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Rationally Speaking Podcast

Rationally Speaking #200 - Timothy Lee on "How much should tech companies moderate speech?"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6787 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode features tech and policy journalist Timothy Lee, discussing a question that's increasingly in the spotlight: How much should tech companies be actively moderating their users' speech? For example, should Facebook be trying to fight fake news? Should Twitter ban bullying? Should Reddit ban subreddits that they consider hate speech? Timothy and Julia look at the question not just from the legal perspective, but also from the moral and strategic perspectives as well.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell. They're dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give.

0:10.0

They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does. For example, how many lives does it save or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated?

0:19.0

You can read all about their research

0:21.1

or just check out their short list of top recommended

0:23.9

evidence-based charities to maximize the amount of good

0:26.9

that your donations can do.

0:28.6

It's free and available to everyone online.

0:31.1

Check them out at give well.org.

0:33.1

Thank you. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

0:52.0

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here today with Timothy Lee.

0:56.6

Tim is a senior tech policy reporter for Ars Technica. He's also written for The Washington Post

1:02.3

and for Vox. And I reached out to Tim to talk about the thorny but increasingly important issue

1:09.7

of how much tech companies should be moderating

1:14.0

speech on their platforms, which is something that he's been covering very thoughtfully for the last

1:19.2

few years.

1:19.9

So, for example, people using Twitter for harassment or bullying, people creating subreddits on Reddit that are offensive or that

1:30.5

could be considered hate speech, people or bots sharing fake news on Facebook, that kind of thing.

1:37.5

So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

1:39.3

Tim, welcome to the show.

1:40.6

Hey, thanks for having me on.

1:42.8

So I guess first off, I'm curious if my impression

1:47.4

is correct that tech companies have been moving in a direction of more actively moderating

...

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