Let's begin with you introducing yourself.

My name is Emma Lanzo, and I'm the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Emma is an expert in the field of content moderation, a cultural and political gray area when it comes to free speech,

and the conflict around that gray area

only got worse when Peyton Gendron, an 18-year-old, killed 10 people last Saturday afternoon

in Buffalo, New York. The horrific mass shooting was broadcast live on Twitch, the popular

live streaming site, where millions of broadcasters produce content for

tens of millions of visitors each day. Twitch moved quickly, removing the video of the shooting

within two minutes of the broadcast starting, but even that quick work may not be fast enough.

Emma says once that content is out there, the damage is already done.

It is often very common for either the attacker or people who are working in concert with him

or who just want to get that material out and shared more broadly

to really begin a campaign of trying to upload the video, still images from

it, associated content in a lot of different varieties and formats on services all across

the web.

Even though Twitch removed the video swiftly, it spread rapidly across social media platforms.

Hours after the shooting, it was viewed more than three

million times on a site called Streamable and shared hundreds of times across Facebook and

Twitter. Social media sites generally don't want videos of mass shootings or hate crimes to show up

on their platforms. And in 2017, four major tech companies,

Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube, and Twitter took action to try to stop that kind of content

spreading across the social media landscape by creating the global internet forum to counter

...