MC Weekly Update 11/28: Alex the Demon Overlord

Moderated Content

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos weigh in on the latest online trust and safety news and developments:

• As protestors against China’s zero-Covid policy fill the streets, images of them fill the internet and China’s censors are struggling to contain them. – Liza Lin, Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal
  • This is partly because the Chinese people have had years of practice at evading censors and know a trick or two. – Paul Mozur / Twitter
• So China is trying to bury that content with its own spam about escorts, porn and gambling. – Jon Porter / The Verge
  • Some of that spam includes … an AI-generated image of Alex with horns? – Alex Stamos / Twitter
• Elon doesn’t seem too concerned though. He’s too busy picking a fight with Apple. – Elon Musk / Twitter
  • And maybe drawing up plans for his own phone if Apple kicks Twitter out of the app store? – Elon Musk / Twitter
• Meta published its quarterly adversarial threat report this week, which included information about accounts it took down conducting information operations that had links to the US government. – Meta
  • Alex walks us through the report Stanford Internet Observatory wrote with Graphika on these operations and what they found. – Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory
  • As a result of this report, the Pentagon ordered a review of information operations conducted by the US military. – Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post
• Alex gives Evelyn an apparently now-weekly update on Stanford football news.

Join the conversation and connect with Evelyn and Alex on Twitter at @evelyndouek and @alexstamos.

Moderated Content is produced in partnership by Stanford Law School and the Cyber Policy Center. Special thanks to John Perrino for research and editorial assistance.

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