FAQs About The NetChoice Cases at the Supreme Court, Part 2
By Daphne Keller on February 21, 2024 at 5:51 pm
By Daphne Keller on February 21, 2024 at 5:51 pm
By Daphne Keller on January 28, 2024 at 4:48 pm
The Supreme Court is about to review a constitutional challenge to two unprecedented and very complicated laws regulating social media. The laws were enacted by Texas and Florida in order to counter “censorship” and alleged anti-conservative bias of major Internet platforms like Facebook or YouTube. Both laws have “must-carry” rules that restrict platforms’ ability to moderate content under their preferred editorial policies, and “transparency” rules including requirements for platforms to notify users when their posts have been moderated. Read more about FAQs about the NetChoice Cases at the Supreme Court, Part 1
By Daphne Keller on July 16, 2023 at 3:29 pm
One of the least appreciated transparency measures in the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA) is the requirement for platforms to send the Commission information about each individual content moderation action, and for the Commission to make that information available in a public database. Draft technical specifications for submissions to the database are out now. They are in real need of improvement, but it's not clear if there is time for that to happen. Read more about Rushing to Launch the EU's Platform Database Experiment
By Daphne Keller on May 18, 2023 at 8:01 am
Beliefs and expectations about what data platforms have at their fingertips vary wildly. That is about to matter a great deal, once new rules in the EU allowing researchers to access data held by platforms come into effect. Relationships between researchers, platforms, and regulators are likely to be very bumpy — and important research is likely to be delayed — until expectations become more aligned. Read more about Some Practical Postulates About Platform Data
By Daphne Keller on September 19, 2022 at 3:49 pm
The examples also illustrate what I think is a very real risk: that state enforcers may abuse transparency laws, using them to reshape platforms’ actual policies. I think it should be possible to mitigate this risk. But we can only do so if we recognize it. Read more about State Abuse of Transparency Laws and How to Stop It
By Daphne Keller on May 5, 2022 at 6:19 am
This week I participated in an unusually collegial and productive Senate hearing about approaches to platform transparency, presided over by Senator Coons. My detailed written testimony, including appendices listing other resources and attempting to identify platforms potentially covered by proposed laws, is here. It captures a lot of detailed questions and concerns that I have been thinking about for a while, but not had time to write about anywhere else, including about surveillance issues. Read more about My Senate Testimony About Platform Transparency
By Daphne Keller on April 25, 2022 at 7:04 pm
People keep asking me what the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA) says. So far, I have not found overview materials that seem like the right match for people unfamiliar with the EU legal and policy landscape. So here is my own very quick and dirty rundown.
By Daphne Keller on April 6, 2022 at 6:00 am
This post is about what I consider one of the hardest questions, particularly under laws that create special data-access regimes for researchers. What data are platforms supposed to share, and what personal information will it disclose about Internet users? This question pits privacy goals against data-access and research goals. A strongly pro-privacy answer will curtail research into questions of great public importance. A strongly pro-research answer will limit users’ privacy rights. In between lie a lot of difficult calls and complex trade-offs. Read more about User Privacy vs. Platform Transparency: The Conflicts Are Real and We Need to Talk About Them
By Daphne Keller on August 23, 2021 at 7:01 am
Interoperability and distributed content moderation models have tremendous promise. But they raise major questions about user privacy. Ultimately, they will likely require difficult tradeoffs between competing goals including competition, privacy, and improved speech environments. This post examines technical solutions, including ambitious blockchain-based ones, that can reduce -- but not eliminate -- those tradeoffs. Read more about Privacy, Middleware, and Interoperability: Can Technical Solutions, Including Blockchain, Help Us Avoid Hard Tradeoffs?
By Daphne Keller on March 19, 2021 at 3:09 am
I am a huge fan of transparency about platform content moderation. So it pains me to admit that I don’t really know what “transparency” I’m asking for. Read more about Some Humility About Transparency