The promise of multilingual language models, moderating Mizzy and gaming hate report

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 brought about another round of layoffs at Meta with content moderation, policy and regulatory teams particularly affected. It's been a rough time for folks working in trust and safety and, as ever, please do get in touch if you're impacted and looking for work.

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This is everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW

Policies

New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation

The US government should recognise that the "judicial system nor the industry itself will rein in the risks of tech platforms" and instead apply a risk-based framework similar to the one used in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash: that's the view of economist James Marrone in this op-ed for Barron's. He calls "self-regulatory organisations" such as the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership "even more toothless than their financial counterparts" and notes that "history proved time and time again that self-regulation was to mitigate financial risks". Feels a bit strong but its an interesting counterpoint nonetheless.

Marrone's piece is part of a tranche of commentary published since last week's verdicts on Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google (EiM #201). Also worth reading are:

• Daphne Keller notes that the rulings have the strange effect of making "the Supreme Court look like the grownups in the room" and represented an "an “everybody, calm down” moment."
• Missouri associate professor Jared Schroeder shared why its time that Congress convened a group of experts to study alternatives to Section 230.
• Ben Lennett, tech policy researcher, argues that Section 230 might have survived this time but "Florida and Texas cases may yet severely weaken it".