The Big Story: Congress digs into recent bank failures. This week, committees in both chambers held hearings to examine recent bank failures, including the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—a key financial institution in the startup ecosystem. The collapse of SVB in particular devastated many across the innovation ecosystem, sending companies scrambling to withdraw funds and make payroll, uncertain if their full balances would be secured.

The Big Story: The difficulties of content moderation and the chance to try it yourself. Critics of the Internet industry, including policymakers, frequently complain about content moderation decisions and propose legislative changes that would make it harder for Internet companies to host, remove, demote, amplify, and curate user content. To help inform those conversations, Engine worked with Copia and Leveraged Play to develop a new video game this week—Moderator Mayhem—with the goal of highlighting the difficulties and the inherent tradeoffs Internet companies, especially startups, face while navigating moderating their users’ content. 

The Big Story: “Children’s safety” push for more data collection, content scanning. Lawmakers reintroduced and advanced legislation that would push Internet companies of all types and sizes to collect more data from their users and scan public and private user content in the name of childrens’ safety. The bills—including the Kids Online Safety Act, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, which were reintroduced this week, and the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, which advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week—would remake the regulatory framework that enables startups to grow and succeed.