My Next Video is Going to Be About… | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

So, I guess time to let you all in on what the topic of my next video is going to be! And... *drumroll*... I’m going to be returning to talking about our good old friend Elon Musk.

Or… kind of.

As usual, I’m going to be using Elon Musk’s current (potential?) acquisition of Twitter as an excuse to talk about freedom of speech, content moderation and the private ownership of social media platforms more broadly. In fact, I’m attempting to push the conversation beyond Americanised, “First Amendment” conceptualisations of “free speech” by taking my queues from Musk’s description of Twitter as the “digital town square” and analysing things through the lens of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere”.

My hope is that doing so is a slightly more productive way of discussing freedom of speech and expression than pretending that the choice is simply "to moderate or not to moderate". I’m also hoping it can help to account for some of the more complicated conversations that are starting to emerge in which the issue is not so much content moderation in the sense of blocks and bans but about how algorithms allegedly prioritise or deprioritise certain posts or accounts (although my feeling is that this happens much less than people think it does).

Work on the video is going pretty well so far. It’s only been a couple of weeks since the last video went out and I’ve already got a significant amount of words on paper for the script! While the continued twists and turns of Musk’s Twitter-purchasing saga have been a little bit annoying to contend with, I think it’s going to lead to a really interesting video. And I’ve already got some really cool ideas lined-up for how I’m going to film it.

And outside of work?

Last weekend, I ran the Half Marathon that I’ve been training for over the past few months. And it went really well!

I’d hoped to complete it in under 1 hour, 45 minutes and ended up doing so in 1 hour, 37 minutes; so everything pretty much went according to plan! It was an absolute scorcher of a day which, whilst being a little bit hot, I find really boosts my mood which in turn makes me run much quicker. I ran it with a friend and his Mum and so, on top of the race going well, it was also a really fun day out. Although I did end up with some sunburn…

With the Half Marathon out of the way, I’m now about to begin my training for the London Marathon, which I’ll be running in October. I’m running that race in aid of a UK housing charity called Shelter, so if you’d like to sponsor me to do so, you can find out a little more information here: https://tcslondonmarathon.enthuse.com/pf/tom-nicholas

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

My reading this week has mostly been guided by the video I’m working on. But I think a couple of those pieces were interesting enough that I wanted to recommend them here!

Alongside Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (which isn’t the most gripping of books, although I’ve been finding it really interesting), I’ve been reading a few journal articles about content moderation and the online public sphere. One of these is a Harvard Law Review article by Kate Klonick called The New Governors: The People, Rules and Processes Governing Online Speech. It provides a really good overview of the history of the laws surrounding online content moderation and has really helped to inform one of the early sections of my video.

As I mentioned above, I’m keen to give some focus to the rise of algorithmic curation of social media platforms alongside outright block/ban content moderation and this article is just a tiny bit too old to be able to include discussion of that stuff. However, it covers it in a really readable and comprehensive way. So, if you’d ever wondered what role the Wolf of Wall Street played in establishing US legal norms of content moderation, go check it out!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Fridayish Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!