The Sunday Show
Tech Policy Press
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Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. The Sunday Show is its podcast.
You can find us at https://techpolicy.press/, and on twitter at https://twitter.com/techpolicypress.
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2 days ago
Peering Inside the Platforms
This episode focuses on how best to create mechanisms for outside scrutiny of technology platforms.
The first segment is with Brandon Silverman, the founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, an analytics toolset acquired by Facebook in 2016 that permitted academics, journalists and others to inspect how information spreads on the platform.
And the second segment is a panel provided courtesy of the non-partisan policy organization the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On June 15, GMF hosted Opening the Black Box: Auditing Algorithms for Accountable Tech, featuring Anna Lenhart, Senior Technology Policy Advisor, Rep. Lori Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts; Deborah Raji, a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation and a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley; and Mona Sloane, a sociologist affiliated with NYU and the University of Tübingen AI center. The panel was moderated by Ellen P. Goodman, a Professor at Rutgers Law School and a Visiting Senior Fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States.
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Jun 19, 2022
Scrutiny for YouTube
This week, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/youtube-report (released a report on YouTube) that Tech Policy Press Editor Justin Hendrix helped write with the Center’s Deputy Director, Paul Barrett. YouTube is generally understood to have avoided the scrutiny of journalists, researchers and lawmakers, at least relative to other social media platforms like Facebook. But there is a cost to flying under the radar.
To address some of the key issues, this episode features two segments. The first is a conversation with Paul Barrett, and the second with two of the sources for the report, University of Washington associate professor and Center for an Informed Public cofounder Kate Starbird and Mnemonic Associate Director of Advocacy Dia Kayyali.
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Jun 14, 2022
Rescuing the Future from Silicon Valley: A Conversation with Dave Karpf
When it comes to visions of the way that technology will intersect with society in the future, Silicon Valley has a near monopoly. It’s been nearly 30 years since Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published the essay https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology (The Californian Ideology), which they say naturalized and gave a “technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures,” a “faith” that is “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.”
Now, the economic power of Silicon Valley has left its billionaire class fairly certain it is above reproach, unchecked and unchallenged, even as some of the biggest firms spawned there are locked in a staring contest with governments in Washington, Brussels and beyond.
To talk more about the ways in which Silicon Valley elites have captured so much of what people define as “progress” and the pronouncements of some individuals who make wild promises about the abundant future that technology will supposedly deliver, Tech Policy Press spoke to https://davidkarpf.com/about/ (Dave Karpf), who has been thinking about these issues for some time. He is the author of http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199898383/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d2_g14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1EJXKRXAV2PGNBGFV5H1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846 (The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy), published in May 2012 by Oxford University Press, and https://global.oup.com/academic/product/analytic-activism-9780190266134?lang=en&cc=us (Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy) published in December 2016 by Oxford University Press.
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Jun 12, 2022
A Conversation with Filmmaker Nanfu Wang
On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it. There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect.
A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Nanfu Wang, https://www.hbo.com/movies/in-the-same-breath (In the Same Breath) (HBO) is a riveting account of how the pandemic unfolded, how governments tried desperately to control the message as it did, and the ways in which citizens in two very different cultures and systems reacted, even as they themselves participated in shaping of the discourse on social media.
This episode of the podcast features a discussion with Nanfu Wang, who directed and produced the film.
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Jun 11, 2022
Responding to Climate Disinformation: A Conversation with Jennie King & Michael Khoo
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not mince words. They say that “climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people.”
The quality of the public discourse on climate issues plays a role. A report released by the IPCC in February says that the “[r]hetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent.” An April installment describes how “opposition from status quo interests” and “the propagation of scientifically misleading information” are “barriers” to climate action and have “negative implications for climate policy.”
This week, a coalition of groups published a report titled https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/deny-deceive-delay-documenting-and-responding-to-climate-disinformation-at-cop26-and-beyond/ (Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond) that outlines prominent discourses that seek to pervert and prevent efforts to address climate change. The report makes recommendations for governments, social media platforms platforms and the media on what to do to address the the issue.
Tech Policy Press spoke to two individuals involved in the effort to produce the report to learn more:
Jennie King, the head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)
Michael Khoo, the Climate Change Coalition co-chair at Friends of the Earth
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Jun 5, 2022
Social Media and Vaccine Misinformation
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, there is a good amount of science emerging about the relationship between the information environment and vaccine uptake. Today we’ll hear from two researchers from different disciplines about their work on social media and vaccine misinformation.
First up is John Alexander Bryden, Executive Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, with whom I discuss the results of some recent research his team had conducted on the problem. And second, I speak with Kolina Koltai, who when I interviewed her at the end of April was transitioning from her position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at The University of Washington to a role at Twitter.
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Jun 2, 2022
Do We Really Want Sanitized Platforms?
When it comes to content moderation and the regulation of harmful content on social media, there are various metaphors at play for how to think about doing it. One that we’ve https://techpolicy.press/the-sunday-show-a-conversation-with-evelyn-douek/ (explored on this podcast) in the past is to see it as a form of administration, or what legal scholar evelyn douek calls the “rough online analogue of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bureaucracy of moderators.”
But some scholars, like douek, see limitations in this way of thinking. That includes Rachel Griffin, a PhD candidate and lecturer at Sciences Po Law School who recently https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4007098 (published a new paper) in the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law titled The Sanitised Platform. The paper employs thinking from feminist legal scholar Vicki Schultz about US law on sexual harassment in the workplace as a framework to critique approaches to content moderation and social media regulation.
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May 29, 2022
A Dictator's Son Wins in the Philippines
This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines.
To learn more about the role of social media in the rehabilitation of the Marcos brand and to dig a little deeper into the conditions that drive disinformation, I spoke to Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, and the author of a recent piece in Time magazine, https://time.com/6174739/bongbong-marcos-election-philippines/ (The World Should Be Worried About a Dictator’s Son's Apparent Win in the Philippines).
Jonathan is also the cohost, with Kat Ventura, of a podcast on the world of troll farms and propaganda in the Philippines called Catch Me If You Can. https://www.pumapodcast.com/podcasts/catch-me-if-you-can (Check it out).
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May 25, 2022
Charting the Future of Tech Accountability
For the past six years, an independent research program at New America called https://rankingdigitalrights.org/ (Ranking Digital Rights) has evaluated the policies and practices of some of the world’s largest technology and telecom firms, producing a dataset that reveals their shortcomings with respect to human rights obligations. Ranking Digital Rights evaluates more than 300 aspects of each company it ranks that fall broadly into three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy.
Following the release of this year’s report, which https://techpolicy.press/ranking-digital-rights-twitter-at-top-of-failing-class-of-tech-firms/ (we covered at Tech Policy Press), Ranking Digital Rights hosted a session on Charting the Future of Big Tech Accountability. Nathalie Maréchal, Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights and a past guest on this podcast, moderated the panel, which included:
Sarah Couturier-Tanoh, Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE)
Jesse Lehrich, Co-Founder, Accountable Tech
Chris Lewis, President and CEO, Public Knowledge
Katarzyna Szymielewicz, President, Panoptykon Foundation
Sophie Zhang, activist and Facebook whistleblower
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May 22, 2022
Is Web3 the Answer? A Conversation with Gilad Edelman
The June cover story for Wired magazine is on a movement in tech that many see as having the potential to rewire not just the internet, but to produce a fundamentally more democratic and equitable society.
The story is titled “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution,” and I had the chance to speak to its author, Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman.
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May 15, 2022
Rohingya Refugees Seek Reparations from Facebook
UN human rights experts that https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook/u-n-investigators-cite-facebook-role-in-myanmar-crisis-idUSKCN1GO2PN (chronicled) Facebook’s https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html (role) in spreading hate speech in Myanmar concluded that it played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook’s own https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/6/18068104/facebook-business-social-responsibility-myanmar-report (investigation) into the situation also found fault with the company’s practices, and made various recommendations for how it should develop a human rights strategy to protect against such things from happening again.
Today, we’re going to hear from a refugee from the violence, who is with other Rohingya refugees in a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, as well as three human rights advocates. And we’ll learn about another complaint filed by sixteen Rohingya youth to Ireland’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, that argues that Facebook violated the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by allowing its platform to be used to incite violence against them and their community. The remedy sought by these refugees is for Facebook to divest from a portion of its 2017 profits and provide remediation for their community in the form of educational activities and facilities in Cox’s Bazar.
Please note that the connection to Cox’s Bazar was not perfect- if you have any trouble making out a word here or there, you can refer to the transcript at the Tech Policy Press website.
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May 13, 2022
Rethinking Far-Right Online Radicalization
Researchers Alice Marwick, Benjamin Clancy, and Katherine Furl this week released https://citap.pubpub.org/pub/jq7l6jny/release/1 (Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature), an analysis of "cross-disciplinary work on radicalization to better understand the present concerns around online radicalization and far-right extremist and fringe movements."
In order to learn more about the issues explored in the review, I spoke to Marwick, who is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP).
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May 8, 2022
The Power of the Platforms with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Over the past year of publishing this podcast, we’ve looked again and again at the issue of the power of tech platforms in society. Now, there is a book titled The Power of the Platforms: Shaping Media and Society, by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter, just published at the end of last month by Oxford University Press.
Justin Hendrix had the chance to catch up with one of the authors about what they learned in writing the book, and the complexities of the subject.
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May 1, 2022
Facebook's Legal Woes
If you take the time to look at the SEC filings for Meta Platforms, Inc. - the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - you will find various disclosures about its ongoing legal battles. Taken together they reveal patterns, particularly in how the company is led. To get an update on some of the key cases under consideration, from Cambridge Analytica to competition, I spoke with one particularly keen observer of Meta: Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next.
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Apr 27, 2022
Barack Obama's Speech, Elon Musk's Antics
Last week at Stanford University, former President Barack Obama gave a https://techpolicy.press/transcript-barack-obama-speech-on-technology-and-democracy/ (keynote address) at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm." This week, many of the issues Obama discussed were brought into sharp relief when it was announced that billionaire Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars.
For reactions to Obama's speech- and to Musk’s antics- I spoke with
David Kaye, Professor of Law at UC Irvine and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; and
Jameel Jaffer, Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
In the opening, you'll also hear just under the last five minutes of Obama's speech, whi…
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Apr 24, 2022
Worldcoin: Where Techno-Optimism Meets Techno-Colonialism
There is a growing literature and practice around how to equitably collaborate with traditionally marginalized communities to build better technology. A pair of investigative reports into Worldcoin’s launch may well serve as the basis for an instructive case study in what not to do.
The https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems (first report), by Richard Nieva and Aman Sethi at BuzzFeed News, was published April 5th. It’s titled Inside Worldcoin’s Globe-Spanning, Eyeball-Scanning, Free Crypto Giveaway: The Sam Altman–founded company Worldcoin says it aims to alleviate global poverty, but so far it has angered the very people it claims to be helping.
The https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ (second report), by Eileen Guo & Adi Renaldi at MIT Technology Review, was published April 6th. It’s titled Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recrui…
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Apr 21, 2022
Nina Jankowicz on How to Be a Woman Online
In the opening to her book, https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-be-a-woman-online-9781350267589/ (How to Be A Woman Online, Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back), Nina Jankowicz crafts an allegory of a woman going about her day, encountering creepy and increasingly threatening men in public. It recounts a morning commute on a cloudless morning, but things quickly get dark. The woman endures various encounters: at a coffee shop, on the metro, ultimately at her office. It gets ugly. And yet the point of the story is, this kind of behavior is perpetual on social media, where women endure a tragic volume of misogyny and threats.
This book is intended to be a guide for women who face this material, and yet wish to have a voice in the quasi-public sphere of social media. To learn more about its themes, Tech Policy Press spoke Nina just before it hit the shelves- both physical and virtual- on April 21st.
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Apr 20, 2022
The Privacy Imperative: Nathalie Maréchal & Matthew Crain
Privacy is one of the fundamental issues in tech policy. And yet, in the United States progress on this issue has been elusive at the federal level, even as Europe has forged ahead with its General Data Protection Regulation or (GDPR) and now the Digital Markets Act, which will reinforce the privacy protections afforded EU citizens under GPDR with new provisions.
And yet there are bills before Congress that could change things in the U.S.- such as the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Democrats. At the time, Senator Corey Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, said that “The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence.”
To talk more about the history of how we ended up with an internet bought and paid for by surveillance advertising and what might drive reform, I spoke to two experts in the field, Dr. Nathalie Maréchal & Dr.…
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Apr 17, 2022
One Man's Outsized Influence on Facebook- and the World
In this episode we hear an account of the prominent role that one Facebook executive has played in US and global politics, making many key decisions that, over the years, have literally been engineered into Facebook and its polices. Our guest is Benjamin Wofford, the author of a WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-joel-kaplan-washington-political-influence/ (cover story) titled The Infinite Reach of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Man in Washington: How one man came to rule political speech on Facebook, command one of the largest lobbies in DC, and guide Zuck through disaster—and straight into it.
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Apr 12, 2022
Digital Crime Scenes: A Conversation with Afsaneh Rigot
Social media tools developed in Silicon Valley can be used for illiberal purposes, often putting the most vulnerable groups at risk.
Afsaneh Rigot is a researcher and advocate concerned with issues of law, technology, LGBTQ, refugee and human rights. A senior researcher at ARTICLE 19 with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center and an advisor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard, Afsaneh is the author of the recently published report, https://techpolicy.press/digital-crime-scenes-how-police-use-a-mosaic-of-private-data-to-persecute-lgbtq-people-in-the-middle-east-and-northern-africa/ (Digital Crime Scenes: The Role of Digital Evidence in the Persecution of LGTBQ People In Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia).
The report uncovers how police use technology to target, harass and arrest those in the LGBTQ community. Meticulously researched, the report also includes recommendations to tech firms on what they can do to help the community, and Afsaneh is…
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Apr 10, 2022
Humanity's Big Bet on Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation With Gary Marcus
It might appear that many political and government leaders have come to regard AI as a kind of panacea, right at the moment when the world needs one most. The third and final installment of the sixth UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was published Monday: UN Secretary General António Guterres called the report "a litany of broken promises" and "a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world." Some leaders appear to be betting that somehow, AI will help us optimize our way out of this crisis.
But what if that bet turns out to be wrong? And what if the bets we’re making within AI today, such as on technologies like deep learning, themselves turn out to be less fruitful than the hype might suggest?
To learn more about these issues, I spoke to Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist, an entrepreneur and a writer. He’s written five books, including the 2019 book http://rebooting.ai/ (Rebooting AI: Building Artific…
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Apr 7, 2022
Critical Perspectives on Ethics in Technology
Last year, the Journal of Social Computing published a https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01351 (Special Issue) on the subject of Technology Ethics in Action. The special issue was the product of the Ethical Tech Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, which was cofounded by Mary Gray and Kathy Pham. The ideas in the special issue span a range of critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, with essay titles ranging from “Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit” to “Connecting Race to Ethics Related to Technology” to “The Promise and Limits of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, and the Techlash.”
To learn more about the ideas in it, I spoke to its editor, Ben Green. Ben is a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His Harvard PhD is in applied mathematics, with a secondary field in science, technology, and society. He studies the social and political imp…
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Apr 5, 2022
Tech Reform Battle Heats Up in U.S. Capitol
Proponents and opponents of measures to reform Big Tech are busy this spring on Capitol Hill, and the fight over proposed antitrust regulation, in particular, is heating up in the US Capitol. In this episode we’ll hear two short interviews that provide a window into the effort to influence lawmakers.
The first segment is with Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for The Washington Post who shared the byline on a story last week on a campaign by Meta, the company that operates Facebook and Instagram, to besmirch its rival, TikTok, in part as a way to bolster Meta’s arguments against antitrust reforms.
And in the second, we’ll hear from Charlotte Slaiman, Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that works on tech policy issues. Prior to joining Public Knowledge, Charlotte was a lawyer in the Anticompetitive Practices Division at the Federal Trade Commission. She shares details on Antitrust Day, a day of action proclaimed by more than 100 civil society groups…
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Apr 3, 2022
Ukraine May Mark a Turning Point in Documenting War Crimes
If there is to be any accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it will requires carefully gathered evidence. The collection and preservation of digital media and other evidentiary material in Ukraine is a massive undertaking. It is being met by brave Ukrainian officials and local civil society groups operating in besieged cities and towns, as well as by an international coalition of human rights, open source intelligence and digital forensics researchers. This loose coalition is drawing strength from relationships formed with one another and lessons learned while investigating past conflicts, including in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and elsewhere.
The ongoing effort in Ukraine, then, can be seen as part of an evolution – or a maturation – of an expanding community of volunteers and professionals gathering user-generated evidence and open source intelligence. It may also represent a crucial test of whether the evidence produced by these methods can play a substantial role in se…
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Mar 31, 2022
The Precarity of Tech’s Shadow Workforce
Earlier this year, a nonprofit organization called the https://techequitycollaborative.org/ (TechEquity Collaborative) released the results of its https://contractwork.techequitycollaborative.org/ (Contract Worker Disparity Project), an investigation into the “shadow workforce” that powers many tech firms. The culmination of a year of research into the disparities in contract work, the report features survey data and first-hand accounts from contract workers in tech who describe range of challenging conditions and inequities, particularly relative to the lavish pay and perks that are offered to full time employees of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
To learn more about the key findings of the report, to hear more about what it's like to make your living in one of these roles, and to get a sense of the types of policy solutions that would address these inequities, we spoke with:
Samantha (Sam) Gordon, Senior Vice President of Programs TechEquity Collaborative
Shannon Wait…
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Mar 29, 2022
War, Disinformation, Myth-making and Cultural Diplomacy
Earlier this month https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-protest-information-new-york (in The Guardian) newspaper, researcher and journalist http://www.janelytv.com/ (Jane Lytvynenko) wrote:
I report on internet disinformation. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it became very personal. There is more than one struggle. There is the war of bombs, the war that’s taking lives. And then there’s the battle over what can be done.Jane, who is presently a Senior Research Fellow on the Tech and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, grew up in Kyiv. She moved to Canada at age eleven, but traveled back to visit her family and friends nearly every year, sometimes spending entire summers in Ukraine. Now– like nearly every Ukrainian, no matter how far from the land that is under assault in a brutal, illegal Russian invasion– she is part of the "battle over what can be done," a battle of ideas, emotion and the way they are combined into political w…
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Mar 27, 2022
The Sunday Show: A Conversation with evelyn douek
Lawmakers around the world want to do something about social media, and in particular content moderation. But what if the interventions they are developing are based on a flawed conceptual framework about how content moderation works, or how it should work?
This week I had a chance to talk to one of the smartest legal minds on questions related to content moderation to explore some fresh thinking on the subject: https://www.evelyndouek.com/ (evelyn douek), a Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. evelyn is the author of “https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4005326 (Content Moderation as Administration),” forthcoming Harvard Law Review, a new paper that serves as the basis for our discussion.
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Mar 24, 2022
The FTC and Social Media Regulation
The United States Congress has before it dozens of bills intended to rein in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. This raft of proposed legislation is in response to various harms that have come to light over the past few years, including dangers to democracy, harassment and hate speech, concerns over safety (especially for children), and various ways the platforms reinforce inequities and permit discrimination.
One agency in the federal government arguably has the power to take action on these issues with its current authority- the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC. But there are a variety of legislative proposals that would clarify the FTC’s role with regard to social media, and even provide it with substantial new resources to police the harms these massive companies produce.
The https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/ (NYU Center for Business and Human Rights), with which I have https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/polarization-report-page (collaborated) in the pa…
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Mar 20, 2022
Internet Freedom After the Invasion of Ukraine
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, governments and tech companies have taken swift action to limit the flow of propaganda out of Russia, and Russia has in turn taken draconian measures to limit the flow of information into Russia, including banning some Western social media platforms, crushing what remained of independent journalism in the country and cracking down on free expression generally.
How do these events fit in the broader scheme of things? The trajectory for global internet freedom and digital rights, just like the trajectory for democracy generally, has been going in the wrong direction for years. What do governments, organizations and the community of individuals concerned with these issues need to do to try to change that trajectory, and to support those working turn the tide?
To answer these questions and more, I invited three experts to join me for this week’s podcast
Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation…
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Mar 18, 2022
War Propaganda and International Law: A Conversation with Vivek Krishnamurthy
Governments and tech platforms have moved quickly to take action against Russian state media since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. But what frameworks exist in international law that could inform our thinking about these complicated questions at the intersection of speech and human rights?
To answer that question, I spoke to Vivek Krishnamurthy, the Samuelson-Glushko Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). Vivek is currently a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Senior Associate of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Mar 17, 2022
Spotify, Substack, Misinformation and Grift: A Conversation with Bridget Todd and Elizabeth Spiers
The past couple of months has seen controversies over misinformation, anti-vaccine and racist material, and how best to moderate content on online publishing platforms such as Spotify and Substack.
To talk more about these issues of speech, editorial intervention, content moderation, and implications for democracy, I invited two expert commentators, Bridget Todd and Elizabeth Spiers, to the Tech Policy Press podcast.
Bridget Todd is the creator and host of the award-winning technology and culture podcast http://tangoti.com/listen (There Are No Girls on the Internet) and communications director for UltraViolet, a gender justice advocacy organization working to build a feminist Internet. Bridget wrote a https://www.thenation.com/article/society/toxic-podcasting/ (great piece) for The Nation, titled It’s Not Just Joe Rogan. The Entire Digital Space Is Rotten.
Elizabeth Spiers is a writer, NYU journalism school professor, political commentator, and digital strategist. She is also the…
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Mar 13, 2022
A Conversation with Mary Anne Franks
Dr. Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law, is an expert on the intersection of civil rights and technology. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy and an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and author of an award-winning book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech from Stanford Press, published in 2019.
In addition to her academic responsibilities, she is President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that combats online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted a model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography- “revenge porn”- which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for proposed federal legislation to tackle the issue.
Dr. Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a docto…
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Mar 6, 2022
State Media, Social Media, and the Conflict in Ukraine
In this podcast, we’re going to listen in on a panel discussion hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center on State Media, Social Media, and the Conflict in Ukraine.
Convened by Nate Persily, Co-director of the Cyber Policy Center and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the panel considers the moves taken in recent days by governments and technology platforms, and the implications for the ways state-sponsored media and information will be regulated in the future. Guests include:
Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Meta, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
Yoel Roth, Head of Site Integrity at Twitter
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center and former Member of European Parliament
Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory
Alex Stamos, Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer of Facebook
Alicia Wanless, Director of the Partnership for Cou…
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Mar 5, 2022
Moves To Ban Kremlin Propaganda Outlets Evoke WWII Anti-Nazi Efforts
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, governments’ and private companies’ moves to limit or ban Russian state media have rapidly spread from the European Union, to the United States, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere.
The cascade of developments harkens back to the World War II period, when governments regarded German propaganda as a weapon of war and used tools such as short wave radio to reach citizens behind enemy lines to penetrate the Axis power’s internal information environment. (The BBC, as if to underscore this point, announced Thursday it would resurrect the use of shortwave radio to broadcast news into Ukraine and parts of Russia).
In order to put these new developments in historical context, we hear from two experts on the role of information and media in war:
Heidi Tworek, a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia and author of News from Germany: The Competition to Cont…
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Feb 27, 2022
Technology Is Not Neutral: A Conversation with Stephanie Hare
Upstream from concerns about policy, we enter the realm of ethics- and that is the subject of today’s podcast. Our guest is Stephanie Hare, the author of Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics, published on February 22nd in London Publishing Partnership’s Perspectives series. The book was edited by Diane Coyle.
Stephanie Hare is a researcher and broadcaster with an expertise in technology, politics and history. As part of the BBC Expert Women programme, she often shares her insights on television and radio. She has been a technology consultant and an academic, earning a PhD in Theory and History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Feb 26, 2022
Ukraine, Disinformation, Propaganda and the Platforms
In this special episode of the podcast, we’re going to consider questions related to disinformation and the information ecosystem, and the role of the tech platforms in this deadly moment.
The first guest is Clint Watts, a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC and author of Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News. His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation, and he has testified before multiple Senate committees regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West.
The second guest is Taylor Lorenz, a reporter covering tech culture and online creators who has worked for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and recently joined The Washington Post as a columnist. Taylor wrote this week for Input Magazine about meme scams capitalizing on the Ukraine conflict, and I spoke to her about what they say about our…
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Feb 20, 2022
A Look Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop
Facebook vaunts its multibillion dollar investment in content moderation in advertisements and every time a senior executive is asked to address the problems of mis- and disinformation, hate speech, abuse, bigotry and other violations on its platforms. But what does that investment look like at the last mile? Who does the work? What are the conditions they face?
Today we hear from Billy Perrigo, a journalist at Time magazine, who tells us of the plight of outsourced content moderation workers in Kenya tasked with moderating the typical stream of gore and bigotry, as well as screening for hate speech and incitement to violence emanating out of war-torn Ethiopia.
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Feb 17, 2022
Ukraine, Russia, and the 21st Century Permanent Information War
When Peter Pomerantsev was working as a documentary producer in Russia, he observed how Vladimir Putin employed propaganda to spread such deep doubt and division that meaningful political debate became impossible. Since then, he has written two books on the subject– Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which chronicled Putin’s strategy and tactics; and This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which looked at similar phenomena employed by despots, ideologues and grifters around the world.
Now, Pomerantzev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of Arena, a research project that explores how media can reach polarized and antagonistic audiences, using insights from on-the-ground research in countries including Ukraine, Italy, Hungary, Germany and Sweden. Tech Police Press spoke to him on Tuesday, February 15th, 2022, about his observations on the role of the dynamics in…
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Feb 15, 2022
Canada's Trucker Protests: Online and Offline
To discuss the Canadian trucker protests and the relationship between topics networked activism, social media manipulation, extremism and law enforcement- as well as the potential for Canadian convoys to inspire similar actions in the US, where right wing media personalities have embraced the idea- we speak with two experts:
Joan Donovan, Ph.D., the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Amarnath Amarasingam, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.
This interview was recorded on Monday, February 14th, 2022.
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Feb 13, 2022
Conversations on the EARN IT Act and Tech Exceptionalism
The first segment in this episode focuses on the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act, known as the EARN IT Act. Nathalie Maréchal, Ph.D., Senior Policy and Partnerships Manager at Ranking Digital Rights, wrote in Tech Policy Press about what motivates her opposition to the legislation, and she joined the podcast to share her perspective.
The second segment takes on the idea of tech exceptionalism. Yaël Eisenstat, a Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute and Nils Gilman, vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute and the deputy editor of Noema Magazine, wrote in Noema about "How tech uses the promise of endless innovation to ward off regulating even its present-day harms."
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Feb 6, 2022
Trust and Safety in Virtual Worlds
Warning: this episode features discussion of sexual assault and rape.
This week’s podcast has two segments. We’re going to hear from Vice News reporter Carter Sherman about her story from last week titled “Woman Says She Was ‘Virtually Gang-Raped’ in Facebook's Metaverse,” detailing an incident that represents an early test of Facebook’s ability create a safe environment in its virtual world. Then, I speak with Dr. Carly Kocurek, a cultural historian specializing in the study of new media technologies and video gaming, about a story from 1993-A Rape in Cyberspace, written by Julian Dibbell- that presaged some of the questions we’re faced with when thinking about safety and abuse in virtual environments.
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Jan 30, 2022
Reflecting on Sleeping Giants
Earlier this year, Matt Rivitz announced he planned to step aside from Sleeping Giants, an activist campaign launched five years ago to address the flow of advertising revenues to sites that promote hate speech and disinformation. The ad tech ecosystem is exceptionally complex- and the incentives in place lend themselves to waste and fraud, and to large sums of money flowing to sites that promote questionable content often without the knowledge of the people spending that money. In 2016, Rivitz and Nandini Jammi, now the cofounder of Check My Ads and a recent guest on this podcast, started building a community of concerned citizens to notify the brands often unwittingly propping up sites that feature bigoted or dangerous content.
Scoring early wins- such as against Breitbart, which was starved of advertising by the Sleeping Giants campaign, losing thousands of programmatic advertisers- the effort ended up becoming a community of as many as a million concerned citizens with chapters…
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Jan 26, 2022
Confronting the Cybersecurity Threat in Ukraine
Ukraine has long been known as a "live fire" environment in cybersecurity circles, but with Russian aggression intensifying there are concerns that cyberattacks may signal the beginning of a broader conflict following a string of attacks in the last week that targeted Ukrainian government and private sector websites.
The United States Department of Homeland Security has also warned that Russia may target "US networks—from low-level denials-of-service to destructive attacks targeting critical infrastructure," in retaliation for perceived threats against it, though the threshold for such action is believed to be high.
To learn more about cyber threats against Ukraine and how the country is preparing for it, Tech Policy Press spoke with Viktor Zhora, Deputy Head of the State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine, who is responsible for digital transformation and cybersecurity.
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Jan 25, 2022
What's Next for the Digital Services Act?
Last week, the European Parliament gave initial approval to the Digital Services Act, which contains a set of regulations that will have major implications for tech platforms, including on how they moderate content and on their business models. This spring, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union will debate the details of the legislation before voting on a final version.
To learn more about what is at stake and where the DSA is in the process, I spoke with Mathias Vermeulen, public policy director at the consultancy AWO, based in Brussels, Belgium.
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Jan 23, 2022
Accountability after the Facebook Papers
This episode features two segments. First, we catch up with one reporter who has read every single one of the documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen: Shoshana Wodinsky, a staff reporter at Gizmodo covering consumer privacy and tech policy. Shoshana is part of a team that is preparing to release the papers to the public.
And then, we hear from three lawyers- including one former Massachusetts attorney general- that were involved in the legal actions that led to the Big Tobacco Master Settlement, one of the largest settlement of civil litigation claims in American history, about whether that effort to hold an industry to account might provide a roadmap for addressing the harms of tech firms. Scott Harshbarger is a Former Attorney General of Massachusetts who signed the settlement on behalf of his state; Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and Chief Assistant City Attorney in San Francisco who pursued the tobacco companies there; and Thomas Green served as t…
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Jan 16, 2022
A Fact Check Draws Fire; Closing the Digital Divide
There are two segments in this episode. First, we hear from Jay Van Bavel, an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, about social media, misinformation and collective behavior following a week in which he was brigaded by far right and anti-vaccine personalities for calling in to question the veracity of claims made in Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. And second, we catch up with Trooper Sanders, the CEO of Benefits Data Trust, about new broadband benefits intended to close the digital divide, and the coordination that is necessary among federal agencies to make sure the funds set aside by law reach the people that need them most.
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Jan 9, 2022
Extremism, Media & Tech One Year After January 6, Part II
In the second of two episodes on extremism, media and tech one year after the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, we’re going to hear from two individuals who are working to deprive the racists and violent extremists who seek to radicalize Americans and attack our democracy.
The Check My Ads Institute is an independent watchdog organization that seeks to reform the digital ad tech industry from inside. At its website, checkymads.org, it says "we're holding the surveillance ad tech industry accountable for abuses against advertisers and consumers, and spearheading the development of a transparent, efficient and privacy-focused digital advertising marketplace."
This week, Check My Ads launched a new campaign- Defund the Insurrectionists- that seeks to cut domestic extremists off from a key source of funding for their propaganda efforts. Check my ads wants to alert advertisers that are unwittingly funding the insurrectionists, and demand that ad tech companie…
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Jan 9, 2022
Extremism, Media & Tech One Year After January 6, Part I
This week, the United States observed the first anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this episode, we’re going to look at the extremist movement in the United States and how the media and technology environment plays a role in it.
We’re going to hear first from Jared Holt, a resident fellow at Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), who will walk us through the findings of his latest report, After the Insurrection: How Domestic Extremists Adapted and Evolved After the January 6 US Capitol Attack, which chronicles how the far right has reorganized and adjusted strategically since January 6 to position itself to continue the assault on our democracy.
And then, we’ll hear from Candace Rondeaux and Ben Dalton, who just completed a report with an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) and staff at New America titled Parler and the Road to the Capitol Attack: Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6…
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Jan 2, 2022
Reducing Harm on Social Media
This first episode of 2022 features a discussion hosted by the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU (CSMaP) that gathered academic, policy, and tech experts to discuss ideas about how to make social media a safer and more civil place.
The panel was expertly moderated by Jane Lytvynenko, a Senior Research Fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and included:
Niousha Roshani, Deputy Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab at Stanford University’s Program on Democracy and the Internet;
Rebekah Tromble, Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University;
Joshua A. Tucker, Co-Director of CSMaP and a Professor of Politics at NYU; and
and Sahar Massachi, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Integrity Institute.
Thanks to Erik Opsal at CSMaP for his assistance providing the audio, and to Zeve Sanderson, Founding Executive Director…
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Dec 19, 2021
Race, Technology and Policy
This episode focuses on the intersection of race, technology and policy. First, we hear from Carmen Scurato, Suher Adi and Jacquelyn Mason- members of the Disinfo Defense League, which calls itself a network of intersectional organizations fighting disinformation that affects communities of color- about the League’s new policy platform. And second, we speak with two researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life- Daniel Kreiss and Madhavi Reddi- about the need for social media platforms to adopt race-conscious policies.
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Dec 12, 2021
Tech, Democracy and Market Power
We’ve got two segments today. First up, Alexandra Reeve Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) discusses last week’s Summit for Democracy and what it accomplished. Second, we speak with Marshall Steinbaum, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah about market and monopoly power, tech platforms and antitrust.
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Dec 5, 2021
An AI Strategy for New York City
In October, New York City launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy. A 116-page document, the strategy says "Like software itself, AI will touch virtually every area of life in the years ahead, including everything from basic scientific research to the operation of various products and services, and its impacts will be felt from a personal to a societal scale. For these reasons, the City of New York believes that an ecosystem approach grounded in digital rights is necessary to maximize benefits, minimize harms, and ensure the responsible application of AI."
To learn more, I spoke with Neal Parikh, Director of Artificial Intelligence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.
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Nov 28, 2021
Information Disorder and Who Profits From It
Today, we’ve got two conversations about the problem of mis- and disinformation.
In the first segment, Courtney Radsch, a Tech Policy Press contributor and board member, speaks with Vivian Schiller, Executive Director of Aspen Digital, a part of the Aspen Institute that just released the final report of the Commission on Information Disorder.
And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Karen Hao, senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review about her year reporting on how the business model of social media platforms incentivizes the deterioration of information ecosystems.
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Nov 21, 2021
Platform Integrity, Platform Democracy
Today, we’ve got two separate but related conversations about social media and how it intersects with democracy and society.
In the first segment, we’re going to hear from Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi, two former Facebook employees who are the founders of the Integrity Institute, a new nonprofit organization. They believe one solution to the problems on social media is the development of a community of integrity professionals with experience at a variety of social media platforms that can come together to address problems and share best practices together.
Then, we’re going to look under the hood of some fresh ideas about how to democratize policymaking on social media platforms from Aviv Ovadya, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of a proposal titled "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure." To help evaluate Aviv's ideas, I'm also joined by Joe Bak-Coleman, a pos…
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Nov 14, 2021
The Tech Worker Handbook & the Filter Bubble Transparency Act
There are two segments in this week's show:
First- Ifeoma Ozoma is the Founder and Principal of Earthseed, a consulting firm advising individuals, organizations, and companies on tech accountability, public policy and health misinformation. A tech policy expert, Ifeoma is a co-sponsor of the Silenced No More Act. The legislation, authored by CA State Senator Connie Leyva and recently signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, allows everyone in California to share information about discrimination or harassment they have faced on the job, even after signing an NDA. Ifeoma led an initiative to provide tech whistleblowers with needed resources called the Tech Worker Handbook, and is now leading a project to scale the protections in the Silenced No More Act to more companies and workers via shareholder activism.
Second- this week, the Filter Bubble Transparency Act was unveiled in the House of Representatives. The proposed legislation would require “require that internet platforms give u…
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Nov 7, 2021
Holding Big Tech Accountable for Disinformation and Incitement to Violence
The first segment in this episode is a conversation with Congresswoman https://schakowsky.house.gov/ (Jan Schakowsky), a Democrat representing Illinois’ 9th district. Representative Schakowsky serves as Senior Chief Deputy Whip and Chair of the Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has called the tech CEOs to testify in recent months and introduced proposed legislation.
The second is a discussion on the threat of big tech and disinformation to social movements that took place recently at NetRootsNation, conference for progressive organizers. It is hosted by http://melissaryan.net/ (Melissa Ryan), a Tech Policy Press masthead member and author of the https://actionnetwork.org/forms/subscribe-to-ctrl-alt-right-delete/ (Ctrl Alt-Right Delete), a newsletter that covers extremism that has grown to more than 15,000 weekly readers. Melissa uses her expertise to help people, policymakers and institutions combat online extremism and…
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Oct 31, 2021
A Conversation with the Oversight Board's John Samples & Julie Owono
This is Part 3 of three special episodes focused on Facebook in the wake of the revelations in what has come to be known as the Facebook Papers, reports based on a trove of documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
On Thursday- the same day Facebook announced its name change to Meta- Tech Policy Press had the chance to speak with two members of the Oversight Board, the entity the company set up to provide external oversight to its content moderation decisions and to help it make policy. John Samples and Julie Owono- two Oversight Board members who have a deep expertise in questions of internet governance, tech policy, human rights and free expression- spoke to Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix and contributor and board member Courtney Radsch about the Oversight Board's recent transparency report, and the role of the Oversight Board in the post-whistleblower period.
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Oct 29, 2021
The Facebook Papers: Conversations with Jeff Horwitz and Dia Kayyali
This is Part 2 of four special episodes focused on the revelations in what has come to be known as the Facebook papers, reports based on a trove of documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen. In the first part, we heard from the Executive Editor of The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance, who wrote about the challenge Facebook poses to democracy.
In this episode, I had a chance to catch up with two people- first, Jeff Horwitz, a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and one of the leaders of the team reporting on the documents first brought forward by the Journal. And, I spoke to Dia Kayyali, the associate director for advocacy at Mnemonic, for reactions to the revelations in the whistleblower documents, and a point of view on what it means for the Oversight Board, the entity the company set up to provide external oversight to its content moderation decisions and to help it make policy.
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Oct 27, 2021
The Facebook Papers: A Conversation with Adrienne LaFrance
This week’s revelations in what has come to be known as the Facebook papers- reports based on a trove of documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen- are keeping Facebook and its senior executives at the top of news feeds around the world. In the avalanche of coverage, one particular piece stood out to me-one written by Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, and a writer and observer that I regard has having a keen insight into issues at the intersection of technology and democracy. The piece is titled ‘HISTORY WILL NOT JUDGE US KINDLY’: Thousands of pages of internal documents offer the clearest picture yet of how Facebook endangers American democracy—and show that the company’s own employees know it. Tech Policy Press had the opportunity to speak with her about the piece and pose additional questions about the company and its response to these leaks.
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Oct 24, 2021
The Perils of Amazon Ring
Earlier this month, https://www.rit.edu/directory/emsgsh-evan-selinger (Evan Selinger), a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09505431.2021.1983797 (published a paper) with co-author Darrin Durant in the journal Science as Culture titled Amazon’s Ring: Surveillance as a Slippery Slope. Last month, a https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/chris-gilliard-sees-digital-redlining-in-surveillance-tech/ (must-read profile) of https://twitter.com/hypervisible (Chris Gilliard) by Will Oremus for The Washington Post also started out with concerns about Ring, before detailing Gilliard’s perspective and background. I invited Evan and Chris to join me to discuss their writings on Ring, and how it fits into their broader views on tech and society.
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Oct 17, 2021
Seeing Inside the Algorithms
This is a two part show- first, a discussion about how to make sure independent researchers have access to the data from technology platforms; and second, a book talk with the author of How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News: Exploring the Impacts of Social Media, Deepfakes, GPT-3 and More.
In the wake of the revelations brought forward by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, there is a great deal of focus among lawmakers and regulators in many capitals to figure out how to see inside the platforms. Last week, Nathaniel Persily, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, put forward a draft of potential legislation, announcing what he calls the "Platform Transparency and Accountability Act" in a Washington Post column.
We took the opportunity to invite Nate and two other experts on this subject- Rebekah Tromble, Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and Associate Professor at George Washington University, an…
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Oct 16, 2021
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy, Part 5: Ramesh Srinivasan
On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference, Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components.
This fifth features Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, and Director of UC Digital Cultures Lab, who with Dipayan Ghosh was the author of the article Reining in Big Tech in the Journal of Democracy series on the future of platform power that served as the basis for some of the discussion at the event. At the end of the session, you will hear Dr. Nathalie Maréchal and Richard Reisman, two participants in the first session of the day, offer thoughts in reply, along with Bryan J…
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Oct 16, 2021
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy, Part 4: Tracy Chou and Mike Masnick
On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components.
The fourth segment of the event focused on the opportunities and challenges to building middleware solutions that may thrive in a more decentralized social media ecosystem. The two panelists for this session were Tracy Chou, founder and CEO of Block Party, a company that builds anti-harassment tools against online abuse, and Michael Masnick, the editor of Techdirt and the author of Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech, a paper we discussed during the event.
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Oct 15, 2021
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy, Part 3: Cory Doctorow
On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The third segment features Cory Doctorow on the topic of competitive compatibility.
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Oct 14, 2021
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy, Part 2: Joan Donovan & Robert Faris
On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy.
While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The first discussion at the event took on the notion of ‘middleware’ for content moderation, and featured Francis Fukuyama, Nathalie Marechal, Daphne Keller and Richard Reisman.
This second session focuses on ideas put forward by Joan Donovan and Robert Faris, researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, in a Journal of Democracy article titled Quaranting Misinformation that is itself a response and critique of the idea of decentralization and middleware.
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Oct 13, 2021
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy, Part 1: Fukuyama, Keller, Maréchal and Reisman
On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy.
While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components.
The first discussion at the event took on the notion of ‘middleware’ for content moderation, and featured:
Dr. Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy.
Dr. Nathalie Maréchal, a writer, researcher and activist working at the intersection of internet policy and human rights advocac…
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Oct 10, 2021
Resisting Corporate Surveillance
The United Nations General Assembly just took place in New York. We get a report on it from Maya Plentz, who covers technology and innovation at the United Nations and its agencies, for The UN Brief, a subscription-based news platform.
Then, we’re going to hear from Ari Ezra Waldman, a lawyer and sociologist, and Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University. He’s the author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power.
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Oct 4, 2021
A Whistleblower, Facebook, Social Media & Polarization
The relationship between Facebook and political polarization is in the spotlight. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower that took documents to the Wall Street Journal, Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, appeared on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday night. “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world," she said.
Yet Facebook executives such as Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg take pains to disavow the connection between social media and polarization, and in particular to extreme events such as the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
To take a step back from the whistleblower news cycle, I spoke to one academic researcher who has looked at the available evidence in great detail. After https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070 (conducting an analysis of nearly 100 social science studies) that look at the connections between media, social media and political polarization, researcher https://w…
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Oct 3, 2021
Facebook, Instagram and Young People's Well-Being
Most Tech Policy Press podcast listeners will by now be well familiar with the Facebook Files, a series of Wall Street Journal articles revealing internal research and information from Facebook that show the company aware of a variety of serious problems on its platforms that affect people’s lives and our politics. This week, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Safety, was brought before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security to discuss the revelations in the data about Instagram’s effects on children and teens, and in particular their mental health. Just before the hearing, the Wall Street Journal published the documents it reviewed, which details the relationship between the platform and body issues, teen depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.
We’ve got a two part show today where we’ll hear from two experts responding to the testimony yesterday, and talking about what can be done to make change. First, to put…
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Sep 26, 2021
The Bad News on Internet Freedom
We’ve got a three part jumbo show today. First, we’ll dive in to the results of the annual Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House with Allie Funk, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House. Then, we’re going to look at one place where internet freedoms are at risk- Canada, where a new proposal to regulate online harms looms- with Michael Geist, Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. And then, we’re going to talk about the complexity of generating policies for content management on social media- and how a well-crafted multi-stakeholder approach can help- with Chris Riley, senior fellow of Internet Governance at the R Street Institute, a think thank in Washington D.C.
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Sep 19, 2021
Facebook Fuels the Fire
On Monday, September 13th, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published a report titled Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization – And What Can Be Done About It, written by the Center’s deputy director, Paul Barrett, research fellow Grant Sims, and Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix.
Then on Wednesday, September 15th, the Wall Street Journal published an article in a series of exclusives, based on leaked internal documents from Facebook, with the headline “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead: Internal memos show how a big 2018 change rewarded outrage and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes”.
Today, you’ll hear from Keach Hagey, one of the authors of that Wall Street Journal exclusive, followed by a conversation between Paul Barrett, Grant Sims and Justin Hendrix about the Center for Business and Human Rights report.
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Sep 16, 2021
Rep. Lori Trahan on Instagram, teens and mental health
Today, I spoke with Representative Lori Trahan, the Congresswoman for the third district in Massachussetts, to get her reaction to a disturbing report in the Wall Street Journal about internal research at Instagram related to mental health impacts of that social media service, particularly on teens.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published its headline, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.” The Journal’s Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman wrote that the Instagram documents they obtained were part of a "trove of internal communications provided to them on areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking."
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” said a March 2020 slide presentation.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from 2019.
And, the Journal says that one presentation…
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Sep 12, 2021
What Democratic Values Are We Trying to Protect?
In August, researchers Bridget Barrett and Daniel Kreiss from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media joined with Katharine (Kate) Dommett of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics and International Relations to publish research in the journal Policy & Internet that took a hard look at how democratic values express themselves in technology policy documents in the UK and the US in a paper titled, The capricious relationship between technology and democracy: Analyzing public policy discussions in the UK and US.
We spoke to Kate and Daniel about the research, including their findings on the lack of clarity about what democratic ideals we are trying to protect, and why the policy making discourse on tech and democracy is “often out of step with the growing literature which suggests that political conflicts between social groups, right-wing extremism, and anti-democratic actions increasingly taken by elites and parties are…
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Sep 5, 2021
Algorithms and the Plight of the Gig Worker
Tomorrow is Labor Day. This week, we hear from someone who studies gig workers and the systems and companies that manage them. Diana Enriquez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies labor, technology, informal economies, and law, particularly in the US and Latin America. This interview with Diana is about two papers she helped author in recent months- Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy, published in the journal Sociologica earlier this year and another, Managing Algorithms: partial automation of middle management and its implications for gig worker, published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Management this summer.
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Aug 29, 2021
Interviews with Cindy Gallop and Carissa Véliz
This episode features two interviews. The first looks at the struggles of those in the sex and sextech industries to get access to capital and to create products and services that respect users and creators, and the second considers the state of privacy and its relationship to power.
OnlyFans, a UK-based site that built a billion dollar business enabling creators to post and get paid for sexually explicit material, announced this month that as of October 1st it would no longer permit anything much more salacious than nudity. This came as a surprise to its legion of creators and its many paying fans. But the reason is straightforward: financial firms will simply not support businesses that deal in sex and pornography. The company has since reversed its decision after outcry from its community.
When I read about OnlyFans’ predicament, I immediately thought about another venture that encountered many of the same issues when it got up and running a decade ago- MakeLoveNotPorn. Founded by…
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Aug 22, 2021
The Fall of Afghanistan; The Tech & Democracy Movement
This week, we have two segments. The first is a conversation with Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, about the fall of Kabul and the rise of the Taliban, and the role that digital and social media have and will continue to play there.
And second, we turn to a discussion I had with Emerson’s Atlantic Council college, Rose Jackson, and the Institute for Security Technology’s Vera Zakem, about the nascent pro-democracy effort around tech issues and tech policy around the world, and the challenges it faces.
First, to Afghanistan, where the fall of the Taliban was broadcast around the world by Taliban fighters themselves, sharing photos and selfies as they walked in to official residences and government offices, announcing their victory in the war in Afghanistan. To talk more about the role of social media in their return to power and what to expect in the future, we spoke with DFRLab’s Emerson T. Brooking. Emers…
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Aug 15, 2021
Holding Tech Accountable: An interview with Roger McNamee
This episode features an interview with Roger McNamee. His official bio at Elevation Partners, an investment firm, says that since 2017 he has been involved in ”a campaign to trigger a national conversation about the dark side of social media“. He is the author of a book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, published by HarperCollins in 2019, that has an account of his role as an investor and advisor to the company and his ultimate recognition of the harms it causes at scale.
To many listeners, his voice on these issues is well known- he is a frequent commentator on technology on shows such as “Squawk Alley” CNBC and on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC, and he is a regular at conferences that delve into topics at the intersection of tech and democracy. He knows the tech bro culture well enough to have served as a technical advisor for multiple seasons of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, a show that lampoons the people and industry there.
Roger also a philanthropist a…
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Aug 8, 2021
Talking About An Ugly Truth
This week, we have two interviews. First we hear from two researchers in Britain- Chico Carmargo and Felix Simon- who recently published a paper that takes a critical look at a term that has been often used in recent months to describe a stew of problems in the information ecosystem- the term “infodemic”.
Then, our feature interview this week is with the authors of the bestselling book AN UGLY TRUTH: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination- New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. I got to speak with Sheera and Cecilia about the reception to the book, and whether the type of change it suggests is necessary at Facebook is possible under its current management and structure.
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Aug 1, 2021
Can social media algorithms help depolarize society?
This week's show features two interviews. The first is with Albert Fox Cahn, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project's (S.T.O.P.) founder and executive director, about a column he wrote in Wired magazine about problems with the twitter verification process that disadvantage activists. And second, I talk with Jonathan Stray, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley about whether social media can help depolarize society.
In May, Twitter relaunched its verification program and offered more clarification about how the process works following criticism and missteps, such as verifying fake accounts. I spoke to Albert Fox Cahn about the holes in the program, and how they affect journalists and activists.
There is an active debate the conditions in which and the extent to which social media plays a role in contributing to polarization and division in society. I spoke to Jonathan Stray about his new paper,…
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Jul 25, 2021
Surveillance and the Future of Tech
This week's episode features two segments. The first conversation is a conversation focused on the rise of the global surveillance industry with Marietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. We consider what the revelations of the Pegasus Project about the Israeli firm NSO group means for democracies.
The second segment considers Chinese tech in the world, looking at how the Chinese Communist Party uses technology to facilitate political authoritarianism at home while exporting its interests abroad, the role of private sector firms in the Chinese public sphere, and what it means for the global debate over the Internet and digital technologies. The panel took place at the end of June at The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) hosted its 360/Open Summit: The World in Motion. The panel is moderated by Isaac Stone Fish, Chief Executive Officer of Strategy Risks, and also features Josh Chin, Deputy China Bure…
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Jul 18, 2021
Social Media, the FBI & January 6
This episode features two interviews. The first focuses on extremism, law enforcement and social media monitoring, and the second on what news that an AI voice clone was used to generate segments of a new Anthony Bourdain documentary tells us about the future of synthetic media.
The January 6 insurrection was preceded by weeks of online promotion and planning- including from former President Donald Trump, who told his supporters the event would be wild. What should the FBI have known in advance, and how does social media monitoring play out in the FBI in practice?
First, to get an expert opinion on these issues and what they mean for the effort to curb domestic extremism, I spoke to Clint Watts, a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and author of the book Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World…
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Jul 11, 2021
Digital Communications Technology & Collective Behavior
Social media, message apps and other digital communications technologies restructure the ways in which information flows, and thus how humans interact with one another, how they make sense of the world and how they come to consensus on how to deal with problems.
Now, more than a dozen researchers at multiple universities who study technology, behavior and complex systems believe questions about the impact of communications technology on collective behavior should be regarded as a “crisis discipline,” noting that “the vulnerability of these systems to misinformation and disinformation poses a dire threat to health, peace, global climate and more.” In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they call on researchers and social media executives to take a Hippocratic oath and pledge first to do no harm to humanity.
To hear more, we caught up with three of the authors- Joseph B. Bak-Coleman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washin…
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Jun 27, 2021
Social Media & Real World Violence
This episode focuses on issues of identity, extremism, and violence, and the role that technology plays in societies in conflict.
First up, we speak to Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University. Jefferson describes the underlying grievance driving the right in the United States- white supremacy- and how it combined with demagoguery, disinformation, and the ability to organize at scale on social media to produce the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6th.
Then, we speak to Fadi Quran, campaigns director at Avaaz, a social movement that empowers people to take action on issues from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. He describes the role of social media in the recent flare up of violence between Israel and Palestine, and what social platforms and governments should do to protect democracy.
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Jun 20, 2021
Hard Problems: Algorithms & Antitrust
This episode is in two parts. Both get at hard problems in how to deal with technology companies- first, around the regulation of algorithmic amplification on social media, and second, around competition.
On algorithms, we hear from Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. Daphne recently published an essay, Amplification and Its Discontents: Why regulating the reach of online content is hard, on the website of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
On competition, we take a tour of five new bills to rein in the big tech companies that were just put forward in Congress with Hal Singer, a PhD economist and Managing Director of the firm Econ One. Hal is an expert in antitrust, consumer protection, and regulation. Hal has researched, published, and testified on competition-related issues, providing expert economic and policy advice to regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada, as well as before congres…
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Jun 13, 2021
A Time for Reimagining
This episode features two segments that focus on reimagining our relationship to technology, and the ways in which it contributes to our reality.
First up, we speak with JAZSALYN, an anti-disciplinary artist, curator and creative director and a graduate student in an MFA student in Parsons' Design + Technology program and one of the creators of black beyond , a platform making space for artists and activists to speculate alternate realities for Blackness. black beyond is hosting a virtual new media festival titled black beyond _origins, to reimagine Black Femme Futures, starting June 17th, 2021. I caught up with Jazsalyn about the festival, and about her vision for how a world that repositions and centers communities that are often left out of discussions on technology, or what is the future.
Then, we look at another set of ideas for reimagining our relationship to technology and the world around us. Last month the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech released Rebooting NYC: An Urb…
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Jun 6, 2021
AI, People and Power: A Conversation with Kate Crawford & Ryan Calo
Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most hyped technology in the world. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear a discussion that invites the listener to think about how money, power and other troubling forces and ideas that shape our society are built into AI systems and the ways we think about deploying them.
In May, the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab and Center for an Informed Public cohosted a virtual book talk featuring Kate Crawford, a leading scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence and author of the recently published book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence published this spring by Yale University Press, in conversation with Ryan Calo, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public co-founder, founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and a UW School of Law professor.
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May 30, 2021
Countering Hate Speech and Extremism on Social Media
There are three parts in this week's episode. The first two reflect on the Christchurch Call Summit, a meeting of world leaders and tech executives to discuss efforts to police hate speech and extremism on social media. Moderated by Courtney Radsch, a member of the Tech Policy Press masthead, our guests include Paul Ash, the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Cyber and Digital and the Coordinator of the Christchurch Call; and Dia Kayyali, Associate Director for Advocacy at Mnemonic, the umbrella organization for Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, and Sudanese Archive.
The third is an interview with New York State Senator Anna Kaplan on legislation she has introduced to contend with hate speech and misinformation.
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May 23, 2021
The Dark Side of Social Media
Today’s episode features two discussions on negative impacts of social media- including censorship of marginalized voices and dangers to kids.
First, we talk with Thusiyan Nandakumar, an editor at the Tamil Guardian and Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor and extremism researcher at Queen’s University, who tell the story of how social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are are censoring Tamil activists and other activists around the world who being targeted by governments.
And second, we focus on kids and social media, with reactions to hearing in a Senate Subcommittee titled “Protecting Kids Online: Internet Privacy and Manipulative Marketing”, from tech policy experts Sara Collins, Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge and previously a Policy Counsel on the Future of Privacy Forum’s Education & Youth Privacy team, as well as Joseph Jerome, Director, Platform Accountability and State Advocacy at Common Sense Media, where he focuses on legislative and policy solutions…
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May 16, 2021
The Issue of Trust: Katherine Maher, Ethan Zuckerman & Alberto Ibargüen
Today’s episode features a conversation hosted recently by the Digital Public Library of America, DPLA. The DPLA brings together many collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world on a shared platform.
This DPLA Book Talk features a conversation on trust and the crisis faced by our institutions; the promise of the movements rising to challenge them; and the obstacles we must confront if we are to rebuild civic life and create meaningful change.
It includes Ethan Zuckerman, Katherine Maher, and Alberto Ibargüen.
Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, a research group that is studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet. He’s the author of two books: Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them…
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May 9, 2021
The Facebook Oversight Board & Donald Trump
This episode features two segments focusing on the decision by the Facebook Oversight Board on Donald Trump’s account.
First we hear a panel discussion hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and moderated by Stanford Law professor Nathaniel Persily. The panel features two members of the Facebook Oversight board- Michael McConnell, director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, and Julie Owono, an international human rights lawyer. The others on the panel include Marietje Schaake, international director of policy at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence who previously served as a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands; Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory; Alex Stamos, director of the Observatory, a professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and former chief security officer at Facebook; and Daphne Keller, who…
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May 2, 2021
Technology & Democracy
First, we hear a couple of key exchanges from a Senate hearing last week that featured testimony on algorithms and amplification on social media from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter executives.
Second, Yaël Eisenstat brings us an interview with Eileen Donahoe, the Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University, Cyber Policy Center to discuss the final report of the Task Force on US Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism, a bipartisan group of leaders, experts, and former policy makers committed to addressing the worldwide decline in democratic freedom and the rise in authoritarianism that endanger US national security.
And third, we speak with Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, senior director on the campaigns team at Color Of Change, the nation’s largest racial justice organization with more than seven million members, about the tech policy priorities the organization published in April.
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Apr 25, 2021
AI & Regulation; Disinformation in the 2020 Election
The first interview is with Ryan Calo, professor at the University of Washington School of Law, founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and the UW Center for an Informed Public. The interview took place shortly after the European Commission announced new proposed regulations on artificial intelligence.
The second conversation is with Kate Starbird and Renée Diresta. Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) and Director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory and a co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation, promoting an informed society, and strengthening democratic discourse. Renée DiResta is the Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers i…
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Apr 18, 2021
Julia Carrie Wong & Maria Ressa: Political Manipulation on Social Media
First up is Julia Carrie Wong, Senior technology reporter for the Guardian based in Silicon Valley. This week, she published a series of articles based on interviews and documents from Sophie Zhang, a Facebook whistleblower who came forward to reveal how the social media company has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents.
The second interview is with Maria Ressa. She is co-founder Rappler, the top digital only news site that leads the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. She has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, and still has to fight to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts. Maria has a 35 year career in journalism. For her work on disinformation, Maria was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also be…
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Apr 11, 2021
AI & National Security; Fixing Social Media
In the first half, we talk with Lucy Suchman, a professor and expert on human computer interaction & warfare about a recent report commissioned by the United States Government about artificial intelligence and national security. We look at some of the unexamined premises for the report.
In the second half, we listen to a panel discussion hosted by Betalab on how to build a better social media future featuring David Ryan Polgar, a Responsible Tech advocate and founder of All Tech Is Human; Nicole Chi, a civic technologist and product manager who has worked at the intersection of product, policy, and public interest; Rana Sarkar, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Consul General of Canada in San Francisco & Silicon Valley in 2017; and moderator Yaël Eisenstat, Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab and now a Future of Democracy Fellow at Berggruen Institute.
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Apr 4, 2021
Polarization & social media; anti-Asian disinfo & harassment; Facebook & Canada
Our first segment features an interview with Chris Bail, a researcher who runs the Polarization Lab at Duke University. This week, Chris’s new book will hit book shelves. It’s called Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing.
The second is a conversation with https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivianlachang/ (Vivian Chang), a civic engagement manager for the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO (APALA), about steps her organization is taking to confront disinformation and harassment in the communities it works with, including working with the https://www.protocol.com/election-day-2020-misinfomation-disinformation (Disinfo Defense League), a coalition that trains civic groups to tackle the growing problem of misinformation and disinformation.
The last interview in this episode is with Kieran Leavitt, an Edmonton-based political reporter for the Toronto Star. Kieran has been covering Facebook’s relationship to the Canadian government. This…
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Mar 28, 2021
Congress vs. Zuckerberg, Dorsey & Pichai
This week’s episode of The Sunday Show focuses on Congressional testimony on disinformation and extremism by Tech CEOs including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Guests include Yaël Eisenstat (Betalab), Katie Paul (Tech Transparency Project) Evan Greer (Fight for the Future), Chris Gilliard (Harvard Shorenstein Center), and Fadi Quran (Avaaz). And, Tech Policy Press colleagues Romi Geller and Bryan Jones discuss news of the week.
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Mar 21, 2021
Social Media, Speech & Content Moderation at Scale
This episode features a discussion on the challenges of content moderation at scale with four great experts on the the key issues including Tarleton Gillespie, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University; Kate Klonick, Assistant Professor at Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School; Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and Sarah T. Roberts, Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.
Tech Policy Press fellow Romi Geller and cofounder Bryan Jones discuss news of the day.
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Mar 14, 2021
Amazon & Inequality; Social Media & Regulation
In this episode we focus on the question of what should be done to constrain the dominance of the tech platforms, and to regulate the ways in which they control aspects of our economy, markets and the public sphere.
First up, we hear from Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica that has just written a book that considers Amazon’s dominance and what it means for wealth of American cities and people called https://www.amazon.com/Fulfillment-Winning-Losing-One-Click-America/dp/0374159270 (Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America).
Then, we listen to a panel discussion from the Betalab: Fix The Internet program at Betaworks. The discussion focuses on priorities for the regulation of social media, and features Yaël Eisenstat, Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab and formerly a CIA officer, a White House advisor, and the Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising at Facebook; Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade association that adv…
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Mar 7, 2021
Technology & the Pandemic
This week we focus on the intersection of technology, media and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first segment is a discussion with Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, and the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
Then, we listen in on a panel discussion titled Privacy Impacts of Modern Contract Tracing for Future Pandemic Response that took place a the end of January during a day of discussion hosted by Santa Clara county. The panel features Deirdre Mulligan, a Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Brandie Nonnecke, Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab a UC Berkeley; Brian Hofer, Chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission; and Steve Penrod, VP of Product Development at TripleBlind.
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Feb 28, 2021
January 6th, Extremism & Deradicalization
This week's episode features a discussion hosted by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab titled Reclaiming Reality: De-radicalization and Rehabilitation After the January 6 Attack that includes https://www.queensu.ca/cidp/people/fellows/amarnath-amarasingam (Amarnath Amarasingam), an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University, https://datasociety.net/people/lopez-g-cristina/ (Cristina López G), a Senior Research Analyst with Data and Society, QAnon Anonymous co-host https://twitter.com/travis_view (Travis View), and the DFRLab’s Research Fellow, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/jared-holt/ (Jared Holt). We also hear related Congressional testimony from Emily Bell, Founding Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, at a House subcommittee hearing titled "Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media."
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Feb 20, 2021
Australia vs. Facebook & Free Speech in the Digital Age
First, we discuss Facebook’s response to an Australian law that would compel search and social media platforms to pay news organizations for linking to their content with guest Chris Zappone, Digital Foreign Editor at Australia’s The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
Second, we listen in on a panel discussion on free speech in the digital age hosted by Betaworks Studios as part of its Betalab: Fix The Internet program. Moderated by Betalab Researcher-in-Residence Yaël Eisenstat, includes David Kaye, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, along with Nora Benavidez the director of U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America.
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Feb 14, 2021
Fixing the Public Sphere: Ali Velshi, Karen Kornbluh and Emily Bell
This week's episode features a discussion about technology, democracy and the public sphere with Ali Velshi, the MSNBC Anchor of the show named after him and an NBC Correspondent; Karen Kornbluh, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation Democracy Initiative; and Emily Bell, Founding Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Plus, we talk about news at the intersection of technology and policy with Bryan Jones and Romi Geller.
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Feb 7, 2021
Social Media: Teens, Violence and Section 230
Interviews with https://ssw.uconn.edu/person/caitlin-elsaesser-phd/ (Caitlin Elsaesser), a clinical social worker and researcher at the University of Connecticut who studies the connections between youth violence and social media and https://www.usna.edu/CyberCenter/People/Biographies/Kosseffbio.php (Jeff Kosseff), a professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy's Cyber Science Department and author of the book The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet- A history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Also featuring Bryan Jones, cofounder of Tech Policy Press, and Romi Geller, Tech Policy Press fellow and a research assistant at the Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin. Hosted by Justin Hendrix.
Visit https://techpolicy.press/ (Tech Policy Press) and follow us on https://twitter.com/techpolicypress (Twitter) for more.
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