Platforms fight VLOP status, Kenya goes after TikTok and TrustCon in tweets
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation, your 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, I was in San Francisco for TrustCon, which saw almost 900 trust and safety professionals from around the world attend over 150 sessions across three days.
It was great to meet lots of EiM readers in person — many for the first time — and to hear directly about what drives so many professionals to continue doing this vital but often relentless work. I have pages and pages of notes to sift through but I hope to share more reflections in the coming weeks, as well as the recording of the panel discussion I took part in.
This week's newsletter is somewhat abridged as a result of this week's hectic schedule but a warm welcome nonetheless to new readers from Public, Cinder, ActiveFence, Media Lab, Blue Lantern Project, Meta and elsewhere.
Here's everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
First, it was the German marketplace Zalando pushing back against its Digital Services Act categorisation (EiM #207); now Amazon is doing the same. In court documents submitted this week, the online e-commerce giant said it shouldn't be regarded as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) and was being "unfairly singled out" because it isn't the largest retailer in any of the EU countries in which it operates. The company have asked for the European Commission to annul the decision, which will be a significant precedent, whichever way it goes.
The independent-but-Facebook funded Oversight Board believes Meta's enforcement of its gender-based speech policy "may result in the disproportionate removal of content raising awareness of and condemning gender-based violence" following a decision to reinstate two posts by a Swedish user about her experience of being in a violent intimate relationship. It also recommends adjusting the way it does "secondary review jobs" to ensure moderators are not asked to review their own decisions, which seems very sensible to me.