Roundup of Materials from HTLI’s Content Moderation & Removal Conference

On February 2, 2018, the High Tech Law Institute held a groundbreaking conference, “Content Moderation and Removal at Scale.” The conference explored how Internet companies operationalize their content moderation and removal processes. Over 200 people attended the conference in person, and hundreds more watched the livestream. This post rounds up some conference-related materials, including videos, speaker slides, articles from an essay package published in Techdirt, and more.

General:

Conference website

Conference hashtag discussion at #HTLI

Photo album

Videos:

Welcome and Introduction (including Sen. Ron Wyden’s opening remarks)

Legal Overview (presentations by Eric Goldman and Daphne Keller)

Overview of Each Company’s Operations (presentations from Automattic, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Medium, Pinterest, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Yelp). If you only have time to watch one video, this is the one.

The History and Future of Content Moderation (panel featuring Nicole Wong, Charlotte Willner, and Dave Willner; moderated by Kate Klonick)

Session A: Employee/Contractor Hiring, Training and Mental Well-being (panelists from Automattic, Medium, and Pinterest)

Session B: Humans vs. Machines (panelists from Facebook, Wikimedia, and Yelp)

Session C: In-sourcing to Employees vs. Outsourcing to the Community or Vendors (panelists from Nextdoor, Pinterest, Reddit, Wikimedia, and Yelp)

Session D: Transparency and Appeals (panelists from Automattic, Medium, and Patreon)

Speaker Slides:

Eric Goldman, US law overview

Daphne Keller, foreign law overview

Adelin Cai, Pinterest

Aaron Schur, Yelp

Techdirt Essays:

Eric Goldman, It’s Time to Talk About Internet Companies’ Content Moderation Operations

Kate Klonick, Why The History Of Content Moderation Matters

Kevin Bankston & Liz Woolery, We Need To Shine A Light On Private Online Censorship

Alex Feerst, Implementing Transparency About Content Moderation

Jacob Rogers, International Inconsistencies In Copyright: Why It’s Hard To Know What’s Really Available To The Public

Adelin Cai, Putting Pinners First: How Pinterest Is Building Partnerships For Compassionate Content Moderation

Tarleton Gillespie, Moderation Is The Commodity

Paul Sieminski & Holly Hogan, Why (Allegedly) Defamatory Content On WordPress.com Doesn’t Come Down Without A Court Order

Sarah T. Roberts, Commercial Content Moderation & Worker Wellness: Challenges & Opportunities

Colin Sullivan, Trust Building As A Platform For Creative Businesses

Coverage:

Law.com: 5 Takeaways From Tech Leaders’ Content Moderation Conference

Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic: Inside Facebook’s Fast-Growing Content-Moderation Effort

Irina Raicu of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics: Notes from a Content Moderation Conference

Emily Bell of The Guardian: How can we regulate our savage market for instant news?

Yair Cohen of Inforrm: Social media content moderation and removal policies: Some rare insights

Washington Post, AI will solve Facebook’s most vexing problems, Mark Zuckerberg says. Just don’t ask when or how.

Santa Clara Law 3L Olivia Manning-Giedraitis’s recap

Santa Clara Law 3L Gicel Tomimbang’s recap

We are planning a DC offering on May 7 and an NYC offering on October 25!