interview with WEKU on Buffalo shooting and social media content moderation

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Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning.

I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation. I’m also a bit disappointed that our conversation about 4chan in the early part of the interview got cut; I get why (probably not as interesting to the average viewer than some of my more generally-reaching comments), but I also think it’s important to understand that there are these dark places out there on the internet and that they are leading to tragedies like Buffalo.

Whatever my quibbles, though, I’m glad for the chance to be interviewed, and I hope that what I had to say (even if I could have been more forceful) can help people shift their perspective away from empty (and, often, bad faith) discussions about free speech on social media platforms and toward the more important, more difficult discussions about content moderation that we need to be having. It was also fun to have a candid picture of my office appear with the article; there are a lot of my little geekeries hidden in there.

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