Close Your Apps and Think of England

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In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Jen Weedon, a T&S veteran of Meta and Niantic. She is currently consulting and teaching at Columbia school of International and Public Affairs. Together, Ben and Jen discuss:

• Jen Weedon on anticipating platform threats and how to manage burnout (Everything in Moderation)
• AI Slop and the Information Ecosystem (Columbia University)
• UK examines steps to stop children circumventing social media ban (Financial Times)
• Social media ban for UK’s under 16s will go even further than Australia’s policy (BMJ)
• The split-screen reaction to the UK social media ban (Everything in Moderation)
• Anthropic shuts down newest AI model after U.S. bans foreign use (The Washington Post)
• India blocks Telegram messaging app until June 22, government says (Reuters)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• Spotify removed 57,000 fake podcast episodes selling illegal drugs after congressional pressure (TNW)
• Spotify chief defends AI-generated music (Financial Times)

Our fun links this week are the How Alberta eradicated rats (Ben) and Mogwooooo’s Instagram account (Jen).

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).