| Hi all, Gerrit De Vynck here. I'm a tech reporter for The Post in San Francisco. You can find me on Twitter at @GerritD. Below: A top European official warns Elon Musk, and two more tech CEOs criticize Apple's control over the App Store. First: | How YouTube's policy execs decide what stays and what goes |  Senior executives like YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sign off sign off on policy changes. (Reed Saxon/AP) | | | YouTube doesn't always get as much attention as Facebook and Twitter (especially these days), but the Google-owned video site is arguably the world's second-biggest social network after Facebook itself, with over 2 billion monthly users watching a billion hours of video each day. It's been at the center of debates over online content moderation and freedom of speech for years, and has often been criticized for allowing conspiracy theories to spread and find new audiences — from contrails to QAnon. The site has also hosted prominent conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who was banned from YouTube and other social sites in 2018. On Thursday, YouTube posted a blog explaining in greater detail how they come up with new policies and why it might seem from the outside that they take a long time to act on certain issues. When something that might cause real-world harm comes up on the site but isn't covered by an existing policy, YouTube's policy team will watch hundreds of videos related to the issue, debating how enacting certain new rules would impact the videos on the site. Then they come up with a new rule that can be easily enforced by the company's thousands of moderators, who operate in multiple countries and languages. Finally, senior executives, including YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki sign off on the policy change. YouTube tries to maintain specific rules that apply to everyone on its site, unlike Facebook which at one point had exceptions for "newsworthy" figures. Prepping content moderators and training algorithms to enforce new rules evenly takes time. "We will literally spend months — two, three, four months — getting the quality right," Matt Halprin, YouTube's global head of trust and safety, said in an interview. If something is especially urgent, they'll move faster, like when covid-19 began rapidly spreading around the world in March 2020, said Jennifer Flannery O'Connor, YouTube's vice president of product management. The company chose to prioritize blocking potentially harmful health info on the platform even if it meant taking down some content that should have stayed up. That led to YouTube creators avoiding even mentioning the pandemic for fear of losing shared advertising revenue. | | Even so, academics who study online misinformation criticized YouTube for not acting fast enough on some topics. A year after banning covid-related misinformation, videos saying the pandemic was fake or that the vaccines were useless were still proliferating on the site. It wasn't until September 2021 that YouTube took down accounts associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists. YouTube's approach has fit squarely in the middle of the set of norms developed among the big social networks when it comes to content moderation. They've drawn some red lines around covid misinformation, lying about election results or how to vote, and calling for violence against a particular group of people. Enforcement is haphazard, and it's easy to find examples where the companies fail to take down content that breaks their rules, but generally the companies have agreed that certain things don't belong on their platforms. Facebook and YouTube, in particular, have invested huge amounts of money and time into policing their sites, hiring thousands of content moderators and working to fine-tune algorithms that can spot and take down rule-breaking posts before they're even seen by anyone. This trend has become a feature in the broader culture war, with conservatives in the United States claiming that the companies are censoring them, even as Republican politicians use social networks constantly to further their reach. Musk is now running a huge experiment in what it looks like to roll back those norms. He ended Twitter's policy against coronavirus misinformation earlier this week, rescinded the ban on former president Donald Trump's account and plans to enact a "general amnesty" on thousands of other banned accounts. The company has gutted its content moderation teams, leading some advertisers to stop spending money on the platform out of concern that Twitter can't ensure their ads won't show up next to hateful or sexual content. Conservative media and political figures are cheering Musk's changes, and he himself is characterizing them as a return to neutrality after years of content moderation going in the wrong direction. YouTube's policy team is paying attention. | | "Of course we're watching it, this is a domain I care a lot about," said O'Conner. But the company doesn't look to be following Musk's lead any time soon. YouTube's policy on Trump remains that he is suspended because of concerns that he could incite real-world violence, and both executives declined to comment on what set of circumstances would cause them to rescind Trump's suspension. "We have a fair amount of conviction in where we are," Halprin said. "Even though we know we may adjust here and there." | | |  | Our top tabs | | Musk speaks with top European official, who warns of potential ban |  European Commissioner Thierry Breton spoke with Elon Musk on Wednesday. (Virginia Mayo/AP) | | | European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton warned Twitter owner Elon Musk that his social media company has to provide criteria for account suspensions, "aggressively" pursue disinformation and agree to an "extensive independent audit" by 2023, the Financial Times's Javier Espinoza, James Politi, Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy report. Breton warned Musk that if he doesn't stick to those, he could be violating the Digital Services Act — and face a European ban or fines of up to 6 percent of its global turnover. "Twitter's owner said repeatedly that he thought that the DSA was 'very sensible,' said people briefed on the conversation, adding that he had read the legislation and thought it should be applied everywhere in the world," they write. "Musk has previously said Twitter would adhere to all relevant laws." | Major web browsers spurn TrustCor certificates |  The company has had a key role in vouching for the legitimacy of websites. (Charles Krupa/AP) | | | Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Edge browsers won't accept new certificates from TrustCor Systems that vouched for the legitimacy of websites, and other tech companies are also expected to take similar actions, Joseph Menn reports. The decisions came after technology experts, researchers and TrustCor — which said it doesn't have ongoing ties of concern — argued online in the wake of a Post report on the company this month. "Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem, and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware," Mozilla's Kathleen Wilson wrote to a browser security mailing list. "TrustCor's responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla's concerns." The Post reported this month that TrustCor's Panama registration records showed the same agents, officers and partners as a spyware firm identified as an affiliate of Packet Forensics, which has sold communication interception services to the U.S. government. Packet Forensics has said it doesn't have an ongoing business relationship with TrustCor. TrustCor executive Rachel McPherson told Mozilla that the same holding companies had invested in TrustCor and Packet Forensics, but TrustCor ownership was transferred to employees. | Facebook, Spotify chief executives turn up heat on Apple |  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Apple's control over the App Store is "problematic." (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) | | | Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg criticized Apple's control of its App Store at a conference hosted by the New York Times, Bloomberg News's Brody Ford reports. "It is problematic for one company to be able to control what app experiences end up on a device," Zuckerberg said, adding that the "vast majority of profits in mobile ecosystem go toward Apple." Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek, whose company has long criticized Apple's control of the App Store, also weighed in, writing that "talk is helpful but we need action." He tagged Twitter accounts belonging to the U.S. Commerce Department, European Commission and Margrethe Vestager, Europe's top antitrust enforcer. The comments came two days after Musk accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from the App Store, sparking Republican criticism of Apple. But on Wednesday, Musk said he had patched things up with Apple chief executive Tim Cook, whose company has long defended its control of the App Store. Musk said his accusation that Apple was threatening to remove Twitter from the App Store was a "misunderstanding" and that Cook told him Apple had never considered such a move. | | |  | Inside the industry | | | |  | Agency scanner | | | |  | Trending | | | |  | Mentions | | - Andrea Coscelli, who led the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority, is joining Keystone Strategy as the co-head of its European practice. The firm has worked with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Uber, according to an ethics advisory committee for U.K. officials, which weighed in on the move.
| | |  | Daybook | | - Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), National Institute of Standards and Technology Director Laurie Locascio and other officials speak at the Quantum World Congress in Washington today.
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Rostin Behnam testifies at a Senate agriculture committee hearing on lessons from the collapse of FTX today at 10 a.m.
- Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, speaks at an Atlantic Council event on Ukraine's digital resilience on Friday at 1 p.m.
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