Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. I'm April Glazer. And I'm Kashmir Helm.

Hey everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We're recording this on the morning of Tuesday, April 9th. And first of all, I'd like to welcome my co-host today, who is Kashmir Hill. She's an investigative reporter at Gizmodo, who's been digging into privacy and technology conundrums for many years. Kashmir, thanks for co-hosting. Thanks for having me as a guest host. Yeah, super fun.

So on today's show, we're going to talk about a British proposal to regulate content on social media sites.

And then we'll talk about Kashmir's recent investigation into Airbnb's efforts to kick white nationalists off its platform ahead of a national summit in Tennessee.

After that, we'll talk to Pat Brown, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods,

to talk about his eerily realistic fake meat that's trying to pitch a sustainable alternative

to the environmentally destructive meat industry. And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs,

some of the best things we saw on the web this week. That's all coming up on

if then. So we're going to start by discussing some news that came out Sunday that UK regulators

shared. It's a new proposal that would require social media companies like Facebook and

YouTube from Google to be much faster and more proactive about removing harmful content on their platform.

The proposal is very wide-ranging. It covers ensuring news presented isn't rife with misinformation,

combating hate speech, cyberbullying, child exploitation. What else? Like extreme violence, like what we saw in New Zealand.

Right.

And this isn't the first country to do this.

In Germany last year, there was a measure that was passed that could charge companies

up to 60 million if they don't delete illegal content quickly.

And then in Australia last week, are you familiar with this?

They passed a law that says that social media executives could actually be put in jail if content isn't removed quickly enough.

Yeah, and this isn't entirely new. I remember years ago that YouTube executives were going to be arrested if they went to Italy because there was a YouTube video of a kid being bullied that they wanted taken down.

So it's not exactly new, but it does seem like governments around the world are very interested in regulating the tech companies right now.

Yeah, and I mean, Mark Zuckerberg even said that he's open to some form of,

...