The transatlantic speech trade, Deepseek safety report and building out Blacksky
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.
If there’s one thing the last few weeks have made clear, it’s that the US and the EU are engaged in a full-blown tug-of-war over who gets to set the rules of online speech. Yes, we're still seeing the fallout of Meta's announcement but Apple and a certain Republican tech skeptic are weighing in too. Who's calling the shots and who's making noise?
If you like your newsletter with a side helping of audio, subscribe to Ctrl-Alt-Speech, the weekly podcast I host with a very tired Mike Masnick. This week's episode — Digital Oligarchs Gunning for Europe — touches on much of what's shared in today's newsletter.
A big welcome to new subscribers from Character.ai, ActiveFence, Trustpilot, The Times (of London that is), Amazon, Linklaters and elsewhere. Let's get into this week's stories — BW
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
The changes to Meta’s content policies (EiM #276) will roll out “elsewhere” in 2026. That’s the punchy prediction of Joel Kaplan, the company’s global policy chief since taking over from Nick Clegg in early January (EiM #274). According to Politico, he was speaking via livestream at an innovation event in Brussels this week, during which he also took aim at the voluntary rules being developed by the European Commission for AI models on top of the AI Act, passed in March 2024 and which came into effect this week. He’s also been seen loitering in central London.
Wider view: there's an almighty struggle going on for online speech primacy between the US and the EU right now. Kaplan's comments come hot on the heels of a beefed-up Digital Services Act (EiM #278) and in the same week that Republican hardliner Jim Jordan reached out to EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen to request a "briefing". Who will blink first?
An interesting development in the ongoing back-and-forth about the role of app stores in moderating speech: Apple is using the arrival of the first known porn app on iPhones in the EU — enabled by the Digital Markets Act — as a warning that regulation could inadvertently undermine user safety. Bloomberg reports that AltStore PAL carried the porn app Hot Tub while marking it as ‘Apple approved’, despite the company not checking the content of the app’s carried by AltStore PAL. To make it more juicy, AltStore PAL is invested in by Epic Games, which has a long history of fighting Apple’s 30% app store fee. The back story to that beef — which goes to explaining this latest cynical Apple move — is worth reading.