Inside ‘online fraud factories’, Meta apologises and Onahian on AI moderation
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.
It’s great to see new subscribers from Mozilla, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, Faktograf, NowWhat, Engatta, and lots of new faces from Milltown Partners. A special shout out to four new EiM members that signed up this week. If you value the newsletter and want to support EiM, join them.
I’m travelling this week so today’s newsletter is punchier than normal (Ed: but not by much…). Mike is playing the Paxman role in this week’s Ctrl-Alt-Speech and has enlisted the brilliant Kat Duffy, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, as co-host. They talk about the US government meltdown and what it means for internet speech.
If you missed Alice’s T&S Insider on niche community spaces and safety, do have a read. A host of EiM readers got in touch to say they enjoyed its hopeful tone and I heard that it started heated conversations in more than one Slack instance. Are you working on an initiative tailored for small, niche or DIY internet communities? Tell me about it.
From the depths of the UK countryside, here’s this week’s Week in Review — BW
Today’s edition is in partnership with Resolver Trust & Safety; the leading provider of intelligence and advisory services
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
Hundreds of people have been liberated from vast ‘fraud factories’ operating in Myanmar, Thailand, and China, where they are forced by criminals to run pig-butchering schemes and scams. A detailed report from the New York Times explain how victims from more than 40 countries are often tricked into taking jobs abroad, only to find themselves imprisoned in compounds, coerced into scamming others via social media and messaging platforms.
Tens of thousands remain in these compounds by the Thai border, many of them regularly tortured or beaten. It’s a reminder that the human cost of scams is not just felt by the victim.
Last week we had Andrew Ferguson and the Federal Trade Commission challenging “Big Tech censorship’ (EiM #283); this week, Brendan Carr took to the stage to complain about the other big baddies: the European Commission.
Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and reported by Gizmodo, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission criticised the Digital Services Act (DSA), calling it:
“something that is incompatible with both our free speech tradition in America and the commitments that these technology companies have made to a diversity of opinions.”
Europe is in the FCC's sights right now but what happens if — or rather when — Trump’s administration turns his attention to the UK’s Online Safety Act or any other speech regulation. I hope someone has a plan for that eventuality/inevitability…