Casey Newton on Four Years of Platform Chaos
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2020
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Casey Newton, veteran Silicon Valley editor for The Verge who recently went independent to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Few people have followed the stories of platforms and content moderation in recent years as closely and carefully as Casey, so Evelyn and Quinta asked him about what’s changed in the last four years—especially in the lead-up to the election. They also spoke about the challenges of reporting on the tech industry and whether the increased willingness of platforms to moderate content means that the name of this podcast series will have to change.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | We hate referees in this country. |
| 0:35.8 | We object to the power that others have. |
| 0:38.6 | And so I think that we need to accept that platforms exercise editorial judgment. |
| 0:44.0 | They do it in ways that are both visible and invisible. |
| 0:47.6 | They have a right to do it under the current law. |
| 0:50.9 | And there are going to be cases where they exercise editorial judgment in service of |
| 0:55.4 | the broader information ecosystem that may not first appear on their face to be consistent |
| 1:02.1 | with their policies, but are consistent with the general mission that we have given them. |
| 1:06.8 | So my view is just if you believe that they should actively intervene to prevent the |
| 1:12.0 | spread of disinformation campaigns, they're going to have to react really quickly sometimes |
| 1:16.3 | and it's going to be messy. |
| 1:18.0 | Now if your position is well actually I don't think they should intervene to stop disinformation |
| 1:21.6 | campaigns at all, that's fine and you should make that case, but just know that that is |
| 1:25.7 | not the message that they have been receiving for the past three years. |
| 1:30.3 | I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast, October 29th, 2020. |
| 1:38.2 | It's another episode of our Urbaners of Truth series on disinformation. |
| 1:42.4 | This week Evelyn Dwik and I spoke to Casey Newton. |
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