evelyn douek joined Mathew Ingram on Galley by Columbia Journalism Review, a forum for talking about journalism, to discuss free speech, platform regulation, political advertising, and Facebook’s Oversight Board.
“I think transparency should be the focus of a lot of platform regulation - we can't fix problems that we don't fully understand yet. Of course, this is easy to say and hard to craft effectively,” douek said during the discussion. “But at the moment the incentives are all wrong: there is little incentive for platforms to be fully transparent because that opens them up to criticism (see, eg, the flack Twitter cops when it releases datasets around foreign interference for mistakes they make versus the opacity of Facebook and Google's similar take-downs), or Facebook for the high-reporting of child sexual abuse material). We need to take transparency away from being at the beneficence of the companies.”