Content Moderation’s Original “Decider”
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with “The Decider”—Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-cheek nickname during her time at Google in the 2000s. As the company’s deputy general counsel, Nicole was in charge of decisionmaking over what content Google should remove or keep up in response to complaints from users and governments alike. Since then, she moved on to roles as Twitter’s legal director of products and the deputy chief technology officer of the United States under the Obama administration. In that time, the role of social media platforms in shaping society has grown enormously, but how much have content moderation debates really changed? Quinta and Evelyn spoke with Nicole about her time as the Decider, what’s new and what’s stayed the same since the early days of content moderation, and how her thinking about the danger and promise of the internet has changed over the years.
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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. |
| 0:32.6 | Because we have been so open, because we have erred towards letting a thousand flowers |
| 0:39.3 | bloom in terms of expression and supported anonymity, it is also allowed for really bad actors |
| 0:48.2 | to manipulate the information space. |
| 0:50.9 | That is again like one of the variables that we have not figured out how we feel about |
| 0:56.5 | it, how to reconcile it with the principles that we believe we built the infrastructure |
| 1:00.9 | on. |
| 1:01.9 | I'm Quinta Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast, December 9th, 2021. |
| 1:10.4 | We're bringing you another episode today of Arborders of Truth, our series on the online |
| 1:14.4 | information ecosystem. |
| 1:16.5 | We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs, |
| 1:22.2 | but at the end of the day, someone has to make a call about what stays on a platform and |
| 1:27.5 | what comes down. |
| 1:29.2 | So this week, Evelyn Duac and I spoke with the Decider, Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue |
| 1:35.0 | and cheek nickname during her time at Google in the 2000s. |
| 1:39.6 | As the company's deputy general counsel, Nicole was in charge of decision making over |
| 1:44.3 | what content Google should remove or keep up in response to complaints from users and |
| 1:48.9 | governments alike. |
... |
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