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The Tech Policy Press Podcast
Governing Babel: John Wihbey on Platforms, Power, and the Future of Free Expression
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Good morning. I'm Justin Hendricks, editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. Drawn from the biblical story in the book of Genesis, Babel has come to stand for the challenge of communication across linguistic, cultural, and ideological divides. The confusion and fragmentation that arise when we no longer share a common understanding. Today's guest is the author of a new book that invokes Babel and tries to find an answer to how we can create the space to imagine a different information environment that promotes democracy and consensus rather than division and violence.
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I'm John Wibby, associate Professor of Media innovation at Northeastern University, and I'm the author of a new book governing the debate over social media platforms and free Speech and what comes next.
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John, I'm excited to speak to you about this book, which is just out from MIT Press. Going to talk through some of the themes in it and also hopefully connect it to your research and some of the events that have transpired, I'm sure, since you put this book into the publisher. But I want to just kind of start with your intent here in your introduction. You start with postcards from January 2021. And of course, for us listeners, when they think of January 2021, I'm sure they'll minds or immediately go to January 6, 2021. You, of course, start there. You talk about January 6, 2021, and the unique role that social media in the kind of current information environment appeared to play in the events of that day. But you point to other events that may be less familiar to the listener. Can you just Talk about why January 2021 was your window into this book?
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Yeah, my initial research around the kind of contemporary information environment and questions of content moderation really dove into the January 6th events. And I drew on a lot of documents and really secondary sources that other people had. But one of the things I noticed when I started trying to put it in context was that it really appeared that the kind of the month that the, you know, third decade of the 21st century started, there were sort of all kinds of warning signs around the world, and many they weren't politically connected, but they all had this common theme of the online environment and the kind of particular situation I think, presented by social media platforms. And so in Russia, you know, there was, there were huge protests around Alexei Navalny. It actually was really the. The sort of the catalyst for the events that put him in prison, then ultimately led to his death in India. There was the farmers protests that, you know, led to a lot of pushback from the Indian government and Prime Minister Modi. In Uganda, there were protests against the government where social media platforms were shut down, you know, by the government. So there were, you know, in a span of just a few weeks, there were some really major world events that all had this strong social media dimension to them. And so I felt like opening the book, which is really about, you know, the babble of confusion that is the world's sort of speech and communications environment. I felt like we needed to paint that global picture and show how different societies with different values are dealing with common challenges.
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You know, this podcast, we've come back again and again, including with your help. You've been on this podcast before, to questions around the intersection of information and social media platforms and society, and certainly the intersection between tech and democracy as a kind of primary concern. I'm struck by another thing in the introduction here. You know, you say your goal is to build towards a response principle. You call it a duty for all those running networked online platforms to take reasonable action when potential harms present themselves. You talk about this sort of collective responsibility we have as technologists and certainly as the people who are running these platforms. I found myself reading that and thinking, yes, absolutely. And yet it seems we're so far from such a principle at all being embraced by most of the oligarchs who are leading the big platforms that billions of people participate in at the moment. I don't know. Where do you start in your mind? What's the crisis level?
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Well, I think the crisis is really quite acute. I mean, I think there are some underlying economic and political factors that are also driving the polarization, the inequality that exists. But I think the online, you know, communications environment, I think is amplifying and exacerbating a lot of these underlying trends. And so I think it's. We're in quite an acute moment of crisis. But, you know, the book tries to point out that we've been in in crisis moments that at least are echoes of this moment and in particular moments where questions of communications policy and regulation were quite unclear. So you think of 100 years ago with the advent of broadcast technologies, and that's sort of. That's what the book tries to do, is to frame our particular crisis moment as part of a series of historical cycles that while many, I think, are pessimistic right now, if we think of this as part of a longer trajectory, and I call it 100 year journey, I do think there is going to be opportunity. And so I think it's our job as scholars, technologists, people doing work in civil society or working with the platforms or for the platforms, to try to think about where, where are we going? Where, where do we want to actually aspire to and to prepare ourselves for that moment when the opportunity, the, the policymaking moment may, may present itself. I, I, you know, look, it's, it's, it's the, it's the, the winter of our discontent. For those in the trust and safety community and the international human rights law community. I'm not naive, but, but I do think if we take a historical view, a longer view, that can present, I think, some bit of optimism, but it can also remind us we have an obligation to start thinking deeply about what we would want to ultimately aspire to.
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You take on red herrings like the marketplace of ideas, which other scholars have taken apart and shown the various weaknesses of that metaphor and trying to describe what's actually going on on social media platforms at the moment. You take us through a history of disinformation across, you know, mass media and beyond. I don't want to kind of, you know, rehash that entire history. But as far as thinking about what is most important to you when you frame up your ideas, where it's come to at the moment, I mean, you're hitting on, you know, Lippman and Dewey and John Stuart Mill and other people. What's most important for the listener to understand about that past and where we've got to.
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I think one of the most important things to recognize is that we've lost some, some visibility into sort of core values and issues, in my view. And I think by recovering some of the dialogues and debates in the past, we can begin to kind of discern what in particular, American culture could support and tolerate in terms of new rules. I think that's the most important thing, because right now we're in a state of real polarization and confusion. To me, the only way out is to look very deeply to the sort of first principles that have informed the country's past, sort of communications regulation, some of the past ideas that I think were lost in history, but if we resurface them, I think we can come to something that we might agree on. But again, I don't mean to sound Pollyanna ish, but I really believe that the first step is to get some sort of structured debate, some sort of structured forum, perhaps a regulatory forum in place. I don't think we're ready for rulemaking. I wouldn't pretend that you could get a bunch of Democrats and Republicans into a regulatory agency with commissioners right now and have them agree on almost anything relating to speech in the online environment. But I do think if we spent a few years putting things on the record, gathering evidence, creating access to some data, making the companies show up regularly, you know, we might move from some of the grandstanding that we've seen where the CEOs appear before Congress from time to time, and it's sort of a bunch of theatrics and spectacle. If we moved it to a more structured environment where we were sort of gathering evidence, slowly, looking at it, trying to get definitional clarity, thinking about the categories that we might, you know, want to gather data on, I think that could be a first step. And it's not dissimilar to what we did with the FCC. You know, coming out of the 20s, into the 30s, 1934, the FCC was founded. I mean, the FCC was kind of a mess for many decades in terms of, you know, what are the real rules for licensees for people who are doing broadcasting in the public sphere. And so I think, you know, I'd like to get to that moment where we at least have some general principles. And that's why I sort of try to articulate this response principle different than the public interest principle that the FCC opted as its sort of core value, and to try to start seeing if we can structure the dialogue and structure the evidence a little more carefully.
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One of the things that's perhaps most dispiriting about even thinking about that is the kind of current state of regulatory agencies and the United States. And certainly it's hard to imagine the Federal Communications Commission, which is kind of busy serving as a sensorial arm of the Trump administration, participating in a reasonable debate about these matters. It's almost like for you, you have to imagine a future state of our politics where folks might be willing to engage in reasonable discussion.
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I think that's right. And. And here I'm drawing on, you know, the work of, like, Tom Wheeler, who was the chair of the FCC under. Under President Obama, who's has some ideas about a new digital regulatory agency. Others have. Have put forward ideas for a digital or platform sort of regulator. There may be different ways to do this, and I'm not, you know, a policy scholar proper. So the book is nonfiction narrative and really does a lot of storytelling, but it does have an argument embedded in it. And I mean, you're absolutely right that it hardly seems the moment to reconstitute some kind of new fcc, which would inevitably be called a Big Brother, you know, operation, and maybe be dismissed out of hand. But I do wonder, as the sort of laissez faire speech consensus has fallen apart. And you see it, you see it with, with some, some serious reservations about what the FCC is doing, particularly with regard to the, to the Jimmy Kimmel jawboning. But in a lot of other respects, you start to see people on all sides of the aisle say, wait a minute, maybe, maybe there should be some rules and sort of valid principles that should govern this space. And, you know, after the Charlie Kirk assassination, we began to see people in the conservative camps start to talk about what should appear or should not appear on social media, under what conditions, with what functionality associated with it, on different platforms. And I actually think that's a good thing for people to start articulating views on where lines are. I think that's actually the beginning of a conversation. And it's worth, it's worth pointing out that the traditional civil libertarians on the left, the free speech maximalists on the right, have kind of started to change positions around issues of hate speech, around issues of disinformation, around issues of, of expression generally. And so the lines are getting really blurry, which to me says that there may be an opportunity in the coming years to try to figure out whether we could re. Articulate a set of rules about sort of large online communication spaces.
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Let me ask you to characterize, you know, something that is a big part of the middle book, couple of three chapters here, thinking about the First Amendment in the United States, thinking about the notion of free expression and human rights as they apply under different international frameworks. You know, I don't know. What's your sort of assessment of where we've got to. I mean, we had various other conversations on this podcast with First Amendment scholars in the past. We've had on people like Jamil Jaffer, we've had on Marianne Frank's various differing views on exactly where we're at. But what's your assessment based on this book, based on your effort here, of where we've got to. On those conversations?
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You know, those, the folks you mentioned are luminaries in the legal, you know, First Amendment scholarship and jurisprudence. And so, you know, in some ways, I'm treading into territory that's beyond my expertise as a scholar. But, but as a writer and as a, as someone who's trying to tell, you know, a deeper story, one of the things I wanted to try to really investigate is this, this suggestion that the First Amendment and international human rights law in particular, are somehow incompatible. And so what I try to excavate is the ways in which, in particular the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt, but you know, others, you know, really took the American First Amendment and made it global. And that informed the effort to create some kind of agreed upon set of international laws, particularly relating to human rights and expression. And so the book tries to remind folks that, you know, this was a very, I mean, it was a global project to create, you know, for example, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, other sort of landmark pieces of law. It was a deeply American project, though in many respects. And although, you know, recent administrations in the US have balked it, I think fully embracing a lot of this, it is in some ways deep in the DNA of the United States to try to think of the First Amendment as a kind of global principle that can help protect dissidents, can ensure free expression, can help human rights activists, can ultimately speak to the protection and the flourishing of democracy. I think we've lost that. You know, there's, there's a real pessimism about the ability of international law to really mean anything. And I, I, you know, in some ways I'm trying to tap into some memory of what the US did do and by extension could.
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Do you focus in particular on incitement? You have, you know, some recommendations for social media platforms and in particular and what they should do about the problem of incitement. Can we just touch on that one for a bit? Because, you know, going back to your entry point in January of 2021, I mean, that seems to be one of the most kind of, I guess, high level concerns that everyone has around social media. I mean, we're seeing it across the globe. I'm even thinking about the recent events in the UK where, you know, arguably disinformation, including claims spread by Elon Musk, you know, led to violence. We've seen many other examples of this in past. How, how do you think social media platforms should think about incitement in the current environment?
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Well, it's really, it's a really difficult question in terms of getting like really great definitional clarity and then the, the platforms being able to operationalize it. But I would say if someone is live streaming, effectively a domestic terrorist act, as happened on January 6th, but as we've seen around the world in different cases, I think a reasonable citizen, whether in the United States or around the world, would agree that the companies have some obligation to prevent that type of action from occurring on their platform. And when it's discovered to have sufficient capacity to do so. And so one of the things that came out of the, the, the, the January 6th congressional investigations was that for example, the, the, the Twitter platform now X which really just didn't have the capacity to control the online environment. There just weren't enough firefighters, there weren't hydrants. This is from some of the, the, the unpublished but kind of revealed reports that folks like Dean Jackson would pop in and in authoring, you know, the platform just didn't have enough people and didn't have the technical capacity to kind of chase this stuff down. You know, even stuff that's like clearly violating federal law and is dangerous. And it seems to me that requiring platforms to have enough personnel and enough technical capacity to be able to fight against, you know, civil, you know, incidents that involve terrorism, civil conflict, other kinds of really, you know, dangerous environments and situations seems like a reasonable thing. So maybe some kind of preparation standard and you know, certainly I think that would be a first step in terms of requiring some kind of protection against incitement. But the incitement chapter also looks at a few other possible ideas. One is this idea around sort of overt actions and actors. And I think helping the platforms to see part of their duty of care is doing more than just looking at messages, but also trying to discern what's going on, you know, outside the platform. If there is a group that is clearly trying to foment violence, like, you know, having a duty to actually do some additional work. And that may mean phone calls, it may mean discovery, it may be, it may mean calling law enforcement. But, but getting some context I think is also an obligation. You'd have to structure that really carefully. But I will say the platforms have contact, you know, with law enforcement every single day. There are hundreds of contacts. You know, this is really tricky territory because it gets into this collaboration that I think has become quite controversial. But one of the recommendations of the book is that if you got a new regulatory forum or agency, you could channel all of that government contact into a transparent environment where it's actually recorded. It's, there's some oversight, there's independent oversight. You know, right now what we have is a pretty willy nilly kind of hodgepodge of, of relationships between government job owning, you know, all these different considerations. And there's no sort of one place to put all these communications where there's sort of some oversight. So you know, the, the, and then the final thing I, I know in the, in the incitement chapter is just the issue of encryption, which I think is really bedeviling a lot of folks, including the platforms, but also law enforcement and civil society groups, because so much of the communication, particularly illicit communication, where violence might be advocated, where, you know, illegal conduct might be instigated, is done on end to end encrypted platforms. And so there's a huge question, what do you do with the, you know, with the, with the whatsapps and telegrams and signals of the world? Certainly these are incredibly important values, right to have privacy protection, and we wouldn't want to violate that. But there are some new ideas about, for example, message franking, where there would be a way of at least validating that some kind of bad activity is going on if someone within that communications channel wanted to report it out as a potential problem. Right now you can't, you can't verify the authenticity of any message because you can't get it out of that particular communication system. So I think, you know, there are some creative ideas. The privacy maximalists, you know, the, the encryption folks who are very scared about breaking encryption in any way, shape or form, you know, are having to kind of rethink some of the stuff that the computer scientists are coming up with. You know, here I'm just reporting on sort of existing debates. I don't have expertise in it, but I think it's quite interesting.
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You know, I think during the period of time that the court obviously was arguing about and civil society was arguing about the facts of the case in Murthy v. Missouri, you know, there was a desire, I remember myself even saying, you know, there needs to be a reasonable conversation about the relationship between social media platforms and government and the relationship between certainly law enforcement in social media platforms. But, you know, we're now in this phase where we've got this hodgepodge of, you know, third party vendors often kind of operating in this membrane somewhere between the state, social media, law enforcement, it seems to really complicate things. So I don't know exactly where we'll get to. And I guess the other complication is, you know, in some of these cases, it would take a government which wants to stop some of this activity rather than in some cases turn a blind eye or perhaps even encourage it in the United States. That seems to be an open question, right?
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I mean, we're just not in a political position right now to imagine a quick solution. But I will say, you know, as many problems we have in the United States, if you look across the world at what is happening in terms of governments meaningfully intervening with social media and online platforms to try to suppress dissent, to try to silence dissidents and human rights activists and journalists. It seems to me important that the United States creates some kind of interface for how this would work. How should government and communications platforms interface? I mean, I think that's a really big question. Sometimes it's very low level. You know, a local cop needs, you know, some access to some Facebook data because there's been a crime. Then there's the high level stuff that, you know, the NSA and the CIA and others get involved in that have national security implications. It seems to me that if the United States could provide a model for at least transparency, a central clearinghouse, as it were, and say, look, this is, this is, this is compatible with best practices and here's how we're going to do it, that we could have a shot at trying to get other countries to replicate that model so that some of them, I think in some ways, I mean, our, the jawboning that's going on in the United States is obviously super problematic, but there's other stuff going on around the world that is, you know, in, in many respects, objectively more problematic. And so I, we have to figure out what that interface between government and platforms looks like and to get some kind of transparency and oversight. Again, don't want to sound naive, but I do think it would be, it would serve the world well if we could figure out, like what the minimum viable kind of policy solution would be there and to then capture all of those government contacts in a way that's, that's structured and is subject to, to review. That could be courts, that could be, you know, regulators or, or independent watchdogs.
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The major focus on this book is, you know, what you talked about last time you were on this podcast and what you've written about for us as well, which is AI and epistemic risk. And I feel like this is probably going to be the area that dominates researchers like yours concern over the next several years, perhaps even beyond. Whereas social media has been the kind of primary concern for the last 15 now we're entering into a different phase. You introduce all types of terms here that feel like they're important for the listener to think about things like context collapse or container collapse. You know, you talk about different ways that artificial intelligence is being used to intervene in speech on social media platforms or to generate more speech, more content. I don't know. When you step back right now In September of 2025, what have we learned even from this early stage of a generative AI and its presence on the Internet.
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Well, we've learned a lot and I think one of the, the big lessons is really is the result of the proliferation of AI generated content. If we imagine what could happen in the coming years, we could very well imagine many of the platforms becoming semi unusable. I think, you know, I, I think about the AI revolution sometimes through the prism of my, my students, you know, who are 18 to 25, depending on where they are and what kind of degree they're pursuing. What's interesting is that they don't feel like this is their revolution. Suppose the social media revolution, right, where, which was very much youth driven. This is a, this is a revolution that is in some ways being imposed on them. I think that they see their, their platforms, you know, their backyard, which is, you know, Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and whatnot, being in some ways kind of polluted and I think is creating a lot of backlash and skepticism. And so I'm interested in how as they advance and start to become, you know, as the generation advances and they become people who are working in the professions, how they will see AI. So that's one thing, I don't know if that's coherent, but I think the AI slot problem is a big one and the authenticity of content is a real question. The term that I try to frame many of these things around in the book is epistemic risk. And so a lot of people in, in Silicon Valley and you know, some of the, you know, effective altruism community, others who are doing really good work, you know, often talk about existential risk and this is the sort of the killer robots or the, the, the sort of out of control AGI, you know, sci fi visions that people have. And I think those are, you know, I think it's important to think about those things. But I do wonder if really the bigger risk in the short term is epistemic insofar as the nature of knowledge changes, the ways in which we're able to have any sense of shared reality, a shared sense of facts is diminished even further. Obviously it's taken a big hit in the social era generally, but I worry if you go on X, for example, right now it is a real hall of mirrors sometimes. I mean, it's very difficult. I'm one of the people who stayed on it and I'm at least alert worker. And every day I have a very hard time discerning what is authentic and what is not, whether it's the voices or the images or the videos or the, you Know, the, the social data of likes and comments that, that inform how we see something, you know, a really ungoverned space online with a ton of generated AI, generative AI content I think can look really dark and really epistemically confusing.
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One of the things that you did as a part of this or you fed into the book, I suppose, is some polling around the world. We've talked mostly in a US context here. I should reassure my European listeners and listeners elsewhere that you do talk about the Digital Services act, you talk about the European model of regulation, you talk about various other countries considerations around these issues, particularly around speech. Can you talk a little bit about the polling and how some of those results play into the way you think about these things?
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Yeah, and I mean our, our team at Northeastern has survey research touching on, you know, different countries around the world. But there's been a lot of subsequent polling and survey research from a lot of other great groups. I was just reviewing a bunch and the couple, you know, sort of findings that I think unite both our, our work and the work of others, whether it's the, the TUM group in Europe, whether it's Pew, many other scholars out there doing this work. One is that the US Tends to be an outlier in terms of having stronger sort of libertarian, you know, kind of First Amendment fundamentalist views on social media. In other words, you know, real, real hesitancy around content moderation. Although I would point out that once you start to point to specific interventions, context, labeling, downranking stuff that's really nasty, a lot of the American public sort of comes around to seeing that as like a sensible trade off around the world. Pretty much the finding over and over again is that there is a very strong appetite among publics for some kind of content moderation. Once you get really specific on hate speech and disinformation, there are, you know, there's some variation, but I think, you know, the, I think the platforms and the right and the policymakers would be well served to just sort of look at this and say, you know, this is, this is strongly supported by publics. They, they see trade offs obviously between free expression and, and, you know, some degree of, of moderation. But the, but the polling and survey data is pretty consistent. That said, you know, even within regions, for example, like East Asia and I surfaced some of this data. I think it's from Pew, you know, where you would notionally have a lot of maybe cultural overlap, there are quite different sets of views on the trade off between keeping social stability and harmony and being able to say whatever you want. And so, you know, even within countries that border one another, you can see a lot of differences. But one of the findings from my research is that if you ask really high level questions, you often get tons of consensus, and if you ask more specific questions, you start to see more regional and country variation, you know, and, and the platforms, frankly are, you know, have to then operationalize, like, what the rules are. They have to respect national law. They always say that. So I, I would not pretend that it's an easy set of trade offs and balances to strike in each country, but I think there's broadly consensus around there needing to be some amount of content moderation. And so the conversation should be, you know, where are the thresholds? What are the definitions? How do we keep things roughly under control even while allowing lots of ideas to ventilate and to circulate?
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John, I want to come back to this idea of the response principle. You say early on that the book builds towards it, and by the end we come to this notion of it. You say the response principle offers an opportunity to consolidate a new set of expectations, a norm that could be broadly translated into local law. This principle derives from original traditions of media and communications governance thinking, namely First Amendment jurisprudence, the fairness Doctrine, the right of reply, power of counterspeech, various aspects of the long information justice movement, particularly relating to transparency and human rights impact assessments that have been developed over the past century. I just kind of want to give the listener the basics on this response principle, and maybe if you will convince me why it's not essentially a kind of appeal to the owners of these platforms to behave in a more moral fashion.
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C
Sure. And you know, that that's sort of my, maybe my rhetorical flourish to try to kind of bring it all together. But I do believe that if you look at the whole trajectory of particularly 20th century history and into the 21st century, and you look at American jurisprudence, the trends, that's what I'm trying to trace, that you see what, you know, one, one observer called a kind of rule of elementary fair play, which is that if people are criticized or there are harms that are levied against, you know, a certain group or certain set of people, that there should be some kind of response. And I think it's very deep actually, in sort of American culture, this elementary rule of fair play. I will note that there was this idea of the right of reply which got basically adopted around the world. It almost got enshrined in some of the UN's sort of origin doctrines. And whatnot, but it didn't quite make it actually. It's an interesting law and again, not a legal scholar, but if you trace its sort of history, it's the thing that gets rejected in the Tornio decision in the 70s, which basically says the government cannot basically tell publishers, newspapers, in that case, what to do. The case was about whether someone had the right to print a reply in a newspaper. It became central again in the NetChoice decision recently. So it kind of came sailing back because Tourneo is about rejecting a right of reply. And so broadly we see this sort of response kind of principle at play in that choice. It's interesting because if you read Justice Barrett's concurring decision, she makes a bunch of observations about how would algorithms play into all this. Are certain types of algorithms infrastructural or other type of algorithms expression that we should protect? And so I see in some ways recurring issues that are from our history that we've sort of gotten lost. For example, this right of reply being kind of resurfaced in new ways and in different ways in an algorithmic era. And so I'm trying to kind of do a genealogy of ideas in the book. I don't know how successful it is, but I try to bring that forward. And I had distinguished this response principle from a public interest principle, which is sort of where the FCC began. And I think we're dealing with very different communications capacities and capabilities. And I just don't, I can't imagine a public interest standard being implemented. You know, people have talked about let's get the Fairness Doctrine back somehow. And I just don't see a path for that. And a lot of policy scholars like Phil Napoli have looked at it pretty dubious. But I do think we might be able to within this sort of risk assessment framework and this response framework where there's a kind of rule of fair play, start to think about shaping a regulatory environment which asks the companies to show some kind of responsiveness and social responsibility. As Tom Wheeler has said, and he says in his book techlash, it probably should be effects based. To the extent that there is regulation, it probably shouldn't tell people exactly what to do. They need capacity for iteration. It needs to be agile. This is a really dynamic environment. It's very different than broadcast. But giving people directional instructions and making it an effects based kind of regulation I think would be good. And so I hope the response principle could be a way of being a kind of umbrella idea that could encompass a lot of different elements.
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John, you're Speaking to me from Stanford, you're attending the Trust and Safety Research conference there. This is the first year I haven't attended that conference. So maybe I'm, you know, slightly missing. Some of the folks that I know are there, including many tech policy press contributors and many of the folks that you cite in this book who are presenting, I don't know, what's your lay of the land? How does it feel in that community this year? A lot has changed since last year, not to mention the administration, the politics of everything, but certainly even the, I suppose, emphasis that the tech leaders are putting on this space. What's your make of it? And maybe I'll even challenge you. How does it tie into the book?
- [37:00]
C
Well, Justin, there are many tears have been shed because of your absence. I should say that first of all. And actually some of your colleagues are obviously here and it's, you know, it's a, it's always a wonderful event to see people who are working in common, you know, questions and, you know, industry typically is here, they're here this year. The AI companies are here in some force and, you know, so is Google. Some of the other companies didn't send as many representatives this year. And that might be a political thing and might be a scheduling thing. I think the atmosphere is one of great uncertainty because both government and the major platforms, I think, were quite engaged with this research community for many years and have pulled back, both because of the Trump administration's policies, but also the pivots from many of the major companies. I think there's more trepidation around all these issues of trust and safety which have been politicized. There's a sense that we're in a kind of winter cycle, I think, in trust and safety and international human rights law and other areas which are all relevant. Nevertheless, there's a great amount of interest in thinking about how generative AI is going to intersect with the communications platforms. And so I think there's a lot of energy around just trying to study this new variable in the equation. I think a lot of people are also starting to think about how they could help states, US States formulate their policies, whether it's AI, and we know there's been more than a thousand bills or something like that that touch on AI, but also trust and safety regulations, whether it's relating to youth harms, whether it's relating to other kinds of, you know, scams or other kinds of harms that may occur on platforms. People are really engaged, I think, at the state level. And also our, our colleagues In Europe, you mentioned the Digital Services act, the Digital Markets act, you know, the Online Safety Act. And in the UK there's a lot of regulatory action, you know, just across the pond. And so representatives from Ofcom, which is the British communications regulator, are here, other folks from across the world who are doing national level regulation and who are looking for ideas, allies are, you know, are in the mix here. And so I think in some ways the TNS community is sort of looking both sort of more locally within the United States, but then also internationally because a lot of the policy action, as they say in the book, the US Is sort of sitting on the sidelines now at the national level. There's really nothing going on at the federal level to speak of. And there doesn't seem to be any prospects for meaningful legislation to be passed in the next few years. But there's plenty of action both sort of down at the grassroots level and then also across the ocean.
- [40:05]
A
I appreciate that Dispatch. Can't imagine there are terribly many tears being shed, but of course I'll shed one for missing the opportunity. And also for visiting my favorite restaurant in Palo Alto, Zerbines, which is excellent Pakistani food. Recommend it to any listeners. But John, thank you for taking the time to speak to me from the conference and commend my listeners to the book governing the debate over social media platforms and free speech and what comes next out from MIT Press. Thank you so much.
- [40:40]
C
Thanks Justin.
- [40:52]
B
That's it for this episode. I hope you'll send your feedback. You can write to me at JustInEckPolicy Press. Thanks to John, thanks to my co founder Brian Jones and thank you for.
- [41:01]
C
Listening Tech Policy Press.