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At the latest committee hearing about its repeal bill, Congress finally deigned to bring in one witness who spoke in defense of Section 230. Engine Executive Director Kate Tummarello got a little bit of time to explain how Section 230 isn't about protecting big tech, it's about protecting the hosts and users of all kinds of extremely important and valuable online communities. But that little bit of time was far from enough, so this week Kate joins us on the podcast to say some more things that Congress really, really needs to listen to.

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 a fascinating story about how political deepfakes are being used in the Indian election - but not in the way you might expect.

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/

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

There's no shortage of prognostication about the future of generative AI, including plenty of predictions that it won't actually be around forever for various reasons. A lot of these takes are a little too speculative or just not very interesting, but one that stands out comes from law professor and returning podcast guest Eric Goldman, who joins us this week to discuss his recent lecture and subsequent paper arguing that the regulatory environment won't allow generative AI to survive.

2024 Nies Lecture on Intellectual Property: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3tzZ_nH-AI

Research paper, "Generative AI Is Doomed": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4802313

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline is a central component of the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, but there have been a lot of questions about how well it truly works. A recent report from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which we've published two recent posts about, provides an extremely useful window into the system. This week, we're joined by two of the report's authors, Shelby Grossman and Riana Pfefferkorn, to dig into the content of the report and the light it sheds on the challenges faced by the CyberTipline.

Stanford Report: https://purl.stanford.edu/pr592kc5483
Techdirt posts: https://www.techdirt.com/company/ncmec/

We've got one more cross-post episode for you today, then next week we're back with a brand new discussion. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast's The New Abnormal podcast with host Andy Levy for a conversation about the big news from last week: Biden signing a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if owner ByteDance doesn't divest from it. The full episode of The New Abnormal covers other topics as well, or you can listen to Mike's segment isolated here on this week's episode.

The New Abnormal episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trumps-campaign-shifts-strategy-for-its-part-time-candidate/id1508202790?i=1000653645212