Tech in the Era of Accountability

Yashad Kulkarni22min

Speaker 1

00:04

Now for all the early stage startup founders beginning now on the sessions tab TechCrunch, staff will be on hand to help you fine tune your pitches. But here on the main stage, we have a super interesting speaker coming up by calling Taylor Hatmaker sat down with the CEO of the anti defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, a few days ago to chat about what are the possible policy solutions for online content moderation.

Speaker 2

00:36

Thank you so much for joining us. We'll just get right into it today. Your work at the anti defamation League, increasingly, in recent times has intersected more and more with technology, Silicon Valley and what platforms are doing. I was wondering if you could describe a little bit about that kind of work that you've been doing in recent years?

Speaker 3

00:53

Sure, I'm happy to tell. So at the ADL, we're the oldest anti hate organization in the world. But we deeply believe that today, the frontline and fighting hate is really on Facebook. I mean, there's just no question that social media has become a breeding, breeding ground for kind of bigotry, that is offensive and ugly in all respects. Now, we've known this for years. But when I came on board, about five and a half years ago, I really wanted to focus on this, and try to get causal and right to the heart of the problem. So we could finally turn it around. So in 2017, we actually opened an office in Silicon Valley, our Center for Technology and Society, we were the first civil rights group with an actual presence in the valley. And for me, that was sort of second nature, because I had worked in the valley for years before taking this job, you know, both raising money on Sandhill road, managing teams of engineers building products. So through that center in for Technology and Society, we've been doing multiple lines of work. Number one, we've been working directly with the companies because I believe you've got to engage these businesses, and their engineering talent in their capacity for information, and show them how it's in their interests to try to address the intolerance that's so rampant on their services. So we're engaging with all of the big businesses. But even as we typically call them in we also don't hesitate to call them out. And we did that with our stop a for profit campaign last year, which we've talked about. Secondly, we're doing a lot of really interesting r&d. So we have a really exciting Fellows program, we bring in academics and researchers, and others to study specific aspects and issues of hate and harassment online. And then finally, we're looking at policy, I think it's very clear that we can't just rely on self regulation to create a better, safer, less toxic online environment. We need the regulators, we need the legislators to pay attention. So we're working that's really interesting issues at the federal and state level on that front as well.

Speaker 2

03:03

I'm glad that you mentioned the research work that you all do. You know, I think a lot of that work is really important. You will put out, you know, a ton of data that you collect a ton of reports on the extremism stuff like white supremacy, stuff like misinformation, deadly conspiracies, all of it. And the question I have for you is, do you think that the onus is on these companies, especially major tech platforms, we're talking Facebook primarily, but you know, YouTube, Twitter, to take more of that research in house? Do you think that they need to invest like, you know, their extraordinary resources, and in doing more of this kind of work themselves?

Speaker 3

03:38

It's a really interesting question. You know, I think, you know, we try to be a very evidence based with a fact oriented organization, meaning we ground our advocacy in research and data, I think it's critical. We've been doing audits of anti semitic incidents for 40 plus years, we've been doing admin attitudinal surveys for more than 50 years. We also do surveys now of online hate and harassment. And the picture is pretty grim. And our 2020 survey, we found that 44% of social media users reported experiencing some degree of harassment on different platforms. 28% characterized it as severe, repeated harassment. I mean, think about that. That's more than one out of four users. And the platform where it happens most frequently is Facebook. That isn't a function of the fact that it's the largest social media service in the world with more than 3 billion active users a month. It's because the platform itself has failed to take the simple basic steps to keep their users safe and secure. So then to the question about, well, do the companies have a bigger need to do more research on this? I'll give you a two part answer. Yes, the companies need to be investing real recent sources to make sure they understand the problem on their platforms. And they're building, you know, the products in a more safe and secure way creating features and functionality to address these issues. That is totally within their wheelhouse. Take Facebook, for example, they brought in $70 billion in 2019. Right, it is a company of gargantuan in size in global ambition. And they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to research their different products and services. The idea that they can't spend a little bit of more money to more rigorously measure the hate on their own platform. That's a laughable proposition, of course, they should be doing this. If it really were a priority, you would resort to that priority, we failed. We haven't seen Facebook do that yet, they failed to take the kind of action. But on the other hand, I would say Taylor, we can't rely only on the companies themselves. I believe that civil society, organizations like ADL, but there are many others in this space to organizations like Common Sense Media, or free press, or CBT or EF f so many others, they have critical roles to play as watchdogs to keep the companies honest, again, time and time, time and time again, the businesses have not demonstrated the kind of transparency around these issues. They've been unwilling like Facebook, in particular, to publish the data. They have been, you know, kept their doors close to things like independent audits of their hate content. So I think while they need to do more, they also need to create the space for watchdogs and researchers and academics to study this issue on an independent third party basis.

Speaker 2

06:53

While we're talking about tech companies doing more and taking their own steps, I'd love to talk a little bit about January 6, and the attack on the capital.

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