MC Weekly Update 2/7: Requiem for the Bots

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

• Twitter Corner
  • Twitter announced it is ending free API access, potentially cutting off hobbyist developers and their weird and helpful content and tools. - Ryan Browne/ CNBC
  • Musk said the change would help rid the site of malicious bots. But cats might save the internet once again, as the Twitter owner later backtracked, replying to @PepitoTheCat that he might still allow “bots providing good content that is free.” - Ivan Mehta/ TechCrunch
  • The change has stark implications for public interest researchers and journalists who use the Twitter API to analyze current events, conduct studies on important societal issues, and develop open source tools that democratize online research. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Justin Hendrix/ Tech Policy Press, Coalition for Independent Technology Research
  • The New York Times and the Canadian Center for Child Protection found child sexual abuse material continues to spread on Twitter with more than 200,000 engagements and hundreds of accounts sharing explicit content. - Michael H. Keller, Kate Conger/ The New York Times
  • Twitter trust and safety head Ella Irwin outlined how Twitter makes decisions about whether to suspend accounts for “restricted content,” such as threats and calls to violence or. She also said removal reasons will be made public soon — we’ll see about that! - @ellagirwin
    • More: Irwin said the company pushes back against government demands, but “Not everyone has a sense of humor.”- @ellagirwin
• Speaking of questionable orders:
  • India set up its government-appointed panels that will review user appeals of social media content moderation decisions. - Scroll
  • Wikipedia was blocked in Pakistan for blasphemous content, and then restored after three days (just before recording). - Kamran Haider/ Bloomberg News
• Meta denies its moderation of the Ukraine war is biased. The company’s response may be raising more questions than it answers. - Jacob Turowski/ Meta
• Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) introduced the Social Media Child Protection Act to ban children under 16 from accessing social media. It's almost certainly unconstitutional. - Cristiano Lima/ The Washington Post, Office of Representative Chris Stewart
• The battle to get rid of TikTok has inevitably resulted in pressuring app stores. Senate Intelligence Committee member Michael Bennet (D-CO) sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google last week calling on them to ban TikTok from their digital marketplaces. - John D. McKinnon/ The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Flatley/ Bloomberg News
• Former Twitter executives will testify before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. They will be grilled on the decision to limit a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Take a drink of (Irish) coffee for every mention of “jawboning.” - Rebecca Klar/ The Hill, Anders Hagstrom, Chad Pergram/ Fox News

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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