COMO: Content Moderation at Scale: Full Schedule

The COMO Summit is a followup to the “Content Moderation And Removal At Scale Conference” held at Santa Clara Law in February 2018. The DC COMO Summit will further explore the vexing challenges that Internet platforms face in moderating content online. Recent phenomena like #deepfakes, Russian election interference, and extremist content are just some of the challenges that our experts will explore at COMO.

8:30am EDT

Breakfast

Get to know other people in the content moderation space over a breakfast of bagels, muffins, fruit, juice, and coffee.

Monday May 7, 2018 8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

9:00am EDT

Opening Remarks

Tim Lordan, Executive Director of the Internet Education Foundation and a member of the COMO conference organizing committee, will offer brief remarks thanking the conference's sponsors, outlining its goals, and giving attendees an idea of what they can expect throughout the course of the day.

Speakers

Tim Lordan

Curator, State of the Net, Internet Education Foundation

Monday May 7, 2018 9:00am - 9:10am EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

9:10am EDT

Foundations: The Legal and Public Policy Framework for Content

Content moderation has been going on for as long as the Internet has existed, but how is it governed? In this panel, we’ll take a look at the laws Congress has passed, or is considering passing, to regulate this field, and we’ll examine how those laws interact within First Amendment jurisprudence, campaign finance laws, and agency enforcement action. We’ll also examine how solutions mandated by Congress interact with company- or industry-specific self-regulation.

Speakers

Eric Goldman

Director, Santa Clara University School of Law

Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he is also Director of the school’s High Tech Law Institute. His research and teaching focuses on Internet law, intellectual property and marketing law.Before becoming a full-time law professor, Eric... Read More →

Tiffany Li

Resident Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School

Tiffany C. Li is an attorney and Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She is an expert on privacy, intellectual property, and law and policy at the forefront of new technological innovations.Li leads the Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 9:10am - 9:40am EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

9:45am EDT

Under the Hood: UGC Moderation (Part 1)

You probably know when your car is working, but you likely don’t know how, exactly, it works. Content moderation is often the same way; many of us have heard of things like takedown notices, account suspensions, and flagged content, but we don’t understand the “machinery” behind those things. In this panel, tech executives will give you glimpse “beneath the hood” of the processes their companies use to ensure that user-generated content meets their community standards and complies with the law.

Speakers

Casey Burton

Senior Corporate Counsel, Match Group

Casey Burton is Senior Corporate Counsel at Match Group, the global leader in online dating products with brands such as Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid, and others. His responsibilities include legal and compliance work for US brands across a wide range of areas, and providing legal support... Read More →

Becky Foley

Director of Content, TripAdvisor

Becky Foley is Director of Content for TripAdvisor where she manages policy, moderation, and fraud detection for TripAdvisor’s user-generated content. Becky started with the Content team in 2013 and now leads a team that includes more than 200 review compliance specialists and fraud... Read More →

Del Harvey

Vice President of Trust & Safety, Twitter

As Vice President for Trust and Safety at Twitter, Del Harvey works to define policy and to ensure user safety and security in the challenging realm of modern social media. Prior to joining Twitter, she spent five years as the co-administrator and law enforcement liaison for a 501(c)3... Read More →

Shirin Keen

Associate General Counsel, Twitch Interactive, Inc.

Shirin Keen is the Associate General Counsel of Twitch, the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers. She has poor hand-eye coordination and is a total noob at video games. As a legal ninja, however, she swiftly negotiates content deals and advises masterfully... Read More →

Sean McGilvray

Director, Legal Affairs and Trust & Safety

Sean McGilvray is the Director of Legal Affairs and Trust and Safety at Vimeo, the world’s largest ad-free online video platform dedicated to empowering creators.Sean was the first dedicated Trust & Safety specialist at Vimeo and has since built the department up from a solo act... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 9:45am - 10:45am EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

10:45am EDT

Coffee Break

Rub shoulders with other COMO attendees over a refreshing cop of coffee.

Monday May 7, 2018 10:45am - 11:00am EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

11:00am EDT

Under the Hood: UGC Moderation (Part 2)

This panel addresses the same topics covered in the earlier "Under the Hood" panel, but with insights from executives at another set of UGC companies.

Speakers

Tal Niv

VP Law & Policy, GitHub, Inc.

Tal Niv is the Vice President of Law & Policy at GitHub. Her mission (in life) is to figure out ways to improve the public policy environment in a way that is conducive to software development, to open source, and to creative activity in general, to help create essential policy tools... Read More →

Nora Puckett

Senior Litigation Counsel, Google LLC

Nora Puckett is Senior Litigation Counsel at Google LLC in San Francisco, CA. She handles regulatory and litigation matters, including class actions, trademark and copyright litigation, claims relating to privacy, defamation and other intermediary liability issues, and commercial... Read More →

Jacob Rogers

Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation

Jacob joined Wikimedia as a lawyer in November 2014. Before arriving, he spent a year working for the United States Senate doing government investigations, where he worked on matters ranging from structured finance to Swiss data privacy to the ins and outs of high frequency algorithmic... Read More →

Peter Stern

Policy Manager for Stakeholder Engagement, Facebook

Peter Stern is a Manager in the Product Policy group at Facebook in Menlo Park, California. Product Policy is responsible for writing and interpreting global policies governing what users can share on Facebook, and how advertisers and developers interact with the site. Peter leads... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

12:00pm EDT

Lunch

Network with other conference attendees over a catered lunch and steel yourself for an afternoon of more COMO excitement.

Monday May 7, 2018 12:00pm - 12:45pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

12:45pm EDT

You Make the Call: Audience Interactive

One fact of content moderation that has become increasingly clear is that the job is more art than science: The line drawing required of moderators can seem like an impossible task where there is often no single “right” answer. This session will invite audience members to explore the challenges of content moderation firsthand by “making the call”: Faced with the decision of leaving a given piece of content up, removing it, escalating the decision, or even demonetizing it, what will you do?

Speakers

Emma Llanso

Director, Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy and Technology

Emma Llansó is the Director of CDT’s Free Expression Project, which works to promote law and policy that support users’ free expression rights in the United States and around the world. Emma leads CDT’s work in advancing speech-protective policies, which include legislative... Read More →

Michael Masnick

CEO, Copia Institute

Mike is the visionary behind Floor64, building up the core idea into reality and recruiting the management team. In addition to providing the strategic direction for the company, Mike oversees all editorial aspects of the Floor64’s public and customer sites. Mike’s insight into... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 12:45pm - 1:45pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

1:50pm EDT

Content Moderation and Law Enforcement

The Internet is sometimes characterized as a “lawless no-man’s-land,” but in reality, Internet companies often work closely with law enforcement agencies to find criminals and stop crimes. This panel will look at how Internet companies work with law enforcement agencies and the opportunities, challenges, and concerns created by such efforts.

Moderators

Clara Tsao

CTO- CFI Task Force, DHS/White House Innovation Fellow

Clara Tsao is the Chief Technology Officer at the US Interagency Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, administratively housed at the Department of Homeland Security. Her latest work focuses on approaches to countering homegrown radicalization online. As an entrepreneur, Clara’s... Read More →

Speakers

Pablo Peláez

Representative to the United States, Europol

Pablo Peláez is a Chief Inspector from the Spanish National Police with nearly twenty years ofexperience. He was appointed as Europol Representative to the USA on December 1st 2013 wherehe serves as Deputy Head of the Europol Liaison Bureau until July 2018 when he will take over... Read More →

Jacob Rogers

Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation

Dan Sutherland

Associate General Counsel, NPPD, Department of Homeland Security

Mr. Sutherland currently serves as the Associate General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he leads the National Protection and Programs Legal Division. His client, the National Protection and Programs Directorate, is responsible for cybersecurity, telecommunications... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 1:50pm - 2:35pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

2:40pm EDT

Coffee Break

Fight the afternoon slump with a caffeine-fueled boost.

Monday May 7, 2018 2:40pm - 2:55pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

2:55pm EDT

What Machines Are, and Aren’t, Good At

Many people look at the proliferation of objectionable content on UGC platforms and wonder why tech companies can't just use some "tech magic" to make it all go away. This panel will examine how, while AI and machine learning have made great strides in being able to moderate content, there are some things that machines just can't do.

Speakers

Casey Burton

Senior Corporate Counsel, Match Group

Frank Carey

Machine Learning Engineer, Vimeo

Ryan Kennedy

Moderation Lead, Twitch

Ryan Kennedy began his career in content moderation as a member of Twitch’s very first moderation team when the site launched in 2011. Today, Ryan is head of Twitch’s Moderation team and responsible for managing both community policy and community policy enforcement. Core to Twitch’s... Read More →

Peter Stern

Policy Manager for Stakeholder Engagement, Facebook

Monday May 7, 2018 2:55pm - 3:45pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

3:50pm EDT

Transparency

So we all agree that some content moderation needs to take place, but how do we know it's not going too far? How do we know that tech companies aren't censoring content from marginalized groups or certain political opinions? How do companies draw the line between information that makes someone uncomfortable and communications that constitute harassment or abuse? This panel will examine how companies seek to gain their users' trust by being transparent about how their algorithms and human moderators interact with content.

Moderators

David Post

Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute

Trained originally as a physical anthropologist, Post was one of the first Internet law scholars in the United States. He has been a member of the faculties of Columbia University (Department of Anthropology) and the law schools at Georgetown, George Mason, and Temple Universities... Read More →

Speakers

Kevin Koehler

Trust & Safety, Automattic

Rebecca Mackinnon

Co-founder, Global Voices

Rebecca MacKinnon is an independent writer and researcher. Previously she founded the Ranking Digital Rights project which works to set global standards for how companies in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector and beyond should respect freedom of expression... Read More →

Kaitlin Sullivan

Content Policy Manager, Facebook

Kaitlin Sullivan is a Manager for Content Policy at Facebook in Washington, D.C. Content Policy is responsible for developing and implementing policies to foster open expression and keep our community of over 2 billion people safe. Kaitlin started with the Content Policy team in... Read More →

Alexandria Walden

Global Head of Human Rights, Google

Alexandria is the global policy lead for human rights and free expression at Google. Alexandria drives Google’s work on business and human rights to support responsible approaches to policies across all Google’s products. Based in Washington, DC, Alexandria coordinates policy... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 3:50pm - 4:45pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005

4:50pm EDT

Concluding Remarks

Monday May 7, 2018 4:50pm - 5:00pm EDT
Showroom 1099 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005