Trust & Safety & Integrity & Governance

Impossible Tradeoffs with Katie Harbath

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube!

This week, I welcome Professor Kate Klonick to the podcast. The name of this episode comes from some amazing swag Kate made for a conference she put on last year on the history of the Trust and Safety profession. (You know how much I love swag.)

Kate is among the foremost experts on many things, including platform governance of speech. In 2018, she wrote a paper at Harvard titled “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” which was a first-of-its-kind behind-the-scenes look at how platforms handle content moderation.

In 2021, she wrote a piece for the New Yorker about how then-Facebook set up the Oversight Board titled, “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court.”

Recently, she has been writing on these topics at her Substack The Klonickles. One of her pieces I cite all the time is about the end of the golden age of tech accountability where in 2023 she makes the point:

[F]or all the of the complaining we’ve done about Big Tech’s lack of cooperation with accountability, transparency, and research efforts, I unfortunately think we’ll look back on the last five years as a Golden Age of Tech Company access and cooperation.

We talk about all of this and more. Enjoy!

Kate Klonick teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick's research focuses on law and technology, most recently on private platform governance of online speech.

Klonick's scholarly work has appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review, and The Southern California Law Review. Her popular press writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications.

Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit. She is an affiliated fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is on leave for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University.

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