MC Weekly Update 12/27: Trust and Safety Does Not Take Holidays

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

• Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman, Amy Klobuchar, and Bill Cassidy introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) on Wednesday. The Bill would give researchers at universities and nonprofit organizations in the U.S. access to study data from the largest social media companies and provide public transparency on the most widely shared posts, advertising, content moderation practices and recommendation algorithms. - John Perrino / Tech Policy Press
  • More: Nate Persily puts in a cameo appearance to explain the bill and its history. Nate has been working on platform transparency for years. - Tara Wright / SLS News
• An internal investigation by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, found that employees tracked the location and user data of multiple journalists, in an attempt to identify leakers at the company - Emily Baker White / Forbes 
  • More: One of the reporters who was tracked, Emily Baker White, has a good toot-thread of the reporting on the company that she has done over the past year that led to her being tracked. - Emily Baker White / Mastodon
• The password manager LastPass dropped a lovely Christmas present on its users, announcing a major security breach. Yikes. - Karim Toubba / LastPass
• Over at Twitter:
  • Musk is still CEO.
  • No, the US Government is not paying Twitter millions of dollars to censor information (Musk on Twitter). It reimburses the company for the costs of complying with orders to hand over data under the Stored Communications Act. - 18 U.S. Code § 2703, § 2706
  • The Twitter Files finally had some interesting reporting about US Government covert information operations. - Lee Fang / The Intercept
  • No, it’s not news that platforms struggled with content moderation during the pandemic and often made mistakes. Yes, there should be a proper review of content moderation during the pandemic. - David Zweig / Twitter
  • Elon Musk has a worrying lack of understanding of Twitter’s data security obligations. - Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post
    • Here’s a primer of what he should know and why he should be worried Moderated Content prepared earlier - “Elon puts rockets into space, he's not afraid of the FTC”
    • And for Orin Kerr’s take on why he really, really shouldn’t share people’s DMs, listen to MC Weekly Update 12/12
• Everything has a content moderation angle – Leo Messi’s post celebrating his world cup win has become the most-liked Instagram post of all time. - Dan Ladden-Hall / The Daily Beast

Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.

Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.

Extra special thanks this week to the production team, Brian Pelletier, Alyssa Ashdown and Ryan Roberts for making sure this reached you during winter shutdown.

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