Impossible Tradeoffs with Katie Harbath Katie Harbath

Sorry for the slight delay today. The tech gods were not being kind.
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NOTE: A lot of this summary and show notes were generated via a new AI tool by Riverside.fmIn this episode, Brian Fishman, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cinder, discusses his background in studying terrorism and his work at Facebook. He shares insights on the early days of using the internet for research on terrorist organizations and the challenges of trust and safety in the tech industry. 
Brian also talks about the importance of pivoting in one's career and the trade-offs involved. He discusses the future of the tech industry, including the impact of AI and the role of regulation in trust and safety. The conversation covers various topics related to content moderation, media coverage, and the role of technology in society. 
The main themes include the challenges of content moderation, the difficulty of making decisions in the face of complex issues, the role of the media in shaping narratives, and the need for a more comprehensive understanding of technology's impact. The conversation also touches on the importance of capturing the wider ecosystem of communication platforms and actors involved in events like January 6th. 
We also discuss the potential for storytelling to shed light on the challenges of trust and safety in the tech industry.
Takeaways
* Brian Fishman has a background in studying terrorism and has worked on trust and safety issues at Facebook.
* The early days of using the internet for research on terrorist organizations provided valuable insights.
* Pivoting in one's career requires a mix of audacity and humility.
* The tech industry is facing challenges related to AI, synthetic content, and trust in institutions.
* Regulation will raise the floor for trust and safety expectations but may lower the ceiling. Content moderation is a complex and challenging task, regardless of whether it is done by private companies or regulators.
* The difficulty of making decisions in the face of complex issues remains even when responsibility is transferred from private companies to regulators.
* Media coverage plays a significant role in shaping narratives and public understanding of events.
* A comprehensive understanding of technology's impact requires considering the wider ecosystem of communication platforms and actors involved.
* Storytelling can be a powerful tool to explore the challenges of trust and safety in the tech industry.
Links
* Trust and Safety Tycoon Game
* How much mouse poop should be allowed in cereal boxes (a thought exercise that pertains to content moderation that we discuss and David Karpf wrote a piece about).
Show Notes
* Introduction and Background
* Early Internet Research on Terrorism
* Pivoting in a Career
* Challenges and Opportunities in the Tech Industry
* The Role of Regulation in Trust and Safety
* The Challenges of Content Moderation
* The Difficulty of Decision-Making
* The Role of Media in Shaping Narratives
* Understanding the Wider Ecosystem of Communication Platforms
* Storytelling and the Challenges of Trust and Safety
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As most of you know, I started working full-time as the Global Affairs Officer of Duco Experts in January. One of the things I like about the job is getting to work across the industry and seeing how companies tackle similar problems differently.
Thus, I thought it would be fun to bring the leadership team on the podcast to discuss some trends. Sidney Olinyk is the founder and CEO. Neema Basri is the Chief Operating Officer, and Scott Hoch is the Chief Technology Officer.
In this episode, Sidney and Scott talk a bit about the origins of Duco and some lessons learned from starting the business. Neema shares some of the work that we do and we all jump into sharing some trends we are seeing, our favorite productivity hacks and some hot take predictions for the future.
Anchor Change with Katie Harbath is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



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I’m trying something different for this week’s podcast. I originally hoped I would have a webinar to repurpose, but we ended up rescheduling it, so rather than not doing a podcast this week, I thought I would record the answers to questions I get quite often.
In this discussion, I go into seven different areas of interest. Topics and time stamps are below. 
I hope you enjoy it! 
* 2:04 - My career path & how I mapped out my post-Facebook journey
* Lessons from Striking Out on My Own
* Mapping Out My Post Facebook Career
* Lori Brewer Collins: On Leading: Transformative Conversations
* 26:13 - Who I am outside of work
* Reclaim the Fairy Tale
* The Things We Whisper
* 32:16 - What I do and a typical day looks like for me
* 34:41 - How to get a job in tech
* 40:54 - My reading/news consumption habits
* 48:10 - Why I started my Substack and how I put it together each week
* 57:25 - What’s next


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This week, I welcome Professor Kate Klonick to the podcast. The name of this episode comes from some amazing swag Kate made for a conference she put on last year on the history of the Trust and Safety profession. (You know how much I love swag.)
Kate is among the foremost experts on many things, including platform governance of speech. In 2018, she wrote a paper at Harvard titled “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” which was a first-of-its-kind behind-the-scenes look at how platforms handle content moderation.
In 2021, she wrote a piece for the New Yorker about how then-Facebook set up the Oversight Board titled, “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court.”
Recently, she has been writing on these topics at her Substack . One of her pieces I cite all the time is about the end of the golden age of tech accountability where in 2023 she makes the point:
[F]or all the of the complaining we’ve done about Big Tech’s lack of cooperation with accountability, transparency, and research efforts, I unfortunately think we’ll look back on the last five years as a Golden Age of Tech Company access and cooperation.
We talk about all of this and more. Enjoy!
Kate Klonick teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick's research focuses on law and technology, most recently on private platform governance of online speech. 
Klonick's scholarly work has appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review, and The Southern California Law Review. Her popular press writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications.
Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit. She is an affiliated fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is on leave for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University.


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Don’t forget you can watch all of these on YouTube!
This week, we are discussing all things online influence operations with one of the foremost experts - Olga Belogolva. We’re talking about Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and other actors who want to influence the online information environment. The title of this episode comes from one of her classes she used to teach at Georgetown.
Olga is the Director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She also a lecturer at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at SAIS, where she teaches a course on disinformation and influence in the digital age.
At Facebook/Meta, she led policy for countering influence operations, leading execution and development of policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior, state media capture, and hack-and-leaks within the Trust and Safety team. Prior to that, she led threat intelligence work on Russia and Eastern Europe at Facebook, identifying, tracking, and disrupting coordinated IO campaigns, and in particular, the Internet Research Agency investigations between 2017-2019.
Olga previously worked as a journalist, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Journal, Inside Defense, and The Globe and Mail, among others. She is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project and serves on the review board for CYBERWARCON.
Enjoy!



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Don’t forget you can also watch this on YouTube!
This week, we are talking to Michael Bąk. Michael brings more than two decades of experience across international development, peacebuilding, diplomacy, and tech policy. Throughout his career, he has sustained a strong commitment to democratic governance, human rights, and information integrity.
He is currently the Executive Director of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a former colleague of mine at Facebook, where he was the head of public policy for Thailand.
We dig into the relationship between technology companies and civil society, how he’s thinking about our information environment and how we protect democracy in the age of social media and artificial intelligence.
Show Links:
* Global Call for Research to Expand Literature on Crucial Research Questions, with Emphasis on Global South Regions
* Policy brief - Tech firms, governments urged to combat digital election threats (I forgot to mention that we did this with International IDEA and Democracy Reporting International)
* Policy Brief - Information Integrity in Times of Conflict
* AI as a Public Good: Ensuring Democratic Control of AI in the Information Space framework
* Why Do We Need to Discuss So-called "Information Integrity"?
* Euroviews. 'Regulation stifles innovation' is a misguided myth 
* Der Demokratieschützer Michael Bak über KI. - SZ.de 
* Fair Trade AI: https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung/plaedoyer-fuer-eine-fairtrade-ki 
* Forum on Information and Democracy: www.informationdemocracy.org


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