Progressives Push for More Moderation of ‘Lawful but Awful’ Content on Political Podcasts

A prominent liberal think tank that has developed an online tool to monitor political podcasts in America is suggesting that tech companies could use it to police the ecosystem for “lawful but awful” content that may have “harmful societal effects.”The Brookings Institution, which rolled out the tool earlier this week, is lamenting that tech companies are not doing enough to police a medium that now reaches more than 100 million listeners every month. Last year, by some estimates, there were 850,000 active podcasts being produced around the world, up from 700,000 just a year earlier.Podcasts about politics are a big part of the network distributed by platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts, Brookings reports, and conservatives are producing about three times as much content as liberals. These podcasts are a prime avenue by which “misinformation” about Covid vaccines and treatments and “election fraud narratives in the lead up to January 6” spread, the report says.“Despite the real-world harms caused by this type of misinformation and the medium’s growing reach and influence, to-date little research has explored the role of podcasting in shaping political conversations due to a myriad of technical and other challenges,” the Brookings report says.The number of episodes produced by 80 prominent political podcasts has exploded in recent years, and most of them are conservative-leaning. Brookings Institution/Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative The author of the new report as well as earlier ones about the podcasting industry, Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings data analyst, writes that the new dashboard will allow researchers to monitor the conversation topics of 79 prominent political podcasts and will be updated three times a week. The tool will also monitor the partisan leanings of the podcasts and the most popular words used in those programs.In an earlier post titled “Policy recommendations for addressing content moderation in podcasts,” Ms. Wirtschafter said it is incumbent on the platforms that distribute content to come up with ways to address what she calls the “spread of hate speech, misinformation, and related content” via podcasts in the same manner that other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have done.“Just as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other digital platforms have struggled for years with difficult questions about what content to allow on their platforms, podcast apps must now weigh them as well,” Ms. Wirtschafter states. “From new policies and user interfaces to novel regulatory approaches, the podcast ecosystem can and should employ far more robust content-moderation measures.”Ms. Wirtschafter states unequivocally that she is opposed to government actors deciding what is permissible content on the platforms or pressuring them to ban certain types of content, but government control may not be needed if recent reports about White House collusion with tech companies during the Covid pandemic and after January 6, 2021, are accurate. The platforms apparently are willing to censor content themselves without legal orders to do so.Documents and emails unearthed in recent litigation by a group of Republican attorneys general show that at least 45 officials at the White House and other federal agencies communicated with technicians at Facebook beginning in summer 2021 to suppress so-called misinformation about the Covid pandemic and vaccines. In addition to the White House, the agencies included the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Election Assistance Commission, among others.In a separate lawsuit, a former New York Times reporter and famous Covid skeptic, Alex Berenson, retrieved emails and internal chat logs at Twitter showing that employees of that company were pressured by White House officials to expel him from the service. Mr. Berenson was banned from Twitter in August 2021 but reinstated last month.Just this week, reports surfaced that Facebook has cooperated with the FBI and turned over private messages on that platform of people who discussed attending the January 6 riot at the Capitol. A number of both public and private groups on Facebook were used to help organize the events of the day, the report stated.The Republican attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt, one of those leading the lawsuit against Facebook, won a court order last month forcing the Justice Department to turn over communications between federal officials and employees at the social media platforms.“We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” Mr. Schmitt, who is running as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate this fall, said. “We’re just getting started.”

Progressives Push for More Moderation of ‘Lawful but Awful’ Content on Political Podcasts

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

American Socialists To Join New Cuba Aid Flotilla Despite Hints of Negotiations Aimed at Ousting Communist Leadership

Trump’s Pared-Back Tariffs Return to Trade Court Under New Legal Rationale

North Korean Leader’s Daughter, 13, Shows Up at Missile-Firing Exercise Looking All the More Like His Heir Apparent

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

Will Hollywood Bite Its Tongue at the Oscars?

Reuters Claims To Have Unmasked Banksy After Extensive Investigation