📌 The revolving door between regulators and the regulated
Welcome to this week's Everything in Moderation, one and all. New subscribers from Dangerous Speech Project, the University of Michigan, ilsole24ore.com and The Telegraph, a particularly warm hello. I dearly hope you’re not bots.
I'm struggling to make time for webinars of late but I’m going to get to this Shorenstein Center panel on 'Commercial Content Moderation during the Pandemic' next Friday 8th May (1pm EDT). See you there?
This week’s newsletter is more tapas than main meal. If you have ideas, opinions or links, please do hit reply.
Thanks for reading and stay safe — BW
PS Just as I was pressing schedule on last week’s newsletter about TikTok being racist (EiM #61), it decided to ban Tommy Robinson and Britain First for promoting ‘hateful ideology’. Bad news: I didn’t realise until after it hit your inboxes — sorry about that. Good news: it at least shows EiM is on the pulse.
👽 Close encounters
Last year, it enlisted Clegg. Now Facebook has nabbed Close.
The Times announced this week that Tony Close, the director of content standards at media watchdog Ofcom, had accepted a role at Facebook. He has been put on gardening leave for three months.
It’s noteworthy because Ofcom is the proposed regulator of legislation designed to 'make the UK the safest place in the world to be online’. Close, according to the report, is said to have 'been heavily involved with drawing up rules to rein in the tech giants and protect the public’. Facebook gains greatly by having him on their payroll.
The Times also revealed that his move comes a month after another UK government policy expert also moved to the Big Blue. Something of a hiring spree.
Job moves like this are easy to dismiss as unsurprising and not newsworthy. After all, we’ve known since 2016 that many UK and US public officials make the move into policy roles at the tech giants (and occasionally vice versa).
But, with a full response to the Online Harms White Paper due any week now, it might be a good time for news organisations to look again at which government experts have recently updated their LinkedIn job titles.