The great podcast moderation problem, 'Facebook's chief fixer' and another dislike button

Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation, your weekly shot of news and analysis about online safety and content moderation. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw.

A warm welcome to new subscribers from Stanford University, USA Today, Salesforce, the Integrity Institute, OSTIA as well as a host of other people presumably thinking about the same questions that I am. And thanks to everyone that spends time with EiM each week.

In today's edition, there's a mix of the practical and the political as well as an interesting job role that caught my eye. I hope you enjoy it — BW

Policies - emerging speech regulation and legislation

The podcast ecosystem "can and should employ far more robust content-moderation measures", according to a detailed review from the Brookings Institute. Analyst Valerie Wirtschafter and fellow Chris Meserole noted in a blog post how Spotify and Google Podcasts lack "easy-to-use' mechanisms for user reporting" (with gifs to prove it) and advocate for clearer language in their moderation guidelines. For example, Apple's current creator guidelines prohibit "mean-spirited" content, whatever the hell that means.