MC Weekly Update 12/5: THE MODERATED CONTENT FILES

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

• Using a powerful AI language model developed by OpenAI, the new ChatGPT tool allows anyone to generate short text that is indecipherable from written text and that draws upon vast amounts of publicly available information. - Janus Rose/ Vice, Ina Fried/ Axios
  • More: ChatGPT has fun and informative uses, but is also easy to abuse — from generating recipes or funny movie scripts, to the spread of misinformation or nefarious tips to get away with crimes.
• TikTok and Bumble are adopting a tool developed by Meta with international charity SWGfL’s Revenge Porn Helpline. The tool uses hashing technology for submitted content to identify and block non-consensual intimate media from participating platforms. - Olivia Solon/ Bloomberg News
• More: Victims make a tradeoff on whether a single human reviewer seeing their intimate image outweighs its spread across the social media and dating services using the technology. - @oliviasolon
• Rumble and the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog run by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, are challenging a New York law that prohibits hate speech in a federal lawsuit, claiming it would violate First Amendment free expression protections. - Chris Dolmetsch/ Bloomberg News
• The “Twitter Files” were released in a staggered thread of more than 40 tweets on Friday evening. The string of tweets includes screenshots of Twitter staff’s internal communications and external email correspondence which lack any smoking gun. Instead, the thread is most likely to reinforce existing beliefs about the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and related content. - Cat Zakrzewski, Faiz Siddiqui/ The Washington Post
• Twitter CEO Elon Musk disputed news reports on research by advocacy and civil rights groups that found hate speech slurs were more prevalent on the platform. Musk claimed the data actually shows a decrease in the reach of hate speech on the platform since his acquisition and said the Twitter safety team will publish weekly reports on the data going forward. - Mohar Chatterjee/ Politico
  • More: As University of California, Berkeley researcher Jonathan Stray points out, both sides can claim they are right depending on the data and measurement of success. More transparency and collaboration could move these efforts in the right direction. That seems unlikely for now, but could be required under the EU’s new digital regulations.

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.

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