Currents 062: Stephanie Lepp Interviews Jim Rutt on Musk and Moderation



In this episode, Jim Rutt is a guest on his own show! He’s interviewed by Stephanie Lepp about the ideas in his Quillette essay “Musk and Moderation“…
In this episode, Jim Rutt is a guest on his own show! He’s interviewed by Stephanie Lepp about the ideas in his Quillette essay “Musk and Moderation.” They discuss where things stand with Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, Jim’s 41-year background in online community moderation, strengthening & clarifying Twitter’s decorum moderation, loosening point-of-view moderation, the “green sprouts” issue & the importance of tolerating fringe ideas, an appeal protocol for rulebreakers & stepping through an imagined violation by Trump, the meaning & plausibility of Twitter as a “fair and effective marketplace of ideas,” a crowd-sourced fact-checking system, defining the metrics of a thriving marketplace of ideas, whether stricter moderation is needed at the start, using theory-practice-theory loops in complex domains, Elon Musk as a potential bridge from GameA to GameB, a direct invitation to Musk, and much more.

Stephanie Lepp is a producer whose work strives to hold up a mirror — inviting us to grow from what we see. She’s the Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology, the organization at the heart of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Her project Deep Reckonings — a series of explicitly-marked deepfake videos that imagine morally courageous versions of our public figures — won two Webbys and has been exhibited worldwide. Deep Reckonings was also the subject of her first appearance on The Jim Rutt Show, in episode 129. Be in touch with Stephanie on Twitter: @stephlepp.