How to moderate 100m daily users, Meta over-enforcement claims and Clegg saves the web
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.
Today's edition is like a bit like EiM's greatest hits — we've got stories on Sir Nick Clegg, the eSafety Commissioner, even Reddit’s mod tooling — but with new questions to answer. Add to that a technical peek into Roblox’s AI enforcement engine, and you’ve got a round-up that covers different harms, geographies and platforms. I hope it's useful.
Want more? You're in luck. Mike and I go deeper on some of these stories in the latest episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech (Apple, Spotify).
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Let's get into it then, thanks for reading — BW
Voice-based scams are more sophisticated, more emotional, and more expensive than ever before. But traditional fraud tools still focus on the text and transaction — not the tone.
This blog post from Modulate breaks down why the voice channel is becoming the new front line in fraud, and how behavioural voice analysis can catch what legacy systems can’t.
Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
From last week but an important one: a ruling in Australia has reversed a takedown decision by the eSafety Commission, stating that it did not meet the threshold for cyber abuse under the country’s Online Safety Act. In a win for X/Twitter, who jointly filed the challenge with a Canadian anti-trans activist, the Administrative Review Tribunal said it couldn’t be satisfied of the “necessary intention to cause serious harm to the subject of the post”, a trans man appointed to advise the World Health Organisation.
ABC News has a 6-minute explainer on the case, which has intensified the focus on Australia’s regulatory approach and led to calls for the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to step down.
The EU has released its the latest list of 40+ trusted flaggers under the Digital Services Act and it’s revealing. Euronews led with the fact that 14 of the 27 European countries have not yet approved any organisations but I was more interested in the range of organisations that have been designated: the Finnish branch of Save The Children? Romania’s national institute for Holocaust studies? The Austrian Chamber of Labour? A strange bunch with big responsibilities for tackling illegal content.