The whole gang's back together and what a week in labor it has been! After a few quick headlines we dive right into the biggest story of the week breaking down the nationwide writer's strike.   Writers across the country have hit the picket lines to defend the very existence of their profession as a career. A story in Labor Notes details the ways fishery workers in Massachusetts have had immigration law and labor law loopholes weaponized against them. AI and content moderation workers in Africa launched the first continent wide union of its type this week. More horrors out of Amazon as they've released a new service purporting to provide affordable connection to healthcare...with the price of giving away your HIPAA rights. More awful news on the child labor front as the government announced fines for McDonald's employing children as young as 10. Finally, we close with some happier news, as the team behind Youtube Music announced their unanimous decision to join the CWA.

Join the discord: discord.gg/tDvmNzX 

Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

Ep 156 - The People's War Against AI

As part of our Trust & Safety Month 2023, we are delighted to be joined on The GDI Podcast by Adnan Al-Khatib, Principal Product Manager - Moderation at Stream.

Adnan joins GDI's Senior Reporter Sean Nolan to discuss how dating apps can ensure users have positive experiences through the use of next generation moderation tools.

He also explains how generative AI systems can pose risks to online dating, and how understanding the intent behind content could help address this.

Safety in dating is paramount, so choosing an in-app messaging solution for your dating app focused on safety and security allows your users to connect and build relationships in a low-stakes environment. Unlock Stream's enterprise-grade APIs and SDKs with powerful auto moderation tools to empower your users to feel safe – they can mute, block, and report unwanted interactions, and you can swiftly identify and remove trolls through the moderation dashboard when needed. Trust Stream to keep your app safe – try it today.

Stream - How to Find and Resolve Harmful Content

In this podcast, Rob Corbet, Partner and Head of the Technology and Innovation Group moderates a panel discussion on content moderation as part of our recent Digital Reform: Insights and Regulators’ Perspectives event. The topics covered by the panel include key changes for content moderation programmes, considering AI in content moderation, new rules for content moderation, and content removal and governance obligations under the Digital Services Act. The other speakers on this podcast include Olivia Mullooly, Partner and Head of our Intellectual Property team, Ciara Anderson and Rosemarie Blake, Senior Associates, Technology and Innovation.

Disclaimer: The contents of this podcast are to assist access to information and do not constitute legal or other advice. Speciﬁc advice should be sought in relation to speciﬁc cases. If you would like more information on this topic, please contact a member of our team or your usual Arthur Cox contact.

Content moderation - Adopting a content moderation programme for the digital age

Play Moderator Mayhem: https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Last month, in partnership with Engine, we launched our new browser game that puts you in the shoes of a frontline content moderation worker at a growing online platform: Moderator Mayhem. If you haven't tried it yet, you can play it in your browser on mobile or desktop. The response to the game has been great, and this week Mike is joined on the podcast by myself, our game design partner Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, and Engine executive director Kate Tummarello who spearheaded the project, to discuss how we built Moderator Mayhem and the impact it's been having so far.

The Techdirt Podcast

Moderator Mayhem!

When talking about content moderation, it's easy to focus entirely on centralized platforms. But now, with the rise of more federated and decentralized systems like ActivityPub and Bluesky (and many others), it's becoming more and more important to talk about how content moderation works in a decentralized space. This week we're joined by Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter and now a Tech Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley, to discuss the new and different content moderation challenges that decentralized platforms face.

Decentralizing Content Moderation

The trust and safety conversation tends to focus on the huge platforms, and the millions of smaller websites (some still quite big!) get ignored. But those websites have trust and safety needs too, and they use a lot of different tools to meet them. Most of these tools are proprietary, but there's a growing push to build more open source tooling for the purpose, which was discussed by Derek Slater in a recent Atlantic Council report. This week, Derek joins us on the podcast to talk about the problems that open source trust and safety tools can solve.

Open Sourcing The Trust & Safety Toolkit

As you hopefully know by now, earlier this week we launched our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon. It's a free, browser-based game (playable on desktop or mobile, though we recommend desktop for the best experience) that puts you in the shoes of the head of trust and safety at a rapidly growing social media platform, where you must face all the difficult decisions that entails. As we did for our past games Moderator Mayhem and Startup Trail, Mike, myself, and our game design partner Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play sat down after the release to record a podcast episode all about the game, our design process, and the reaction from players so far.

Trust & Safety Tycoon

As you hopefully know, we recently launched (and then released a podcast about) our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon, which we created in association with the Atlantic Council's Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. This week, we've got two people from the Atlantic Council joining us on the podcast: Democracy & Tech Initiative Director Rose Jackson and DRFLab Senior Fellow and Managing Editor Andy Carvin. In the wake of current events in Israel, the conversation turned to a look at the unique challenges of trust and safety during times of global armed conflict.

Trust & Safety In Wartime

Many of you might know Andrew "K'Tetch" Norton as a Techdirt commenter, or from his work at TorrentFreak or for the Pirate Party, and some of you might know that he also runs his own podcast, Tetch Talk. Recently, Andrew asked Mike and I to join him on the podcast for a discussion about our content moderation games Moderator Mayhem and Trust & Safety Tycoon, and today we're posting a mirror of the full discussion for our last podcast of the year. See you in 2024!

Content Moderation Games

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.

In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Mike and Ben discuss the latest curious and contradictory content moderation decisions by Elon Musk, and a recent article about the risks and challenges associated with how different countries approach internet regulation.

Listen to the whole episode covering all the week's biggest news in online speech - and get ready for this week's episode, releasing tomorrow - by visiting ctrlaltspeech.com or subscribing to Ctrl-Alt-Speech on your podcast platform of choice!

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ctrl-alt-speech/id1734530193
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1734530193
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1N3tvLxUTCR7oTdUgUCQvc
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/93842011-b662-430a-8e51-218433a7e647
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcky6_VTbejGkZ7aHqqc3ZjufeEw2AS7Z
More: https://www.ctrlaltspeech.com/

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Elon Musk & Stonetoss (Teaser)

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.

In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Mike and Ben discuss the recent decision from the Oversight Board that reveals the single most moderated word on Meta's social media sites.

Listen to the whole episode covering all the week's biggest news in online speech - and get ready for this week's episode, releasing tomorrow - by visiting ctrlaltspeech.com or subscribing to Ctrl-Alt-Speech on your podcast platform of choice!

Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ctrl…ch/id1734530193
Overcast: overcast.fm/itunes1734530193
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1N3tvLxUTCR7oTdUgUCQvc
Amazon Music: music.amazon.com/podcasts/9384201…e51-218433a7e647
YouTube: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc…Hqqc3ZjufeEw2AS7Z
More: www.ctrlaltspeech.com/

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The Most Moderated Word on Meta (Teaser)

Artificial intelligence seems to be pervading every aspect of our lives - it certainly consumes social media and news feeds. And while AI certainly has many benefits, it also brings some challenges - especially when leveraged as a content moderation tool. The question becomes - what will be the role of humans? 
In this episode, Camilla Hegarty discusses the evolution of content moderation, the role of AI, and the need for humans in the content moderation function.

Content Moderation Evolution from Humans to AI

Check out Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike Masnick's brand new podcast with Ben Whitelaw, creator of the Everything in Moderation newsletter.

In this teaser excerpt from last week's episode, Mike and Ben discuss the startling epidemic of "sextortion" scammers targeting teens online.

Listen to the whole episode covering all the week's biggest news in online speech - and get ready for this week's episode, releasing Friday - by visiting ctrlaltspeech.com or subscribing to Ctrl-Alt-Speech on your podcast platform of choice!

Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ctrl…ch/id1734530193
Overcast: overcast.fm/itunes1734530193
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1N3tvLxUTCR7oTdUgUCQvc
Amazon Music: music.amazon.com/podcasts/9384201…e51-218433a7e647
YouTube: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc…Hqqc3ZjufeEw2AS7Z
More: www.ctrlaltspeech.com/

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Combating Sextortion (Teaser)

As decentralized social media experiments continue, we're getting more and more opportunities to really understand the impact of decentralized systems and how they are received by users. Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, has been studying and thinking about these issues a lot, and this week she joins us on the podcast to discuss a recent paper and, in general, how users are faring in the world of decentralized social media and content moderation.

Research paper, "Do Users Want Platform Moderation or Individual Control?" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.02208

Platform Moderation Or Individual Control?

The hosts of Ctrl-Alt-Speech are both on vacation this week, but we didn’t want to leave our listeners waiting too long for an update on today’s big news about online speech: the Supreme Court’s ruling in the NetChoice cases, which sends the Texas and Florida laws that would limit the ability of online platforms to moderate political speech back to the lower courts. So Mike Masnick has stepped briefly back to the microphone to join our producer, Leigh Beadon, for a quick mini episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, which we’re also posting to the Techdirt podcast feed. In this short discussion, Mike explains the immediate implications of the ruling, the way it separates procedural questions from its broader guidance on the First Amendment, and what it signals about how the court will evaluate issues like this in the future.

Read more about the NetChoice ruling in our coverage on Techdirt:

From Mike Masnick - https://www.techdirt.com/2024/07/01/in-content-moderation-cases-supreme-court-says-try-again-but-makes-it-clear-moderation-deserves-first-amendment-protections/

From Cathy Gellis - https://www.techdirt.com/2024/07/01/in-the-netchoice-cases-alito-and-his-buddies-are-wrong-but-even-if-they-were-right-it-may-not-matter-and-thats-largely-good-news/

Ctrl-Alt-Speech Minisode: The Supreme Court’s NetChoice Ruling

Meta’s changes to fact-checking and hate speech could get enough users offside that they go elsewhere? If that happens, how will arts brands respond?

Meta changes in the lead up to Trump's second term may see users leave the platforms which is bad for arts brands

As AI begins to fundamentally alter our lives, we're in urgent need of expert voices who both understand how the technology works and are capable of scrutinising its effects. In her new book, Empire of AI, tech reporter and former Silicon Valley engineer Karen Hao debunks the myths that surround AI and exposes the true costs of this global industry. She speaks to Aaron about Sam Altman’s origin story, the traumatising nature of content moderation work, and the striking similarities between Open AI and the British East India Company.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Downstream: Exposing The True Costs of AI w/ Karen Hao

In episode 39 of Generationship, Rachel speaks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and co-creator of Django. Simon discusses the surprising resurgence of blogging, his coining of the term “prompt injection,” the power of learning in public, and how he uses GitHub issues as an external brain to manage hundreds of projects. This quick-witted and humorous conversation offers a pragmatic look at leveraging today's tools for maximum productivity and impact.

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Generationship - Ep. #39, Simon Willison: I Coined Prompt Injection

We've got a bunch of brand new episodes of the Techdirt podcast coming over the next few weeks, but first we've got one special cross-post from our other podcast made in partnership with Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation: Ctrl-Alt-Speech. As we take a little break from that podcast for the month of August, we're posting a few special episodes, starting with this conversation about how it got started, how we create the episodes, our philosophy about sponsorship, and what we need to make Ctrl-Alt-Speech sustainable in the long run. We're cross-posting it here on the Techdirt podcast feed, and we hope you enjoy it!

What's Next For Ctrl-Alt-Speech

The Techdirt Podcast, hosted by Michael Masnick.

Heavybit is the leading early-stage investor in enterprise infrastructure. Since 2013, we've helped launch and scale visionary technical startups—from DevSecOps and feature flagging to AI code generation and beyond. We go hands-on from day 0, backing founders as they turn code into companies and build the future of software from the bottom up to the top down.

We do all things that publish, play, post, tweet and trend. We ❤️️ arts + communications. See our stuff: #agentrycomms. Share rad stuff: #artsagent.

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New tracks tagged #content moderation