Teen ban details emerge, how LLMs view autocracies and The Lancet on misinfo
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.
Despite writing EiM most weeks since 2018, I still get a buzz out of seeing who joins its readership each week — and none more so than this week. A warm welcome to new subscribers from Wikimedia, the Computational Democracy Project, GIFCT, the eSafety Commissioner, Ofcom, Aibi.ai, Minalab, Coimisiún na Meán, Bumble and elsewhere.
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In this week's Ctrl-Alt-Speech, I sat down with Niklas Eder, User Right's co-founder and co-CEO, to read the tea leaves on Europe's plans for a harmonised social media ban and its latest Big Tech enforcement play. Out now for Patreon supporters, arriving later today for free listeners.
Here's everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW
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These labels can integrate into your existing moderation workflows to help your team filter, sort, and prioritize flagged content, whether you're using Safer directly or incorporating results into your own internal review tools.
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
There is finally some flesh being put on the bones of social-media age restrictions — although the UK and EU are building rather different creatures.
- UK: 16 and 17-year-olds will be unable to access social media between midnight and 6am after government research showed it was the best way to reduce usage — but it will be able to be turned off in account settings. One expert called it a “mildly annoying settings prompt with a government press release attached". The government said it wants to disable addictive features like autoplay and infitite scroll but would be no VPN ban as there was little evidence it was being used. Phew. However, there’s still no clarity on the platforms that will be in and out of scope.
- EU: The much-awaited Special Panel on Child Safety has advocated "access restrictions" for under-13s within the bloc with the potential for national measures for 13-18 year olds. The approach relies heavily on the EU-wide approach to age assurance, which you may remember had a stuttering start back in April (EiM #333). President Ursula Von der Leyen’s line — that the debate is not only about whether children can access social media, but “whether and when social media can access our children” — was inevitably repeated across the coverage.
The difference in the two approaches — the UK’s piecemeal, drip-fed ban and the EU’s considered, more warmly received approach — will not be a huge surprise to policy onlookers who saw the emergence of the Digital Services Act and Online Safety Act. But it further underscores how successive British governments have bodged tech policy. It would be a remarkable shock if Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham was any different. This week's Ctrl-Alt-Speech has more.