When it comes to regulating social media, it's tradeoffs all the way down

Untangled

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When it comes to regulating social media, it's tradeoffs all the way down

An interview with Daphne Keller

Charley Johnson

Dec 12, 2021

Hello, welcome back to the podcast edition of Untangled. If someone forward you this link, it was probably my sister. Give it a listen — she knows what she's talking about. Then, if you're so inclined, become a subscriber.

👉 Two things before we get into it. First, you can now listen to Untangled directly on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Second, if you haven't yet decided what you're going to get me for Christmas (I get it, I'm really hard to shop for), just forward this email to 10 friends and kindly ask that they smash the subscribe button. I mean, this gift isn't even affected by the supply chain — it's a Christmas miracle!

And now, on with the show.

This month I offered up some unsatisfying solutions for a big fat problem: Facebook. On Twitter, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain called it "a brisk and thoughtful piece weighing different futures for social media." Who ever said Twitter wasn’t the absolute best? And Rose Jackson, Director of the Democracy & Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council referenced it in her thoughtful testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee. Untangled made it to Congress, y'all.

While writing the piece, I knew I wanted to speak with Daphne Keller. Daphne directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, lectures at Stanford Law School, and before all of that, she was an Associate General Counsel at Google. That's deep academic, legal, and private sector expertise all in a single human!

Daphne has thought deeply about the problem of amplification and the practical challenges to implementing the solution of "middleware services.” In this conversation, we dive into both. Along the way, we also discuss:

How the private sector and civil society misunderstand one another when it comes to platform governance.
Why everyone seems to hate Section 230 and why regulating speech is so hard.
Why regulating reach is ... just as hard.

Listen all the way to the end to learn the one thing Daphne would tell her teenage self about life.

If you like the podcast, please do all the things to make it go viral - share it, review it, and rate it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the second monthly series of Untangled. For next month, I’ve decided to write about something we’re all not at all tired of reading about: the metaverse! 😬

More soon,

Charley

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