The T&S newsletters that I read regularly

I'm Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation*. I'm standing in again for Alice in this week's Trust & Safety Insider while she enjoys a break.

Something a little different for T&S Insider this week: a list of the independent voices that help me make sense of the way that T&S and the internet is changing.

I'm well aware that either you'll find it a useful list or you'll view it in the same way that I view Hollywood actors and writers dish out fawning compliments to each other at award ceremonies. Sorry if you're in the latter category.

If its the former, that could be the sign to become a paying EiM member to get access to practical guides for T&S professionals, detailed breakdowns of industry reports and sensible takes on social media bans that you can use when chatting to friends/colleagues/family. It's worth it, promise.

Get in touch to share your own favourite newsletters and, as ever, thanks for reading — BW

What I read when I’m not writing EiM

Some of you know that I spend a large chunk of my waking hours thinking about the media industry and all of its considerable ills.

In particular, I’m fascinated by how quickly our information habits are changing. People are finding new places to understand the world, new voices to explain it and new ways of deciding who to trust.

One of the big shifts we've seen is the rise of individual personalities, folks who have built audiences — often large, regularly on algorithmically-powered video platforms — by expressing the world in a particular kind of way. Their entertainment value and ease of understanding often makes up for their lack of impartiality and sometimes questionable motives.

The T&S and tech policy space is not immune to this shift and, in some ways, EiM is part of that trend. Don't worry, there are no plans to start creating cringey YouTube Shorts anytime soon.

However, there are many other independent voices doing excellent work who I don’t think everyone in this field knows about. Most of the ones I know write newsletters, which can be hard to discover if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I wanted to share the ones that I gravitate towards in case you’d find them useful too.

There are other excellent newsletters by organisations, non-profits and technology vendors that merit a mention, and I may well do a separate round-up of those at some point. But I wanted to start with individual voices because I want these folks to get their due credit. Subscribe to them, support them, don't take them for granted.

NB: I'm fully aware that this list is homogenous with a plethora of US/UK voices and not enough perspectives from people and places beyond those two countries. That represents my own linguistic bias but also that newsletters I previously subscribed to are no longer publishing regularly. If there are other independent voices covering platform governance, internet regulation and the systems shaping online safety and AI, share them with me and I'll share them in the coming weeks.

So, in no particular order, here are the eight independent newsletters that I read regularly: