A giant repository of AI risks, Breton's latest bust-up and interim at the Integrity Institute
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your in-depth guide to the policies, products, platforms and people shaping the future of online speech and the internet. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
This week marked EiM's sixth birthday which, as we all know, is a lifetime in internet side-project terms. Although EiM never made it into the list of 54 good things that happened in 2018, I'm still glad that I send on that first edition. Thanks to everyone for following along and reading every week.
Here's everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
If last week’s newsletter (EiM #258) saw Elon Musk go after Kier Stamer, this week he was back taking aim at his old EU arch-nemesis Thierry Breton (EiM #206). Breton had sent a stern letter to Musk — surprising many of his European Commission colleagues, according to Politico - that elicited a Musk meme from comedy war film Tropic Thunder and ire from Donald Trump’s campaign team. Very grown up behaviour all round.
Here’s a story that speaks to something that Mike and I touched on in last week’s Ctrl-Alt-Speech: schoolchildren in England will be taught how to spot misinformation under planned changes to the school curriculum following the UK riots of the past month. Exercises will be woven into different subjects; for example, children could be taught to spot fake news websites by their design and UX. Which will be a nerve-wracking moment for the local news websites laden with poor-quality ads.
More context: It comes on the back of research earlier this year which shows that the participation of 9-11 year olds in a UK news literacy increased their ability to detect fake news, and that this improvement sustained over time. Scandinavian countries have shown the benefits of programmes like this for some time so, in my opinion, these changes can’t happen soon enough.