Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:
India Update
- At least some of the YouTube, Meta, and Internet Archive takedowns of clips from a BBC documentary that examines Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political rise were due to copyright claims made by BBC, rather than requests made by the Indian government. Maybe they could have mentioned that a bit earlier? - Rishi Iyengar/ Foreign Policy, Russell Brandom/ Rest of World, Internet Archive
- Luckily, Twitter owner Elon Musk chimed in with a tweet reply that he hadn’t heard of the issue, adding “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.” - @elonmusk
- Twitter reinstated Indian Hindu nationalist accounts previously suspended for hate speech against Muslims. - Newley Purnell/ The Wall Street Journal
Twitter Corner
- A new Twitter Files thread on the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton 68 project, which tracked Russian influence operations on Twitter, illustrates the dashboard’s flawed methodology. That doesn’t change the fact that there was Russian interference during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. - @mtaibbi
- Musk made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with House leadership to ensure that Twitter will be “fair to both parties.” We are sure there will be tons of transparency. - Tony Romm, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Adela Suliman/ The Washington Post
- Twitter will allow anyone to appeal an account suspension, starting this Wednesday, February 1. - @TwitterSafety
- And Twitter is re-suspending some of those accounts. White supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was suspended less than 24 hours after his account was reinstated. - Julia Shapero/ The Hill
- In completely unrelated news, Twitter is being sued in Germany over failing to remove antisemitic hate speech. - Molly Killeen/ Euractiv, Aggi Cantrill, Karin Matussek/ Bloomberg News
TikTok Offensive
- TikTok is going on the offensive with public engagements explaining its private negotiations with the U.S. government. Executives are briefing members of Congress, academics, and think tank researchers about Project Texas, the company’s plan to audit content recommendation systems and securely store and process U.S. user data in partnership with Oracle. - Cecilia Kang, Sapna Maheshwari, David McCabe/ The New York Times
- Researchers briefed on TikTok’s proposal to continue operating in the U.S. said that a new subsidiary, TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. (USDS), will house all of its U.S. content moderation under the governance of an independent board that will report to the U.S. government (CFIUS) — not to ByteDance. Plans also call for TikTok’s source code and content recommendation systems to be audited by Oracle and a third-party inspector. - David Ingram/ NBC News, Matt Perault, Samm Sacks/ Lawfare (commentary)
Other stories
- The messy business of operating in China caught up with Apple again as the company’s Safari web browser seems to have quietly adopted a Chinese government website block list. - Sam Biddle/ The Intercept
- Google plans to sunset a pilot program that stopped political campaign emails from winding up in the spam folder as it seeks to dismiss a lawsuit from the Republican National Committee claiming that Gmail filters have political bias. - Isaac Stanley-Becker/ The Washington Post, Ashley Gold/ Axios
- The Financial Times had a miserable experience attempting to run its own Mastodon instance, facing “compliance, security and reputational risks” in addition to cloud hosting costs and creepy factor issues, such as seeing direct messages by default. - Bryce Elder/ Financial Times
Sports Corner
- Did Alex receive a call from the San Francisco 49ers football team during their NFL playoff game this weekend? No, not for that cyber issue last year. Things get “Purdy'' desperate when a team’s first four quarterbacks are injured. - Nick Wagoner/ ESPN
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.
Like what you heard? Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with friends!