Techdirt

As many of you know, last week we hosted an online event for the latest Techdirt Greenhouse edition, all about looking back on the lessons learned from the 2012 protests against SOPA and PIPA. Our special guest was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the strongest voices in congress speaking out against the disastrous bills, who provided all kinds of excellent insight into what happened then and what's happening now. In case you missed it, for this week's episode of the podcast (yes, we're finally back with new episodes!) we've got the full conversation and Q&A from the event. The Techdirt Greenhouse: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/greenhouse/

Our lives are lived at the intersection of vast systems (economic, technological, and beyond) that are incredibly complex and often chaotic, and it's hard to understand and embrace what author Neil Chilson's new book, Getting Out Of Control, calls "the emergent mindset." On this week's episode, Neil joins us to discuss his book and why you can't simply "control" complex systems.

In last week's episode, we had a conversation with the creators and curators of the Knight Foundation's virtual symposium on Lessons From The First Internet Ages. This week, we've got the audio from the panel discussion at the symposium that Mike participated in along with Stanford's Daphne Keller and Harvard Law's Evelyn Douek, all about the ways that the governance of online communities has evolved and changed as the internet has matured.

Earlier this month Mike participated in a content series and virtual symposium on Lessons From The First Internet Ages, hosted by the Knight Foundation, alongside several important figures from the history of the internet. On this week's episode, the creators and curators of the event — John Sands, Mary Anne Franks, and Eric Goldman — to reflect on the writings and conversations from the event and the lessons to be learned.

We've got a crossposted episode for you this week: Mike recently joined The Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb O. Brown for a discussion about the "hacking" fiasco in Missouri and the state's treatment of the journalists who exposed its huge data security flub. It's a shorter conversation than our usual podcasts, and you can listen to the whole thing on this week's episode.

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny lately, and for very good reasons! But the anger surrounding Facebook has also resulted in plenty of criticism that is misleading or downright inaccurate in its description of how the company operates and what it does — though Facebook itself carries some of the blame for that happening, too. The goal of fixing the problems with social media isn't helped by misrepresenting what those problems are, so this week we're joined by Gizmodo's Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss all the things people get wrong about Facebook.

The documents revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen are full of important information — but the media hasn't been doing the best job of covering that information and all its nuances. There are plenty of examples of reporters taking one aspect out of context and presenting it in the worst possible light, while ignoring the full picture. This week, we're joined by law professor Kate Klonick to discuss the media's failings in covering the Facebook Papers, and the unwanted outcomes this could produce.

It's another crossposted episode this week! Mike recently joined the Tech Policy Press podcast alongside Block Party founder Tracy Chou for a conversation about using middleware and interoperability to craft a new, less centralized online ecosystem. You can listen to the whole conversation on this week's episode.

We've got a cross-posted podcast for you this week! Recently, Mike appeared on the Ipse Dixit podcast with host Professor Brian L. Frye — the inspiration for our Plagiarism Collection of NFTs and, previously, our OK, Landlord gear — for a wide-ranging discussion about scarcity and abundance in the digital age. You can listen to the whole conversation on this week's episode. Ipse Dixit - https://shows.acast.com/ipse-dixit

Last week, we celebrated 300 episodes of the Techdirt Podcast with a live stream, for which we brought back original co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy. You can watch the stream on YouTube, but now it's time to release the episode as normal! The subject was simple, but led the conversation in all kinds of interesting directions: how have our views on technology issues changed and evolved since the podcast started? YouTube Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYOzagdwfkI

Disinformation continues to be a major topic of discussion across many fields, but a lot of what people believe about the subject is... questionable at best. One of the more thoughtful writers on the subject is Joe Bernstein from Buzzfeed News, whose recent cover story in Harper's brings a very different and valuable perspective to the debate. This week, he joins us on the podcast to discuss the glut of misconceptions and misinformation about disinformation. Harper's Article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/ Additionally, as we recently announced, we'll be celebrating our upcoming 300th episode of the podcast with a live stream featuring the return of the original co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy, including (hopefully, barring technical issues) the ability for viewers who back our Patreon to call in live and ask questions. The stream will happen on Thursday, September 30th at 1pm PT/4pm ET — stay tuned for more details on how you can watch the stream, and be sure to back our Patreon if you want a chance to call in! Live Stream Details: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/07392347648/this-thursday-watch-techdirt-podcast-live-become-patreon-backer-to-call-with-questions.shtml Techdirt Podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/techdirt

The concept of "shadowbanning" comes up a lot in content moderation discussions — often from people who are spreading nonsense. But various means of deprioritizing content have been employed by platforms for many years. This week, we're joined by Dr. Carolina Are, a researcher who recently released a paper on the subject, especially how it relates to nudity and censorship on Instagram. This week, she joins us on the podcast to discuss shadowbanning, how it works, and the impact it has. The Shadowban Cycle [Paper]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2021.1928259 Additionally, we've got a special announcement: to celebrate our upcoming 300th episode of the podcast, we'll be hosting a live stream with the return of the original co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy, including (hopefully, barring technical issues) the ability for viewers who back our Patreon to call in live and ask questions. The stream will happen on Thursday, September 30th at 1pm PT/4pm ET — stay tuned for more details on how you can watch the stream, and be sure to back our Patreon if you want a chance to call in!

The notion that if libraries didn't exist already, the publishing industry wouldn't allow them to exist at all is both a grim joke and a depressing truth, as continually evidenced by the opposition of publishers to seemingly unobjectionable technologies like controlled digital lending, which aim to allow libraries to carry their mission forward into the digital age. This week, we're joined by Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of the Library Futures Institute, to discuss the institute's new paper on the subject and the legality of and opposition to controlled digital lending, and what it tells us about the future of libraries.

Canada is barreling towards a federal election, and if recent legislative proposals are any indication, the outcome will have huge implications for the future of the internet in the country. Between the recent Bill C-10 and the proposed online harms legislation (among other things), it's clear that plenty of Canadian politicians want to make drastic and draconian changes to how the internet is regulated. This week, I join Mike on the podcast along with Matt Hatfield, the Campaigns Director of OpenMedia (something like Canada's version of the EFF), to discuss the Canadian election and what it means for a variety of important internet policy issues.

We've written a lot about the Oracle/Google case over API copyrights as it wound its way through the courts, but the Supreme Court ruling has such widespread implications that there is still plenty to unpack. This week, we're joined by two top experts on intellectual property — Berkeley Law's Pamela Samuelson and Stanford Law's Mark Lemley, who recently co-wrote a paper on the subject — to discuss in detail what impact this landmark case has on copyright and interoperability. Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3898154

We're continually amazed that so many companies still think they can get away with abusing the law to take down parodies, satire, and criticism without invoking the Streisand Effect and making things worse on themselves. One person who has a lot of experience being on the receiving end of these foolish threats is artist and culture hacker Danielle Baskin, whose recent Brand-Aid project is just the latest in a series of works that drew the ire of Johnson & Johnson. This week, Baskin joins us on the podcast to discuss what it's like when your art is constantly hit with demands to cease and desist.

The pandemic has brought us face to face with important questions about (among many things) the roles of technology and government in our lives, and especially the intersection of the two. One interesting example that is worth exploration is California's new digital vaccine record system, and who better to discuss it with than the person who spearheaded the project: California's Chief Technology Innovation Officer Rick Klau, who joins us this week to discuss tech, government, and what happens when the two manage to work well together.

Most people are pretty clear on the fact that the First Amendment prevents the government from making rules about speech — but what about when government officials make informal demands or threaten retaliation related to speech? Such actions have been ruled to violate the First Amendment, but this practice — dubbed "jawboning" by this week's guest — raises messy legal edge-cases and grey areas. We're joined by University of Chicago Law Professor Genevieve Lakier, who recently authored an article for Lawfare on the subject, to discuss the legal history and status of jawboning and the problem of informal government coercion. Informal Government Coercion and The Problem of "Jawboning" by Genevieve Lakier: https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and-problem-jawboning

Freedom of speech sits at the intersection of so many of the topics we write about here on Techdirt, and some of our favorite podcast guests are true experts on the subject. One such guest is UCI Law Professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, who joins us again for this weeks episode and a wide-ranging discussion about some of the most pressing and current free speech issues.

Although it's taken a bit of a back seat lately, the topic of patents has long been important here at Techdirt. Now that we're in the first ever Patent Quality Week, it's time to dig back in and talk about changing the patent system and turning it into something that enables good patents without allowing so many bad ones. So for this week's episode, we're joined by Engine's IP Counsel Abby Rives to talk about the inception and goals of Patent Quality Week, and how to fix our broken approach to patents.

If you've been following our coverage of Florida's recent law about social media content moderation, you know it hasn't been going well — it was an insane bill that was quickly shut down by an injunction from a judge who could see how obviously unconstitutional it was. But the fight isn't over, so this week we're joined by Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, one of the most vocal critics of the bill in the state legislature, to discuss how this all happened and what's going to come next.

We've been talking a lot about the huge effort in Congress to pass new antitrust laws targeting big tech companies, and all the issues these proposals have. This week, we've got an insider perspective on just what's going on with antitrust in the House: Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who called out many of the deficiencies in the bills during last week's marathon markup session, joins us for a discussion all about the many, many problems in all five proposed antitrust bills.

Even among people who recognize the problems with holding platforms liable for user speech, there's an understandable temptation to treat the act of content amplification and recommendation differently, since that's something the platforms do themselves. While you can see the logic to this idea, the fact is it's just as difficult and fraught with problems as other intermediary liability proposals. This week, we're joined by frequent guest Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, to discuss her recent paper on the subject and why regulating amplification isn't the simple solution it might sound like. "Amplification and Its Discontents" by Daphne Keller: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-discontents Separately, this is the first time we've had a sponsor for the podcast! The Pessimists Aloud podcast is sponsoring today's episode. It's a new offering from the Pessimists Archive Twitter feed, which finds old articles that are skeptical of technology, which in retrospect turned out to be incorrect. The podcast takes those articles and has them artistically read (in an old-timey voice) aloud. We think fans of Techdirt will certainly enjoy the Pessimists Aloud podcast: https://anchor.fm/pessimistsaloud

It's no secret that the tech industry has lost much of the diversity that was present in its early days and grown into a male-dominated field rife with sexism and gender disparity. Today, many people are work to change this — and one such effort is the GirlCon, which is holding its fourth annual conference for women in tech from June 27th to 30th this year. On this week's episode, we're joined by GirlCon co-founder Kyla Guru and co-director Vidya Bharadwaj to discuss this year's event and the ongoing fight to empower the next generation of women in tech.

Earlier today, we announced the release of an open source playkit for Money City, our new game about the future of money that was designed and run for MozFest 2021. For this week's episode of the podcast, Mike is joined by two of the people who commissioned the game — Erika Drushka and Chris Lawrence from Grant For The Web — as well as our game design partner, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, to talk more about Money City and using games to explore serious topics and generate useful ideas. Money City Playkit: https://copia.is/projects/money-city/ Copia Gaming: https://copia.is/gaming/

The recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline has brought renewed public attention to cybersecurity issues. The field is always evolving, and the attack serves as a great starting point for understanding the current state of cybersecurity, so this week we're joined by three experts — Ross Nordurft and Alex Botting from Venable LLP, and Amy Mahn from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — to discuss the lessons from the pipeline attack, and how to take a risk management approach to cybersecurity.

It's no secret that we were not at all impressed with WIRED's recent cover story about Section 230. The resulting conversation sparked a Twitter debate with the story's author, Gilad Edelman, and we thought... why not bring it to the podcast? So on this week's episode, Gilad joins Mike to discuss and debate the story, our response, and Section 230.

Last week, the Oversight Board made its highest-profile decision yet: upholding Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump, though with the caveat that it needs clearer policy reasons to make the suspension indefinite. Unsurprisingly, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions on this, and we wanted to learn more about the decision from the source. Julie Owono is an Oversight Board member and the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières, and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss how this decision was reached and what it means for Facebook.

The past several years have done a lot to expose the failings of the "marketplace of ideas", as disinformation and harassment campaigns have shown an ability to spread and flourish despite ample amounts of counterspeech. This triumph of mob behavior, especially on Twitter, has challenged a lot of people's preconceptions about how free speech functions, and one person who has been exploring these issues is FIRE's Sarah McLaughlin, especially in two topical articles on her Substack. She joins us on this week's episode to discuss Twitter, free speech, and the challenge mob behavior presents to online discourse.

The way a lot of people talk about content moderation is disappointingly uncreative — most of all in the way they boil every decision down to the binary decision of "leave it up or take it down". But this framework is extremely limiting and doesn't reflect the way content moderation professionals work, and one person working to paint a better picture is Santa Clara Law Professor Eric Goldman. He joins us on this week episode to discuss the many different ways to approach difficult content moderation questions.

After a few cross-post episodes, we're back with a brand new conversation, and it's all about a big subject that intersects with the majority of what we cover here at Techdirt: rights. In his book How Rights Went Wrong, Columbia Law professor and Constitutional scholar Jamal Greene proposes a new way of thinking about rights and how they interact, and he joins this week's episode to discuss this paradigm-shifting idea that challenges many preconceptions about the subject.

It's one more podcast cross-post this week! A recent episode of the Institute for Justice's Short Circuit podcast dug into two very interesting legal cases: one that explores one of the more rarely-invoked pieces of Section 230, and another that tests the limits of the Fourth Amendment. Mike joined IJ attorney Josh Windham and host Anthony Sanders to discuss the cases themselves and what they mean for the law, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

We've got another podcast cross-post for you this week! Mike recently joined the Cato Institute Daily Podcast to discuss the PACT Act — the more "serious" proposal for Section 230 reform that is still riddled with problems that will do damage to the entire internet. Listen to the full conversation withn Mike and Cato's Will Duffield on this week's episode.

Despite all the nonsense that dominates so much of the public discussion on the subject, free speech in the age of big social media platforms is a vital topic with a lot of nuances, and there are many people with important perspectives on it. One such person is EFF Director of International Freedom of Expression Jillian York, whose new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism offers an exploration of the topic rooted in personal experience and years of activism — and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internet content moderation and its impact on free expression around the world.

For some reason, a lot of people who get involved in the debate about content moderation still insist that online platforms are "doing nothing" to address problems — but that's simply not true. Platforms are constantly working on trust and safety issues, and at this point many people have developed considerable expertise regarding these unique challenges. One such person is Alex Feerst, former head of Trust & Safety at Medium, who joins us on this weeks episode to clear up some misconceptions and talk about the current state of the trust and safety field.

Textiles have been around for such a long time that we barely think about them. The making of fabric is one of the oldest crafts, and has played a major role in human civilization for thousands of years — and that might lead one to assume that there's nothing left to be learned from fabric's history. But they'd be wrong. This week we're joined by Virginia Postrel, whose book The Fabric Of Civilization: How Textiles Made The World is a fascinating look at how textiles have pushed and shaped the history of innovation, and how the story of fabric can teach us important lessons about today's biggest challenges around innovation.

There was a time not too long ago when tech companies enjoyed broad public support and adulation. Now they face widespread opposition and criticism from almost all corners. The shift from one to the other has long been called the "techlash", but it's always been unclear where it really came from and how it happened, and especially what role journalists and the media played. This week, we're joined by Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, author of the new book The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, for a deep dive into the story of the techlash phenomenon and how companies are reacting to the new dynamic.

Last week, we hosted Section 230 Matters, a virtual Techdirt fundraiser featuring a panel discussion with the two lawmakers who wrote the all-important text and got it passed 25 years ago: Chris Cox and Senator Ron Wyden. It was informative and entertaining, and for this week's episode of the podcast, we've got the full audio of the panel discussion about the history, evolution, and present state of Section 230.

We recently announced the winners of our third annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Now, just like last year, we're dedicating an episode of the podcast to looking at each of the winners a bit closer. Mike is joined by Randy Lubin (our partner in running the jams) and myself (with some unfortunate audio issues that I apologize for), to talk about all these great games that bring 1925 works into the present day.

Questions of content moderation and intermediary liability have seeped into just about everything these days, and not just with regards to Section 230 but also a whole host of laws in the US and around the world. A lot of people seem to think that a long list of societal and political failings can be rectified by regulating content online, and don't talk about how these problems run deeper and have been around for a long time. One person who doesn't fall into this trap is Heather Burns from the Open Rights Group, and she joins Mike on this week's episode to talk about why regulating the internet won't magically fix everything else.

The first batch of decisions about Facebook's content moderation from the recently-established Oversight Board has garnered lots of reactions, including many kneejerk ones — but there's plenty to discuss, so for this week's episode Mike is joined by Harvard Law's Evelyn Douek to talk about the decisions themselves and what they signal about the board as a whole.

The most important point we've repeatedly made about content moderation is that it's not simple, and there are always trade-offs — but this doesn't mean "do nothing" is a viable option. There are no perfect solutions, and that's why experimentation and innovation is important, especially when it comes to pressing moderation questions like those around abuse and harassment. This week we're joined by Tracy Chou, who is doing just this kind of innovation with her app Block Party, to talk about building new tools for fighting abuse and harassment online.

We've got one more cross-post from another podcast this week, and the subject is still the law that's dominating the tech policy discourse: Section 230. Mike recently joined R Street's Shoshana Weissmann on the Daily Tech News Show hosted by Tom Merritt, for a roundtable discussion about the all-important online liability shield and its many, many vital applications that people typically fail to consider. You can listen to the whole discussion on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

The podcast went on pause over the holidays and amidst the deluge of... events — but now we're back! And to kick things off, we've got a cross-post from Nick Gillespie's Reason podcast. Mike recently joined Nick for an interview about Section 230 and why a decentralized internet is better than a heavily-restricted one, and you can listen to the whole thing on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

The pandemic and associated lockdowns have underlined the incredible importance of broadband, and the many problems with it in America. This week, we're joined by Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic — Mike's ISP, and one with a reputation for treating its customers well and speaking out against bad broadband policy and regulation — for an insider perspective on what's happening with US broadband in 2020, and where it might be going next.

This week, we're having another conversation about how more decentralized, interoperable, and competitive systems could help restore the original promise of the open web — and this time around we've got a pair of guests with perspectives that are related do, but distinct from, the protocols, not platforms idea that we talk about so much. Author Cory Doctorow has been discussing adversarial interoperability or competitive compatibility, while Stanford's Daphne Keller has been proposing magic APIs, and both join this week's episode to discuss what all these things are, how they differ and relate, and how they could save the web.

This week, we've got another panel discussion for you, with Mike joining Georgetown Law fellow Gigi Sohn and panel moderator Zach Graves of the Lincoln Network (both also former podcast guests) at the Reboot 2020 conference to discuss the "techlash" — the public opinion backlash against big tech — and try to figure out what exactly it is, and where it's going in the future.

Recently, Techdirt began a new monetization experiment with Coil. It's a system for making payments on the web, but it's not just another micropayment service layered on top of existing technology — it's part of a broader effort to create an open standard for web monetization based on the Interledger network protocol. This week, we're joined by Coil founder and Interledger co-creator Stefan Thomas to explain how an open protocol for payments could change business models on the web.

There are countless debates raging over every aspect of internet regulation — questions of social media moderation, net neutrality, antitrust, copyright, privacy, and plenty more — and the election happening right now is going to have a huge impact on those debates. This week, we're joined by international policy expert and former European Parliament member Marietje Schaake for a long conversation that starts out focused on criticisms of Facebook and quickly expands into a far-reaching look at what the next generation of internet regulation might look like.

With the pandemic spurring a mass switch to remote working for many people, especially those at tech companies that were among the earliest adopters of the trend, discussions about the uncertain future of Silicon Valley have resurfaced. This week, tech reporter and VC partner Kim-Mai Cutler joins the podcast to discuss whether the pandemic-driven changes in how we work will drive a mass-exodus from California and threaten its status as an innovation hub.