Welcome. Welcome back to the Tech Policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Today I bring you an episode from the Vault.

Wonderful episode featuring The Great Daphne Keller,

then as now of Stanford University,

as well as my podcast BFF, Ari Cohn,

at the time free speech council at Tech Freedom.

This episode is from January 2022,

and the subject of it is a paper that Daphne put out in mid-2020.

That paper is on algorithmic amplification.

So line up those dates with that topic.

And please marvel at how incredibly ahead of the curve Daphne was.

The paper's title, to be precise,

Amplification and its discontents, why regulating the reach of online content is hard. Because this was so, dare I say, ahead of its time, the episode is a fascinating time capsule. To be clear,

it retains a lot of merit in its own right for anybody who wants to get up to speed on this

stuff. We hit the key points about why regulating amplification is such a big First Amendment problem.

We didn't cover Section 230 as much as I would have liked.

It is in there, and the First Amendment definitely covered.

This one is interesting in how it shows the tendency of the current thing

to shift around when we discuss social media and the internet and technology, which to me is a

telltale sign that we're dealing with moral panic in this area. At the time Daphne and Ari and I spoke,

the current thing was the spread of noxious content, the hypodermic needle theory of ideas.

...