MC Weekly Update: Hanging by a Thread

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

Threads v. Twitter

• Instagram’s Twitter competitor Threads is the fastest downloaded app, boasting more than 100 million users within five days despite pretty basic features. - Jay Peters, Jon Porter/ The Verge
  • Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Threads will be a place for sports and entertainment over politics and news. We say good luck with that! - Rohan Goswami/ CNBC, Jay Peters/ The Verge, @mosseri
  • Musk is taking it well... tweeting that the showdown against Zuckerberg should be a literal measurement of manhood and threatening to sue Meta. - Matt Novak/ Forbes, Rohan Goswami/ CNBC
  • But don’t worry, Elon, you still have a fan in the Taliban. - @AnasHaqqani313
  • The content moderation challenges will only get more difficult for Threads, especially on a decentralized protocol. - @alexstamos
  • Despite the early success, Threads can’t take flight over Twitter in the EU yet due to uncertainty with forthcoming competition regulations under the Digital Markets Act. - Jillian Deutsch, Stephanie Bodoni/ Bloomberg News, Makena Kelly/ The Verge
• The European Union officially signed off on a new data-transfer deal with the United States. Now, we have to wait and see if it will once again falter under a legal challenge. - Adam Satariano, Monika Pronczuk, David McCabe/ The New York Times, European Commission
• There was frankly frightening rhetoric in the EU threatening to cut off social media platforms during unrest from French President Emmanuel Macron and EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. These are disappointing statements and flippancy about the importance of free expression. - Laura Kayali, Alexandre Léchenet/ Politico, Clothilde Goujard, Nicolas Camut/ Politico
• A U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit upheld FOSTA against a First Amendment challenge. - Gustavo Turner/ XBIZ

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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