Safety concerns drive X departures, new policy tracker & Oversight Board announce CEO
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your need-to-know news and analysis about platform policy, content moderation and internet regulation. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
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Here's the best of what I read this week and what you need-to-know — BW
Today’s edition is in partnership with the Tech Coalition, tackling cross-platform child sexual exploitation and abuse
The Lantern Program makes digital spaces safer for children by enabling secure, responsible sharing of signals related to child sexual exploitation across tech platforms. Now expanding its impact, Lantern is piloting partnerships with two financial institutions to strengthen the collective response.
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
The link between platform election policies and real-world democratic processes is notoriously difficult to track and understand but may get a little easier following the launch of a new resource. Social Media Election Policy Tracker, developed by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, records shifts in social media platforms' election-related policies from 2016 to the 2024 US election with the aim of “understanding how these platforms' actions align with major news, social shifts, and political events.” Tech Policy Press has more but one to bookmark.
While we’re on the topic of elections and policy, Politico reported that Trump has appointed Michael Kratsios (former CTO during Trump’s first term and previous principal of Thiel Capital) and Gail Slater (an Irish-born former Trump tech policy advisor and recent economic policy advisor to JD Vance) to lead the new administration's tech policy work. Slater is also being lined up as FTC chair according to some outlets.