This is the Cato Deli Podcast for Thursday, June 9, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The war in Ukraine offers many lessons for social media,

most notably what the rules of content moderation ought to be during a war.

Cato's Will Duffield recently authored a comment to the Oversight Board Facebook's

Supreme Court.

We discussed the laws of war for social media earlier this week.

I recently submitted a comment to the Facebook Oversight Board,

Meta's sort of Supreme Court, about how platforms should moderate wartime content.

And while yes, the laws fall silent during war, there are separate sets of rules that we've traditionally used to govern or limit

combatant's conduct during wartime.

And in this comment, I suggest that it's now time for social media platforms to look to these

long-standing, sometimes informal laws or rules to inform how they approach content posted by combatants or the supporters of combatants during wartime.

All right, so it's not like social media platforms haven't had quite a bit of experience with organized sides of wars trying to use their platforms to communicate in public?

Well, I think to an extent this war in Ukraine has been novel.

We've seen a lot of conflicts between state and non-state actors in the past or in the

social media age, but this is one of the first wars between established states and what we're seeing here

perhaps the same lesson but presented more clearly as in some of these state

non-state conflicts is that the rules that platforms have developed

for peacetime just don't work very well during war and can even lead to nonsensical or perverse outcomes.

Traditionally, content moderation, platform rules are intended to prevent physical or emotional harm.

Full stop.

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