Recently, regular guest and great friend of the show, Daphne Keller,

director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center,

published an amazing article at Lawfare on the rise of the compliant speech

platform. As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming

and get Daphne on ASAP to talk to us. Fortunately for me and for all of you, she is here.

I've swept all my other work off my desk straight onto the floor,

and I've plopped my microphone down, and I'm very excited to get going.

To set us up, I can't beat the introduction to Daphne's article.

So here that is.

Quote, there's a revolution happening inside platforms like YouTube and Instagram,

and it is changing the way those companies govern speech on the internet.

Small armies of platform employees, consultants, and vendors

are overhauling the daily operations of trust and safety teams, the people who apply

platforms content rules and decide what speech will remain online. The goal is to make every

decision about user's speech standardized, trackable, and ultimately

reviewable by government regulators or courts.

Deciding what people can say and do on the internet is increasingly becoming, in

corporate speak, a compliance function, like following the laws that govern financial transactions at a bank

or safety inspections at a factory under laws like the EU's Digital Services Act.

Whether that fundamental reframing of speech governance will be a net positive for internet users

or society remains to be seen.

Unquote, this is the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold. Daphne, welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be here. Your article is this great mix

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