In the conversation about keeping kids safe online, the actual experts with the most to offer are all too often treated as outsiders and interlopers. One such expert is Candice Odgers, Professor of Psychological Science and Informatics at the University of California Irvine, who has recently been involved in a lot of debates against people who are …

There's a broad legislative push for rules that would (supposedly) protect kids online. But as we've written about at length, while the concern for teen mental health might be genuine, the legislative response is highly problematic and based on a misdiagnosis of the underlying problems. This week, we're joined by UNC's Alice Marwick, one of a group…

At the latest committee hearing about its repeal bill, Congress finally deigned to bring in one witness who spoke in defense of Section 230. Engine Executive Director Kate Tummarello got a little bit of time to explain how Section 230 isn't about protecting big tech, it's about protecting the hosts and users of all kinds of extremely important and …

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Mike and Ben discuss a fascinating story about how political deepfakes are being used in the Indian election - but not in the way you might expect.Listen to the whole epis…

As decentralized social media experiments continue, we're getting more and more opportunities to really understand the impact of decentralized systems and how they are received by users. Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, has been studying and thinking about these issues a lot, and this week she join…

There's no shortage of prognostication about the future of generative AI, including plenty of predictions that it won't actually be around forever for various reasons. A lot of these takes are a little too speculative or just not very interesting, but one that stands out comes from law professor and returning podcast guest Eric Goldman, who joins u…

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline is a central component of the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, but there have been a lot of questions about how well it truly works. A recent report from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which we've published two recent posts about, provides an extremely u…

We've got one more cross-post episode for you today, then next week we're back with a brand new discussion. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast's The New Abnormal podcast with host Andy Levy for a conversation about the big news from last week: Biden signing a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if owner ByteDance doesn't divest from it. The full…

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Mike and Ben discuss the startling epidemic of "sextortion" scammers targeting teens online.Listen to the whole episode covering all the week's biggest news in online spee…

This week, we've got another cross-post episode for you. Mike recently appeared on the Sidebar podcast from Courthouse News as part of an episode taking an in-depth look at why copyright is actually the biggest free speech restriction in the US and the various questions, implications, and problems that arise from this. You can listen to the whole t…

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Ben and guest host Alice Hunsberger discuss Meta/Facebook's new policy for labeling AI-generated content.Listen to the whole episode covering all the week's biggest news i…

Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn't even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week we're joined by Re…

One very important thing to understand in the conversation about online speech is that there are many different kinds of online communities, big and small, and they all have their own needs when it comes to rules and governance. This fact is a key element of a new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life by media studies professor…