This week, Cloudflare announced that it would no longer help to host 8Chan. The decision came after news that the El Paso terrorist was inspired and supported by the site’s hateful culture — as was the shooter in the Christchurch massacre earlier this year. Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider: it…

Facebook has announced plans for an independent oversight board to help make decisions about what should be allowed on the site. In a Draft Charter, Facebook explains that the Board will offer a new way for users to appeal content decisions, and will have some role in shaping global policy…

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit and other major social media companies are working to provide more information about how they apply their rules when they remove content that we share online. Without good information, it’s easy to assume these massive content moderation systems are biased. But what sort of information do…

Google, like other social media platforms, have been under intense pressure over the last few days to prevent people from sharing footage and praise of the Christchurch mass shootings. YouTube responded by completely breaking its search functionality. As at approximately 5am GMT on 16 March 2019, YouTube completely disabled its…

Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has called for the G20 to regulate social media companies in the wake of the terrorist massacre in Christchurch last Friday. The knee-jerk reaction to the mass shootings proposes policy responses that won’t work, and fails to address the real challenges of combating the spread…

Edit (March 2020): Early in 2019, it looked like YouTube made major changes to its ‘up next’ recommendations. We planned to continue monitoring YouTube’s recommendations, but YouTube’s API has been unreliable since the Christchurch massacre. The API is still broken now, making it impossible for us to generate the same…

(and why we need new digital constitutions that protect our rights) — [ My new book is out now—and the full draft is available for free! ] Digital intermediaries govern the internet. The telecommunications companies that provide the infrastructure, the standards organizations that design the protocols, the software companies that create the tools, the content hosts that store the data, the search…

How well do social media platforms do, when measured against the standards of legitimacy that we apply to governments? Very poorly. In a new article published in Social Media + Society, I argue that we should use the standards of the Rule of Law to evaluate the way that internet…

We have just released the Santa Clara principles, calling on platforms to provide better information about how they moderate content online. The principles articulate a minimum set of standards for what information platforms should provide to users, what due process users should be able to expect when their posts are…