Recommendation

Congress should provide funding to establish a multistakeholder forum that would establish guidelines for moderating political speech online.

Details

The United States should take the lead in establishing a multistakeholder forum—described in this report as the International Forum on Content Moderation (IFCM)—to develop a set of voluntary, consensus-based guidelines for social media companies to follow when moderating online political speech. These guidelines should create common definitions of different types of harmful content and establish best practices for classifying and responding to such content based on evidenced-based research. To launch IFCM, the United States should provide initial funding in the form of a 10-year grant. This funding could go to establish a new nonprofit organization or build a new capability in an existing multistakeholder institution.

Keep reading:

▪ Ash Johnson and Daniel Castro, “How to Address Political Speech on Social Media in the United States” (ITIF, October 2022), https://itif.org/publications/2022/10/11/how-to-address-political-speech-on-social-media-in-the-united-states/.