From the inside: When platforms engage with government

Impossible Tradeoffs with Katie Harbath

I have to apologize to you all. I forgot to put a poll in last week’s podcast notes about our fun tradeoff, which was how you would want to unwind.

I won’t make that same mistake this week! The hard question for you today is:

This week, we are joined by a bunch of exciting guests.

First up is Diane Chang.

Diane is a journalist-turned-product manager and was most recently Meta's election integrity product manager. She is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School.

For our first conversation, I wanted to talk to Diane about my current obsession with the role of news and politics on online platforms, given her experience as a journalist and a product manager.

Then, I welcome three of my favorite people who are part of the OG Facebook DC crew - Adam Conner, Brooke Oberwetter, and Matt Perault. Our conversation centered on jawboning: “informal government efforts to persuade, cajole, or strong-arm private platforms to change their content-moderation practices.”

From the top left, going clockwise, are Adam, Brooke, myself, and Matt.

We all worked on Facebook’s public policy team, regularly engaging with governments worldwide. Two things spurred this conversation. The first was Adam asking which of them I would have on as a guest first, and then a recent piece Matt and I wrote for the Knight First Amendment Institute on our experiences.

I didn’t dare pick between them, so I asked them all to come on together after Brooke responded to our piece on X/Twitter about how we should talk about Congressional letters as a form of jawboning. I thought that was a great point and invited them all to talk about their experiences.

Enjoy!

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