Brazil rewrites internet rules, Apple’s transparency gap and AI moderation workarounds
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 paid members like you.
As this lands in your inbox, I'll be landing on the tarmac in London after a few weeks away. I arrive to find a regulator claiming a somewhat hollow victory (see: Policies) and the imminent deadline of the social media ban consultation (EiM #328 and others). What a time to be heading home.
This week's edition isn't all about the UK, or indeed the US, though; among 20+ must-reads and a trio of updates from the T&S community, there are important reads from Brazil and the Middle East. That's what EiM is all about after all.
Welcome to new subscribers from Automattic, Apple, Pioneers Post, Christchurch Call, Electronic Arts, Google, Hinge, University College London and elsewhere around dark — but often still magical — forest that is today's internet.
If writing today's briefing while on holiday isn't enough inspiration to become an EiM member, you also get unadulterated access to EiM's archive of 450+ editions including this week's thought-provoking edition of T&S Insider on standardising parental controls.
Bon voyage for now. Here's your Week in Review — BW
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
Marco Civil Da Internet — Brazil’s lauded civil rights framework for the internet — got its biggest overhaul for a decade this week as President Lula signed two decrees that increase big platforms liability over the content they carry.
The decrees align with a Supreme Court judgment from last year which ruled that platforms must immediately remove hate speech and content that promotes serious crimes. It also gave the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) — which one tech policy expert told me already has its fair share of critics — authority to oversee the new obligations.
Brazilian professor and tech lawyer Ronaldo Lemos called the justification of the decrees as “the hallmark of the so-called "abusive constitutionalism", which rewrites not only laws but the constitutional rules themselves.” His snapshot analysis is worth reading in full while CNN Brasil has a good guide (in Portuguese).