Mitigating 'sensitive content', OpenAI's approach to safety and Brazilian bill lobbying
Hello and welcome to the 200th edition of Everything in Moderation, your guide to the policies, products, platforms and people shaping the future of online speech and the internet. It's (still) written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
This is a milestone edition of EiM and I wanted to thank all of you for opening, reading and sharing the newsletter every week. Lots has changed since the first edition in 2018 but its core premise is the same: to support and empower those building a better internet.
How did I celebrate hitting the big two hundred, I hear you ask? Well, I hosted a brilliant panel at the inaugural All Things in Moderation about how we get the general public to care more about content moderation. Want access to all the brilliant recordings? Become an EiM member this week and you'll get a free ATIM access code, worth AU $99.
You'll see some changes to EiM as part of an ongoing effort to keep the newsletter fresh and to attract a broad range of subscribers from across the trust and safety space. I've explained a bit more below.
Welcome to new subscribers from Quiip, Asana, Pagemasters, Keyword Studios, the University of Tasmania, Spectrum Labs, Storykit, Nextdoor, Vest and a bunch of others. Let's hope you're still around come the 300th edition...
Here's everything in moderation from the last seven days — BW
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
The German government has thrown the cat among the pigeons by proposing an national advisory board to oversee the implementation of the Digital Services Act. As Euractiv reports, the board — which is not a condition of the DSA — aims to ensure the DSA is applied consistently by liaising with the Digital Services Co-ordinators, the new in-country kingmakers that I mentioned last week (EiM #199).
There is some interesting detail in the piece about the handoffs between national and state authorities in applying the DSA as well as the tension with NetzDG, the 2018 legislation that made platforms responsible for unlawful (EiM #13). Worth a read.