#274: Can Platforms Stop the Spread of Misinformation?

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the approaching election, preventing the spread of online misinformation is especially important. Heather West, head of Americas policy at Mozilla, joins the show to discuss how misinformation spreads, how platforms are dealing with it, and how this ties in to the broader discussion on content moderation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to a tech policy podcast. I'm Ashton Kassaritan. On today's show, we have an amazing guest. We have Heather West, Head of Policy for Americas, for Mozilla, joining us to talk about misinformation, the election, Section 230, and platform regulation overall.
0:22.0	Heather, welcome back to the show.
0:24.0	Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
0:26.1	Yeah, and I think this is your first episode with me. Your last one was with our previous host.
0:30.5	May he be in peace at his government job.
0:35.1	Indeed.
0:35.9	We hope to make this a better experience for you than the last time.
0:40.0	Well, I can say that the bar is high, but we're going to have fun. Oh, wow. He could enjoy this.
0:46.8	Well, the election and questions about misinformation are obviously swirling even more intensely now we're we're getting
0:55.5	closer there's like what three months left if not um less than three months i think yeah i just it's it's
1:02.9	been stressful for everyone no matter on what side of this you are or if you're on any side overall um
1:08.4	i don't think anyone would want misinformation to be playing any role in
1:13.6	this election and questioning the results of the election like it did a little bit last time.
1:20.5	So, Heather, you had all of tech policy from Mozilla and you have a very, you know, broad
1:26.8	resume before that, you were a coder, you just told me offlinezilla and you have a very, you know, broad resume. Before that, you were a
1:28.9	coder. You just told me offline. So you have wide expertise in tech and tech policy. What do you
1:35.1	think are the main questions we have to ask ourselves and address when it comes to misinformation
1:40.0	spread online? I think that there's a lot of very good questions that we can ask about misinformation online,
1:48.0	but the really, the big picture question that we need to be asking ourselves is what is the internet we want?
1:55.0	And is this ecosystem of platforms and this kind of information spread what we were aiming for?
2:05.5	I don't think that anyone would say where we want to be in terms of how people consume information online
2:12.7	and how people discover information online.
	...

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