The TikTok timebomb, knock-on effects of Meta's new rules and time to FreeOurFeed?

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.

As with all major announcements, the second wave of coverage tells you much more than the initial flurry. That was the case this week with the Meta announcement (EiM #276), where we’ve seen reaction from advertisers, governments and regulators and Meta’s own staff. All of it is rounded up below but I’d characterise the collective response as "keeping a watching brief". 

To provide a fact checkers’ perspective, I spoke to Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative (SETS) at Cornell Tech and someone with deep understanding of both the efficacy of fact-checking and how big tech companies operate. Read his Viewpoint Q&A.  

Oh and there’s the very live story that is TikTok. We talk about it on this week's Ctrl-Alt-Speech, which is already available in all good podcast feeds.

New subscribers from Digital Action, Bumble, Samaritans, Inetco, Ofcom, Meta, Algorithm Watch, Appeals Centre Europe and others, you picked a helluva week to sign up. 

Here's everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW

Today's edition is in partnership with Checkstep, the all-in-one Trust & Safety Platform

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Policies

New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation

It may well have changed since I hit send on this newsletter but, right now, it seems like a definitive decision on whether to ban TikTok might be kicked down the line. Here’s what we know: 

• As discussed on Ctrl-Alt-Speech, the Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments last week but, as of Friday lunchtime UK time, have not yet released their verdict.
• A new bill to extend the deadline is in limbo but The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump may bring an executive order anyway. An advisor to the President-elect suggested that there is a desire to find an alternative, perhaps inspired by the fact that Jeff Yass, a Republican donor, owns a large chunk of the Chinese-video app.
• Officials from the Biden administration also told NBC that Americans “shouldn’t expect to see TikTok banned on Sunday”.  
• One thing is clear is that American TikTok users are decamping to Chinese apps that follow the country’s strict speech rules. I gather from EiM readers that the risk control department at Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote or Little Red Book) is scrambling to figure out how to understand and moderate the influx of English content.