New hires and new regulatory mires
Plus, our words on content moderation, our podcast episode on Apple's CSAM prevention features, and a whole lot of live-tweeting.
We are thrilled to announce that Bilal Sayyed has joined TechFreedom as Senior Competition Counsel. Bilal’s years of experience working as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the FTC and his 20 combined years in private practice and government service make him an outstanding asset to our team. You can (and should) follow him on Twitter at @BilalKSayyed for cutting-edge antitrust insights. To schedule a conversation or interview with Bilal, please contact us at media@techfreedom.org!
Aspen Forum. Berin live-tweeted the annual Aspen Forum organized by our friends at the Technology Policy Institute — especially the first panel on the reinvention of antitrust law. Check out Bilal’s liveweeting of that panel.
Content Moderation. Over at Techdirt, Corbin has some meditations on the Republican Party’s crusade against social media content moderation. We all know that the GOP spends a lot of time these days obsessing over what can and cannot be said on Twitter and Facebook. But why? That the subject has become so central to Republican identity has something to do (Corbin proposes) with the fact that the party currently lacks a coherent governing philosophy. Without a constructive policy platform to promote, the Right has instead rallied around a cheap rhetorical ploy—claiming to be “censored” by “elites.” Check out both the essay and Corbin’s accompanying Twitter thread, in which he offers a couple additional thoughts.
Apple. On a topical Tech Policy Podcast, Corbin speaks with Apple’s chief privacy officer, Jane Horvath, about Apple’s new child-protection features. Do these measures present a threat to privacy? Two features, in particular, have attracted attention and scrutiny. One is an iCloud scanning feature, which will use image hashes to identify and report iCloud accounts that contain collections of known child sexual abuse material. The other is a messaging feature, which will seek to flag sexually explicit images sent to or from childrens’ accounts, and to discourage children from sending or receiving them. Jane explains how these features work, and addresses some of the concerns that privacy advocates have raised about them. It’s a great episode for anyone who owns an iPhone, has children, or wants to protect their privacy. So, pretty much everyone. Don’t miss it.
Algorithms. One of our interns, Santana Boulton, wrote a piece on algorithms and the First Amendment. Santana explains that, under the First Amendment, restrictions on algorithms qualify as compelled speech. Computer code, like any other language, expresses protected speech. “The state can no more tell a company what code to write than it could tell them what to write in Latin,” Santana writes. We are thrilled that Santana will continue as an intern at TechFreedom this fall.
Misinformation. Last Week, Ari was a panelist at the American Public Health Association’s Symposium on Medical Health Misinformation, where he discussed how the First Amendment limits government regulation of COVID misinformation. He was quoted in Jacobin explaining why amending Section 230 also won’t fix the problem.