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:
Digital Politics - Mark Scott
Mark is a fellow Brit and former Politico journalist who, pejoratively speaking, knows where the bodies are buried when it comes to digital policymaking. That idea runs through every edition of Digital Politics, which has juicy tidbits from Brussels/Washington in spades (see: the recent edition from a New England conference).
I find the weekly free edition is a very handy way to pretend I've read more Ofcom press releases than I've actually got around to. In fact, that same usefulness is one of the selling points of the Marked As Urgent events that Mark and I organise with another name on this list...
Anchor Change — Katie Harbath
There’s very little that Katie doesn’t know about the response — or lack of response, in some cases — of platforms to elections. That’s what happens when you spend a decade at Facebook working on global elections and political policy before going on to advise organisations on technology, democracy and governance.
Anchor Change draws on all of that experience, but with enough personal reflection and behind-the-scenes context to make it feel different from the usual “democracy and tech” fare. I like her work so much that we ran an audience survey together a few years back, and hopefully will do so again.
Indicator Media — Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman
Alexios, formerly of Poynter and Google and now at Cornell Tech, and Craig, ex-BuzzFeed News and ProPublica, set up Indicator last year to fill a gap in the market for practical reporting about digital deception. Its Friday Briefing has become my go-to for a) getting a read on spam, scams and disinfo and b) finding out about their brilliant investigations. Case in point: this recent edition on the rude awakening X/Twitter is getting about its monetisation programme.
It is no wonder Indicator has already been receiving prestigious awards and praise from people who know this space inside out.
Platformer — Casey Newton
Casey is now mostly known for his now-famous boyfriend disclaimer, but his work looking at Trust & Safety, platform governance and outsourcing goes back to some of the earliest editions of EiM, when he was writing for The Verge. Since setting up Platformer, he's broadened out to cover AI labs and the backlash against data centres. Yet he's one of the best places to understand what is happening inside the major platforms, even if his takes on the T&S industry are not always 100% popular.
Casey joined me on Ctrl-Alt-Speech a few months back and didn’t disappoint. You'll have to ask him if the feeling was mutual.
Untangled — Charley Johnson
Charley’s Untangled is a little different from the other newsletters on this list; it looks at technology as part of broader social systems — power, institutions, inequality, governance — rather than pretending that “tech problems” can be solved by twiddling some knobs here and there. Every time I read it, I feel both smarter and slightly annoyed that I didn’t write about the issue in that way myself.
Charley previously led work at Data & Society and has a knack for making sociotechnical thinking feel useful rather than abstract. If you want something that sits between public-interest technology, responsible AI, policy and organisational change, Untangled is well worth your inbox space.
AI As Normal Technology - Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
A more recent addition to my reading habits, Arvind and Sayash’s comprehensive and rational take on the AI hype moment we find ourselves in appeals to my inherently cynical, journalistic nature.
Although not directly about T&S, the professor and computer science PhD candidate duo — who made the TIME 100 AI list as a result of the newsletter — regularly cover AI risk, digital policymaking and government interventions across both areas. That makes it useful reading for anyone, like me, trying to separate meaningful questions about safety from the latest bout of frontier-model theatre. And if AI as Normal Technology isn’t enough, Arvind and Sayash have a book that goes deeper.
Horrific/Terrific — Georgia Iacovou
When it all becomes a bit too wonkish or a touch too technical, I binge on Georgia’s unique brand of anti-capitalist internet chaos. A freelance writer, producer on the Computer Says Maybe podcast and co-organiser of Marked As Urgent, among other things, she weaves together technology politics, online discourse and cultural references in a way that makes the whole thing feel both bleak and weirdly energising.
The name derives from how technology is “terrific for the privileged and horrific for everyone else”, which is hard to argue with after even five minutes on the internet. Georgia's graphics and choice of images are on point, too.
Just Enough Internet — Rachel Coldicutt
I’ve followed Rachel’s work since her Doteveryone days and was therefore delighted when she created Just Enough Internet as a home for occasional, longer-form pieces. They appear in fits and starts but when they do, boy, they’re worth it.
Rachel writes with a clarity and humanity that I struggle to find when reading about digital society, AI and innovation. Her recent piece on the “sports car theory” of LLM adoption — and why generative AI seems to make senior company leaders feel stupid — is a great example of the way she mixes what she sees/hears in her day-to-day work with what it means without ever stretching too far. Oh, and Just Enough Internet has some sweet-looking merch too. Note to self.
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