Cybersecurity & Tech Surveillance & Privacy

The Lawfare Podcast: Brian Fishman on Violent Extremism and Platform Liability

Jen Patja, Quinta Jurecic, Brian Fishman
Friday, May 12, 2023, 12:00 PM
Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work.

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work. That’s the short description, but the paper is really about so much more—about how the work of content moderation actually takes place, how contemporary analyses of the harms of social media fail to address the history of how platforms addressed Islamist terror, and how we should understand “the original sin of the internet.” 

For this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down to talk with Brian about his work. Brian is the cofounder of Cinder, a software platform for the kind of trust and safety work we describe here, and he was formerly a policy director at Meta, where he led the company’s work on dangerous individuals and organizations.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of The Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Brian Fishman is a co-founder of Cinder, an integrated software platform for Trust and Safety. Previously, he served as a Policy Director at Facebook and the Director of Research for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Fishman is the author of The Master Plan: ISIS: al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory (Yale University Press, 2016).

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