Posted below is our tentative conference agenda, subject to change. Click on each session to expand for a list of panelists and a description of panel content. Please check back here for updates.
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Get to know other people in the content moderation space over a breakfast of bagels, muffins, fruit, juice, and coffee.
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Description:
Tim Lordan, Executive Director of the Internet Education Foundation and a member of the COMO conference organizing committee, will offer brief remarks thanking the conference’s sponsors, outlining its goals, and giving attendees an idea of what they can expect throughout the course of the day.
Tim Lordan Executive Director, Internet Education Foundation
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Description:
Content moderation has been going on for as long as the Internet has existed, but how is it governed? In this panel, we’ll take a look at the laws Congress has passed, or is considering passing, to regulate this field, and we’ll examine how those laws interact within First Amendment jurisprudence, campaign finance laws, and agency enforcement action. We’ll also examine how solutions mandated by Congress interact with company- or industry-specific self-regulation.
Eric Goldman Director, High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara Law
Tiffany Li Resident Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School
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Description:
You probably know when your car is working, but you likely don’t know how, exactly, it works. Content moderation is often the same way; many of us have heard of things like takedown notices, account suspensions, and flagged content, but we don’t understand the “machinery” behind those things. In this panel, tech executives will give you glimpse “beneath the hood” of the processes their companies use to ensure that user-generated content meets their community standards and complies with the law.
Casey Burton Senior Corporate Counsel, Match Group
Becky Foley Director of Content, TripAdvisor
Del Harvey Vice President for Trust & Safety, Twitter
Shirin Keen Associate General Counsel, Twitch
Sean McGilvray Director, Legal Affairs and Trust & Safety at Vimeo
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Network with other COMO attendees over a refreshing cop of coffee.
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Description:
This panel addresses the same topics covered in the earlier “Under the Hood” panel, but with insights from executives at another set of UGC companies.
Tal Niv Vice President of Law & Policy, GitHub
Nora Puckett Senior Litigation Counsel, Google
Jacob Rogers Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation
Peter Stern Policy Manager for Risk, Facebook
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Network with other conference attendees over a catered lunch and steel yourself for an afternoon of more COMO excitement.
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Description:
One fact of content moderation that has become increasingly clear is that the job is more art than science: The line drawing required of moderators can seem like an impossible task where there is often no single “right” answer. This session will invite audience members to explore the challenges of content moderation firsthand by “making the call”: Faced with the decision of leaving a given piece of content up, removing it, escalating the decision, or even demonetizing it, what will you do?
Emma Llanso Director, Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy & Technology
Mike Masnick President and CEO, Techdirt
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Description:
The Internet is sometimes characterized as a “lawless no-man’s-land,” but in reality, Internet companies often work closely with law enforcement agencies to find criminals and stop crimes. This panel will look at how Internet companies work with law enforcement agencies and the opportunities, challenges, and concerns created by such efforts.
Pablo Peláez Europol Representative to the United States
Jacob Rogers Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation
Dan Sutherland Associate General Counsel, National Protection and Programs Directorate, U.S Department of Homeland Security
Clara Tsao Chief Technology Officer, Interagency CVE Task Force, Department of Homeland Security
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Fight the afternoon slump with a caffeine-fueled boost.
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Description:
Many people look at the proliferation of objectionable content on UGC platforms and wonder why tech companies can’t just use some “tech magic” to make it all go away. This panel will examine how, while AI and machine learning have made great strides in being able to moderate content, there are some things that machines just can’t do.
Jesse Blumenthal Manager of Technology & Innovation, Charles Koch Institute
Casey Burton Senior Corporate Counsel, Match Group
Frank Carey Machine Learning Engineer, Vimeo
Ryan Kennedy Senior Manager & Head of Moderation, Twitch
Peter Stern Policy Manager for Risk, Facebook
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Description:
So we all agree that some content moderation needs to take place, but how do we know it’s not going too far? How do we know that tech companies aren’t censoring content from marginalized groups or certain political opinions? How do companies draw the line between information that makes someone uncomfortable and communications that constitute harassment or abuse? This panel will examine how companies seek to gain their users’ trust by being transparent about how their algorithms and human moderators interact with content.
Kevin Koehler Trust & Safety, Automattic
Rebecca MacKinnon Director, Ranking Digital Rights, New America's Open Technology Institute
David Post Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute
Kaitlin Sullivan Content Policy Manager, Facebook
Alex Walden Counsel, Free Expression and Human Rights, Google
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Continue the conversation over cocktails following the summit at Happy Hour co-hosted with the Internet Law & Policy Foundry.
Where: Barcode (Cash Bar)
1101 17th St NW, Washington, DC 20036 (map)