Hacking. Deepfakes. Fraud. There are many worrying problems posed by AI tools that are already happening at scale. This book is about how these things are or are not stopped, and by whom. When lawmakers wish to prevent the creation of realistic-looking intimate images of ex-partners or of Internet influencers, scamming based on voice or image cloning, or sexual exploitation of children, where do they start? And where should they stop? In Bad Computers, we argue that in order to understand policies and enforcement in the AI stack, we need to pay much more attention to a much wider array of intermediaries. Rather than focusing on the big AI labs training models, or on evaluations of frontier systems, we examine the past, present and emerging practices of many of the intermediaries which malicious users of AI interact with and through today: cloud providers, operating systems and hardware, network services, model hosting platforms, communications services and more. Code-based “technoregulation,” private governance and law in this area are fast growing and entwining. Trying to animate any single layer of the AI stack to fully achieve a complex policy aim against motivated, malicious users of these computational systems usually brings far too many trade-offs to rights and freedoms, if such an approach even works at all. More promising is what we call full-stack AI governance, where interventions are spread across many actors, coordinating to leave technological “loops” — governance residue like watermarks, logs, hashes and blocking capabilities — that other stack actors can “hook” into. We look back before the generative AI rush to historical analogies that bring significant lessons for today, while deeply probing practices and research we see in the current moment for lessons for the future.

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Leading multinational technology companies like Alphabet, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, and Microsoft now operate sprawling, complex systems to govern online behavior. These technical and bureaucratic infrastructures, commonly termed "content moderation" or "trust and safety," were developed in an effort to keep illegal and harmful material--such as child abuse imagery, hate speech, and incitement to extremist violence--out of sight and out of mind. But recently, they have been mired with scandal, and increasingly are in the public crosshairs.

In The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, Robert Gorwa outlines how governments are shaping the emerging space of online safety. Through case studies from Germany, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, and insights gleaned from ongoing policy debates in Brazil, India, and China, Gorwa explores the domestic and international politics that influence how, why, and when platform regulation comes into being. Going beyond existing work that explores the hidden private rules and practices increasingly shaping our online lives, The Politics of Platform Regulation is a measured empirical and theoretical account of how the state is pushing back.