Moderating Charlie Kirk's legacy, chatbots under fire and LLMs that can't agree
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.
I chose not to mention the shooting of conservative figure Charlie Kirk last week, both because so little was known about the circumstances of his death and because, frankly, I had been fortunate enough to know very little about him.
Seven days on and, not only do I know more about his polarising views, we understand abit more about what happened. Today’s newsletter rounds up the major reaction, while — on Ctrl-Alt Speech — we try to thread the needle between the platform reaction and US political hypocrisy. Add us to your rotation on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Welcome to new subscribers from NextDoor, the Conscious Ad Network, Wikimedia, TaskUs, Public.io, Telus Digital and elsewhere. If you're around, join me in London next week for a drink.
Without further ado, let's get into today’s stories — BW
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
Parents whose sons and daughters died by suicide after using chatbots like ChatGPT and Character.ai (invested in heavily by Google, I often forget) spoke at a US Senate Judiciary hearing this week to explain the potential harms of the tools on vulnerable individuals. It comes in the same week that a lawsuit filed by the parents of a 13-year-old who took her life in October 2023 after interactions with a Character.ai bot called Hero. Character.ai have since improved its suicide resources (EiM #269) but pressure is building, both in the US and elsewhere (EiM #303).
In a week which the UK and US finalised their long-anticipated ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’, the New York Times published a piece looking at the state of digital policy in Britain — particularly its approach to facial recognition as well as the Online Safety Act. But — as this critique by Public Knowledge makes clear — the issues may be closer to home than the NYT realises.