controlling so much public discourse and so much of speakers access to an audience that they ought to be subject to some other kind of rules? And I think as you hinted at earlier, that's kind of a competition question, right? There's a nexus of competition and speech questions that we are not wrangling with well yet.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the bottom line is that for a service like Twitter or Facebook, if they were neutral, if they allowed every single thing to be posted or even every single legal thing, everything the First Amendment allows, they would be cesspools. They would be free speech moshpits. And like real world moshpits, like there are some white guys who would like it and everybody else would flee. And that's a problem both because they would become far less useful as actually sites, actual sites for civil discourse, but also because the advertisers would go away. You know, the platforms would stop making money. The audience would go away. They would be effectively useless if they had to carry everything. So I think most people realistically do want them to kick out the Nazis. They do want them to.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google is a great example. Like, there's an idea that search neutrality is a conceptual thing that you can introduce to Google. What is the spectrum of, okay, we're pretty sure the pipe should be neutral? I'm not sure if search neutrality even is a possible idea. It sounds great to say. I like saying it. How do you think that spectrum, where do you think the gradations of that spectrum lie?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT