Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The (Content Moderation) Eras Tour
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
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In a special episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Ben and Mike discuss (with apologies to Tay-Tay) the three eras of content moderation in the media and what comes next.
Their conversation builds on Ben’s essay in the soon-to-be-published Trust, Safety, and the Internet We Share Multistakeholder Insights, a new book looking at the evolution of the Trust & Safety industry and how platform policies decisions are made. The pre-print is available online.
Together, they unpack three distinct phases: The Strange Fascination Era (2003–2015), when newsrooms powered platform growth and treated social media as an exciting new frontier; The “We’re Watching You” Era (2016–2020), when investigative reporting exposed online harms and pushed platforms to formalise Trust & Safety; and The Mask Off Era (2021–present), as platforms retreat from working with the media and the commitment to moderation waned.
We’ll be back next week with our regular episode.