Video, Photos & Presentations

Description:
Tim Lordan, Executive Director of the Internet Education Foundation and a member of the COMO conference organizing committee, offered brief remarks thanking the conference’s sponsors, outlining its goals, and giving attendees an idea of what they could expect throughout the course of the day.

Tim Lordan Executive Director, Internet Education Foundation

Video of Opening Remarks

Description:
Content moderation has been going on for as long as the Internet has existed, but how is it governed? In this panel, we took a look at the laws Congress has passed, or is considering passing, to regulate this field, and we examined how those laws interact within First Amendment jurisprudence, campaign finance laws, and agency enforcement action. We also examined 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

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 offered a 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

Description:
This panel addressed 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

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 invited 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 would they do?

Emma Llanso Director, Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy & Technology Mike Masnick President and CEO, Techdirt

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 looked 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

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 examined 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

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 examined 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

Description:
Gary Ashcroft, a Fellow at the Internet Education Foundation and a member of the COMO conference organizing committee, offered brief remarks thanking the conference’s sponsors, speakers, and attendees.

Gary Ashcroft Internet Education Foundation

Video of Concluding Remarks