Content Warning

October 17, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: This is a casual, insightful conversation between a Radio Lab host (Simon Adler) and a returning expert guest. It feels like catching up with an old friend who happens to be a brilliant legal scholar.
The Key Players:
- Simon Adler: The host of Radio Lab, curious and willing to play the "fool" to get to the truth.
- Kate Klonick: A law professor at St. John's Law School who has been studying social media content moderation for years. She's sharp, funny, and unafraid to swear on the radio.
The Vibe: Educational with a side of existential dread. The tone is conversational and often funny, but the subject matter—the control of information and the death of the "public square"—is deeply unsettling.

🗝️ Key Themes & Topics

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Kate Klonick**
2 (04:00) **The Rise of TikTok and a New Moderation Model**
3 (10:30) **Facebook's Shift: The End of Fact-Checking**
4 (19:15) **Content Moderation as a Vector for Power**
5 (22:00) **The New Metaphor: Broadcast vs. Public Square**
6 (24:00) **The Need for Regulation and the Problem of Platform Islands**
7 (27:14) **Reflections on Past Coverage and the Future of Moderation**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Over the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, it’s not how you’d expect.

Today we continue our yearslong exploration of what you can and can’t post online. We look at how Facebook’s approach to free speech has evolved since Trump’s victory. How TikTok upended everything we see. And what all this means for the future of our political and digital lives.

Special thanks to Kate Klonick

EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by - Simon Adler
Produced by - Simon Adler

Original music from - Simon Adler

with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloome

Fact-checking by - Anna Pujol-Mazzini

Lateral Cuts:
The Trust Engineers
Facebook’s Supreme Court

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