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

“So, this is where we are talking about many, many different places in the stack. And I think I've always, you know, been a proponent of net neutrality that at the ISP level where it is very hard for most people to switch, there's a lot of pricing games. There's not a lot of competition. Okay, that makes a lot of sense for neutrality to exist. The user facing platform level at the very top of the stack, Twitter. I don't know that I think Twitter neutrality makes any sense.”
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 hugely important question. And, you know, this is why if you go deep enough in the Internet's technical stack down from consumer facing services like Facebook or Twitter and down to really essential infrastructure like your ISP or your mobile carrier access providers, we have net neutrality rules or we have in the past had net neutrality rules, you know, saying those guys really do have to be common carriers. They do have to provide their services to everyone. They can't become discretionary sensors or choose what ideas can flow on the internet. And, you know, obviously we have a big debate in this country about net neutrality even at that very bottom layer. But the examples that you just listed show that we need to have the same conversation about anyone who might be seen as essential infrastructure. If Cloudflare, for example,”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That question about competition to me is like it's at the heart of a lot of the controversy without ever being at the forefront of it. And the way I would come at it is, well, okay, over the weekend, Apple and Google and AWS and Okta and a thousand Twilio, they all decided they weren't going to work with Parlar anymore because Parlar didn't have the necessary content moderation standards. And I think Amazon made public a letter. They'd sent a Parlor saying we've identified 98 instances where you should have moderated this harder. And you're out of our terms of service. We're not going to let incitement to violence happen through AWS's services. Well, if all of those companies can take parlor off the internet effectively, how can you have a rival company to Twitter with a different content moderation standard? It feels like if you want to start the service, it has more lax moderation, you will run into AWS.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Include things like getting courts involved in deciding what speech is illegal instead of putting that entirely in the hands of private companies. processes so that when users have their speech taken down, they get notified and they have an opportunity to respond and say if they think they've been falsely accused, which happens a lot. And then if what we're talking about is the platform's own discretionary power to take things down, the European proposal and some of the US proposals also involves things like making sure platforms are really as clear as they can be about what their rules are, you know, telling users how the rules have been enforced, letting users appeal those discretionary takedown decisions. And just trying to make it so that users understand what they're getting. And ideally so that there is also enough competition that they can migrate somewhere else if they don't like the rules that are being imposed.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I actually think there's a big gap between the debate in DC over the past year and the debate globally and among experts and in academia. So DC has kind of been a circus, you know, with lawmakers just making things up and throwing spweetti at the wall to see if it will stick. There are over 20 legislative proposals to change CDA 230 last year, and a lot of them were just theater or had proposals that were highly impractical. By contrast, globally and especially in Europe, which is working on a huge legislative package on this right now, the Digital Services Act, there's a lot of attention where I think it should be placed, which is on just like the logistics of content moderation. How do you moderate that much speech at once? How do you define rules that even can be imposed on that much speech at once? And so the proposals we're seeing in Europe”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Google App Stores, Amazon AWS pulled a plug on its web hosting. Effectively, the service was shut down by large tech companies, a control distribution points. That's a lot of different things. It's a lot of different points in the tech stack. One of the things that I'm curious about is it feels like, okay, we had a year of 230 debate and now a bunch of other people are showing up and saying from first principles, what should content moderation be? But there is actually a pretty sophisticated existing framework. There is a pretty sophisticated existing debate in industry, in academia. Can you just help me understand what the existing frameworks and debate look like?”
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 would say 2020 was kind of a big inflection point in the conversation about content moderation. There was this endless amount of debate about Section 230, which is the law that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post. Trump insisted that it be repealed, which is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Interestingly to me, Joe Biden's platform position is 230B repealed as well, which is unique, I think, among Democrats. But that conversation really heated up. And then over the last week, Trump incited a riot at the Capitol. He got himself banned from Twitter and Facebook. Another platform that we don't think about in the context of Twitter and Facebook, but like Stripe stopped processing payments from the Trump campaign website. And then sort of next to that, there is a competitor to Twitter called Parlor, which had very lax content moderation rules. It got itself removed from both the app.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like news reporting that makes them legal, or just take them down without review and accept the possibility of error. So automation plays a big role in the system also.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do the work and try to craft rules that are so clear and have so many bright lines that it's possible to hand them off to globally distributed teams and hope to get consistent results out of them. Of course, as we all know, there are not actually consistent results. You know, as Mike Masmick at TechDirt has written about at length, content moderation at scale is impossible to do right. There are always going to be a lot of errors and a lot of inconsistencies. But those are the two main models, the sort of central artisanal model, the distributed model with huge teams. And then, of course, both of those, but especially the big distributed models are often supplemented by technology. For example, automated tools can detect duplicates of content that's been seen before and route them for faster review to see if they're being used in some new context.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you're talking about a smaller company, it's likely a medium or an automatic and WordPress or Tumblr, it's likely that the content moderation is relatively artisanal, meaning there is a small team of college educated Americans who think hard about the policies and look carefully at each takedown decision. And that, first of all, it can be bad for a global platform if it's nothing but Americans making the decisions, but it is possible to achieve a relatively high degree of consistency and care if you have that artisanal model. But once a platform crosses a certain size and a certain number of takedown requests, you get into the world of outsourced content moderation where you hire contractors often in places like the Philippines to”
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 they only end up on his desk if they put strain on the existing rules. You know, if there's something where the existing rules say take this down, but there's some powerful reason to leave it up, or vice versa. You know, so in this case, if there wasn't an existing rule or if the existing rule was ambiguous and it, you know, it needed a judgment call, it makes absolute sense that this kind of judgment call would go all the way to the top. Like, do you really want to just delegate it to somebody two years out of college to make this judgment call or do you want to actually have everybody look at it carefully?”
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 so. As the public, I think we want platforms to have a consistent set of rules. I think they want to have a consistent set of rules for PR reasons, but also for operational reasons. You know, it's really hard to enforce your rules if you have a special carve-out for President Trump and a special, you know, Duterte carve out, you know, something that's really hard for the moderators to understand what the rule's going to 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 do think that's justified. Platform's rules for online content evolve all the time in response to new things happening. You know, people find a new way to be terrible to each other on the internet, and then platforms have to update their policies. Maybe they didn't have protections for transgender people at one point and they realized they have to add it, or maybe their rules don't cover the tide pod challenge, and suddenly they have to adapt for that. Adapting because of real ongoing violence and threat to life in the nation's capital, that makes complete sense. And if that adaptation has to be fast and clumsy at the start and then later on you go and you figure out how that affects the rest of your policies and you streamline them and make them consistent, that seems just fine to me.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The platforms took big actions against the president over the last week, and they basically cited extraordinary circumstances, right? It was outside of their normal framework, and they said, he's inciting violence. Is that justified? I mean, that seems like there's the debate about content moderation and there's this dude is leading a coup and we're just not going to allow it the end. Is that basically the shape of it?”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Well, you know, a lot of how I first encountered this was by being at Google and getting requests like, oh, this Turkish politician wants us to take down a news article from search results because it says that he's corrupt and having to decide what to do with that because we don't know if this politician in Turkey is corrupt or not. And so dealing with it in real life and seeing both what platforms can be compelled by law to take down, which is a pretty broad swath, including in the US, there are a fair number of things platforms legally have to take down. And then the separate question of, well, what should platforms use their discretion to take down if they want to go beyond the law or their users want them to go beyond the law and take down things that are really awful but aren't illegal? I dealt with that endlessly in practice. And then since 2015, I've been at Stanford and doing a lot of thinking and writing.”
2021-01-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Trump, Twitter, and the First Amendment, with platform moderation expert Daphne Keller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT