Program on Platform Regulation

Unlike many other proposals to curtail platform power, middleware does not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In the United States, that makes middleware a path forward in a neighborhood full of dead ends.

In a new blog post, Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center, looks at the need for transparency when it comes to content moderation and asks, what kind of transparency do we really want?

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic speaks with Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center and an expert on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Questions of state and private power are deeply intertwined. To understand and protect internet users’ rights, we must understand and engage with both.

What should platforms like Facebook or YouTube do when users post speech that is technically legal, but widely abhorred? In the U.S. that has included things like the horrific video of the 2019 massacre in Christchurch. What about harder calls – like posts that some people see as anti-immigrant hate speech, and others see as important political discourse?

The Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) 2019 ruling in Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland** addresses courts’ powers to issue injunctions requiring internet hosting platforms to proactively monitor content posted by their users.

The “Good Samaritan” principle ensures that online intermediaries are not penalized for good faith measures against illegal or other forms of inappropriate content. This is a rule that applies to concrete types of intermediaries, particularly those providing hosting services.