The Tech Policy Press Podcast

On Monday, April 14, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will kick off its trial against Meta. In process for years, the case is over whether Mark Zuckerberg’s company has an illegal monopoly over social media and whether it should be forced to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp.To prepare to cover the arguments, Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to two experts to better understand the issues at play.William (Bill) Kovacic is a Professor of Law and Policy and Director of the Competition Law Center at the George Washington School of Law. From January 2006 to October 2011, he was a member of the Federal Trade Commission and chaired the agency from March 2008 to March 2009. And for nearly a decade, Professor Kovacic served as a Non-Executive Director with the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority.Gene Kimmelman is a senior policy fellow at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. He was the Justice Department’s deputy associate attorney general during the Biden administration, and he has served as chief counsel to the head of the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

On April 4, The New York Times reported that the European Commission is considering finding X, formerly Twitter, as part of its ongoing DSA investigation, which began in 2023. Tech Policy Press has discussed at length the extent and quality of transparency from platforms under the DSA, but there is limited insight into how the Commission is conducting its investigations into large online platforms and search engines. In most cases, the publicly available documents on cases are just press releases, while enforcement strategies and methods are not spelled out. To delve into the challenges this lack of transparency presents and how it impacts the public's understanding of the DSA, Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir spoke to two researchers:Jacob van de Kerkhof, a PhD researcher at Utrecht University. His research is focused on the DSA and freedom of expression.Matteo Fabbri, a PhD candidate at IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. Fabbri is also a visiting scholar at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam. He recently published a research article titled "The Role of Requests for Information in Governing Digital Platforms Under the Digital Services Act: The Case of X."

Across the United States and in some cities abroad yesterday, protestors took to the streets to resist the policies of US President Donald Trump. Dubbed the "Hands Off" protests, over 1,400 events took place, including in New York City, where protestors called for billionaire Elon Musk to be ousted from his role in government and for an end to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has gutted government agencies and programs and sought to install artificial intelligence systems to purportedly identify wasteful spending and reduce the federal workforce.In this conversation, Justin Hendrix is joined by four individuals who are following DOGE closely. The conversation touches on the broader context and history of attempts to use technology to streamline and improve government services, the apparent ideology behind DOGE and its conception of AI, and what the future may look like after DOGE. Guests include:Eryk Salvaggio, a visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Tech Policy Press;Rebecca Williams, a senior strategist in the Privacy and Data Governance Unit at ACLU;Emily Tavoulareas, who teaches and conducts research at Georgetown's McCourt School for Public Policy and is leading a project to document the founding of the US Digital Service; and Matthew Kirschenbaum, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.

On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir in discussion with​ Rina Chandran, Rest of World; Natalia Anteleva, Coda Story; Anupriya Datta, Euractiv; and Anisha Dutta, an award-winning investigative reporter.​This discussion delved into the global implications of these developments and key lessons from reporting in various political contexts. Questions included:​What key narratives are emerging globally from recent shifts in US policy?​How is the rise of a tech oligarchy shaping technology coverage outside the US?​What practical lessons can journalists learn from reporting on technology and politics in non-Western contexts?

On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features a discussion with Michael Masnick from Techdirt, Vittoria Elliot from Wired, and Emmanuel Maiberg from 404 Media.This session explored the intersection of technology and the current political situation in the US. Key questions included: How are tech journalists addressing the current situation, and why is their perspective so crucial? What critical questions are journalists covering the intersection of tech and democracy currently asking? How does the field approach reporting on anti-democratic phenomena and the challenges journalists face in this work?

Every now and again, a story that has a significant technology element really breaks through and drives the news cycle. This week, the Trump administration is reeling after The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he was on the receiving end of Yemen strike plans in a Signal group chat between US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other top US national security officials. User behavior, a common failure point, appears to be to blame in this scenario. But what are the broader contours and questions that emerge from this scandal? To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke to:Ryan Goodman is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and co-editor-in-chief of Just Security. He served as special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense (2015-16).Cooper Quintin is a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He has worked on projects including Privacy Badger, Canary Watch, and analysis of state-sponsored malware campaigns such as Dark Caracal.

Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency that enforces federal consumer protection and competition laws and that, under former President Joe Biden, turned up its scrutiny of the tech sector's biggest companies. The two commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, plan to challenge Trump's firing, which they said will only benefit billionaire tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to Bedoya on Monday, March 24.

What is necessary to develop a future that is less hospitable to authoritarianism and, indeed, to fascism? How do we build collective power against authoritarian forms of corporate and state power? Is an alternative form of computing possible? Dan McQuillan is the author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, published in 2022 by Bristol University Press.

Dr. Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she has served on the faculty since 2019. From 2021 to 2023, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She was deeply involved in the Biden administration’s approach to artificial intelligence. She led the development of the White House “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which informed President Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. To say the Trump administration has taken a different approach to AI and how to think about its role in government and in society would be an understatement. President Trump rescinded President Biden’s executive order and is at work developing a new approach to AI policy. At the Paris AI Action Summit in February, Vice President JD Vance promoted a vision of American dominance and challenged other nations that would seek to regulate American AI firms. And then there is DOGE, which is at work gutting federal agencies with the stated intent of replacing key government functions with AI systems and using AI to root out supposed fraud and waste.This week, Justin Hendrix had the chance to speak with Dr. Nelson about how she’s thinking about these phenomena and the work to be done in the years ahead to secure a more just, democratic, and sustainable future. 

A year ago, Europe’s Digital Markets Act—the DMA—went into effect. The European Commission says the purpose of the regulation is to make “digital markets in the EU more contestable and fairer.” In particular, the DMA regulates gatekeepers, the large digital platforms whose position gives them greater leverage over the digital economy. One year in, how has the DMA performed? Do Europeans enjoy more choice and competition? And what are the new politics of the DMA as European regulations are contested by the Trump administration and its supporters in US industry? To answer these questions and more, Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson spoke to a set of experts following a conference hosted by the Knight Georgetown Institute titled “DMA and Beyond.” His guests include:Alissa Cooper, Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI)Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law SchoolHaeyoon Kim, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), andGunn Jiravuttipong, a JSD Candidate and Miller Fellow at Berkeley Law School.

The goal of achieving "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, is shared by many in the AI field. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” and last summer, the company announced its plan to achieve AGI within five years. While other experts at companies like Meta and Anthropic quibble with the term, many AI researchers recognize AGI as either an explicit or implicit goal. Google Deepmind went so far as to set out "Levels of AGI,” identifying key principles and definitions of the term. Today’s guests are among the authors of a new paper that argues the field should stop treating AGI as the north-star goal of AI research. They include:Eryk Salvaggio, a visiting professor in the Humanities Computing and Design department at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Tech Policy Press fellow;Borhane Blili-Hamelin, an independent AI researcher and currently a data scientist at the Canadian bank TD; andMargaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.

Could AI help design better, more democratic platforms and online environments for public discourse? What are the opportunities, challenges, and risks of deploying AI in contexts where people are engaged in political discussion? Today’s guests are among the more than two dozen authors of a new paper on AI and the future of digital public squares:Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and former Digital MinisterRavi Iyer, managing director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision MakingBeth Goldberg, head of R&D at Jigsaw and a lecturer at Yale School of Public Policy

On this podcast, we regularly engage with questions about redesigning social media networks to make them more democratic, pluralist, and prosocial. One hypothesis people have about how to do that is through the decentralization of platforms and the introduction of middleware—tools built to give users more control over their social media experience and, thus, more autonomy in how they engage in public discourse. In this episode, you’ll hear a discussion with one entrepreneur building middleware for Bluesky: Rudy Fraser, the founder of Blacksky Algorithms and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Last week, Tech Policy Press joined the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (EL CLIP) in publishing a report and series of articles documenting how adult users use public Facebook groups to identify and target accounts that indicate they are children for sexual exploitation. The “Innocence at Risk (Inocencia en Juego)” project, coordinated by EL CLIP with participation from Chequeado, includes a report from Lara Putnam, a professor of Latin American history and Director of the Civic Resilience Initiative of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security at the University of Pittsburgh, and independent reports from journalists across Latin America investigating a pattern of behavior on the platform’s public groups in Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina. They published their reports in EL CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado. This episode features a discussion with Lara Putnam and Pablo Medina Uribe, who led the project at EL CLIP.

On January 22, President Donald Trump terminated all three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an intelligence watchdog charged with monitoring the United States government's compliance with procedural safeguards on surveillance activities. The PCLOB's independence is also of concern to the European Commission, which relies on its reports in its assessment of whether US intelligence practices are aligned with EU Data Protection Framework standards. On February 24, two of the three terminated members filed suit against the government, arguing they were wrongfully terminated and must be reinstated. The outcome could determine the independence and effectiveness of the PCLOB going forward.This episode explores what's at stake in this matter, and it features three segments, including:Excerpts from remarks by the remaining PCLOB board member, Republican Beth Williams, at the annual State of the Net conference on February 11 in Washington, DC;An interview with former board member Travis LeBlanc conducted just days before he filed suit against the government;An interview with Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir hosts a roundtable discussion on the first systemic risk assessments and independent audit reports from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines produced in compliance with the European Union's Digital Services Act. Ramsha is joined by:Hillary Ross, program lead at the Global Network Initiative (GNI);Magdalena Jozwiak, associate researcher at the DSA Observatory; andSvea Windwehr, the assistant director of EU policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

This week, RightsCon, which bills itself as "the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age," descends on Taipei. To better understand the dynamics in the civil society community working on digital rights and tech policy matters in Taiwan, Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts:Liu I-Chen (劉以正), Asia Program Officer at ARTICLE 19Kuan-Ju Chou (周冠汝), Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights Grace Huang (黃寬心), Director for Global Justice and Digital Freedom at Judicial Reform Foundation 

At the Paris AI Action Summit on February 10-11, remarks by EU and US leaders indicated significant divergence on how to think about AI. But on balance, nations are moving decisively toward innovation and exploitation of this technology and away from containing it or restricting it. In this episode, Justin Hendrix surfaces voices from the Summit, as well as reactions and discussion on these matters at this year's State of the Net conference on February 11 in Washington, DC, including comments by Center for Democracy & Technology vice president for policy Samir Jain, Abundance Institute head of AI policy Neil Chilson, and former Biden administration assistant director for AI policy Olivia Zhu.

Over the last two decades, as Berlin reinvented itself as a "creative city," social media both mirrored and shaped shifting social landscapes—offering new possibilities while also reinforcing inequalities. How did digital media practices reshape urban life? And what can Berlin’s story tell us about the broader relationship between technology, culture, and the places we live? Today’s guest is Jordan H. Kraemer, the author of a new book that tries to answer these questions and more. It's called Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin, published by Cornell University Press.

As Donald Trump’s second presidency enters its third week, Elon Musk is center stage as the Department of Government Efficiency moves to gut federal agencies. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with two experts who are following these events closely and thinking about what they tell us about the relationship between technology and power:David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California Irvine and formerly the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, andYaël Eisenstat, director of policy impact at Cybersecurity for Democracy at New York University.

Justin Hendrix speaks with Jathan Sadowski, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; co-host of This Machine Kills, a weekly podcast on technology and political economy; and author of the new book The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism from the University of California Press.

If Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s efficiency and performance achievements stand up to scrutiny, it could have big implications for the AI race. It could call into question the strategic approach that the biggest US firms appear to be taking and the wisdom of the current American policy approach to AI. To discuss these issues, Justin Hendrix spoke to Karen Hao, a reporter who covers AI. In recent years, she's reported on China and tech for the Wall Street Journal, written about AI for The Atlantic, and run a program for the Pulitzer Center to teach other journalists how to report on AI. Hao has a book about OpenAI, the AI industry, and its global impacts that will be released later this year.

From Executive Orders on AI and cryptocurrency to "ending federal censorship," President Donald Trump had a busy first week in the White House. Justin Hendrix discussed the news with Damon Beres, a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the technology section. Beres wrote a piece reflecting on Trump's inauguration titled "Billions of People in the Palm of Trump’s Hand."

This episode features two segments. First, we hear from Nikki Gladstone, director of Rightscon, the annual conference organized by Access Now on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. And in the second, you’ll hear from Robin Berjon and Sean McDonald, two of the folks behind Free Our Feeds, a new effort to raise a public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky’s underlying tech (the AT Protocol) resistant to billionaire capture.

Today- Friday, January 17, 2025 - the US Supreme Court delivered its order upholding the constitutionality of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April 2024. The Court found that the Act, which effectively bans TikTok in the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it, does not violate the First Amendment rights of TikTok, its users, or creators.The decision clears the way for a ban to go into effect on January 19, 2025. Late this evening, TikTok issued a statement saying that “Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.” The White House had previously announced it would not enforce the ban before President Biden leaves office on Monday. Unless Biden takes action, this may set President-elect Donald Trump up to somehow come to TikTok’s rescue. To learn more about the ruling and what may happen next, Justin Hendrix spoke to Kate Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John's University and a fellow at Brookings, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and the Yale Information Society Project. The conversation also touches on recent moves by Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to ingratiate himself to the incoming Trump administration. 

Last fall, Cornell University PhD candidate Cristiana Firullo gave a presentation at the Trust and Safety Research Conference at Stanford University during a session on understanding algorithms and online environments. Titled "The Cursed Equilibrium of Algorithmic Traumatization," the talk focused on the work Firullo is doing with her colleagues at Cornell to try to understand why social media recommendation systems may produce harmful effects on users. Audio reporter Rebecca Rand spoke to Firullo about their hypotheses.

Even as the new year ushers in a new administration and Congress in the US at the federal level, dozens of states are kicking off new legislative sessions and are expected to pursue various tech policy goals. Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts to get a sense of the trends unfolding across the states on the regulation of AI, privacy, child online safety, and related issues: Keir Lamont, senior director at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) and author of The Patchwork Dispatch, a newsletter on state tech policy issues; Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which runs a state privacy policy project and scores AI legislation; Scott Babwah Brennen, director of the Center on Technology Policy at New York University and an author of a recent report on trends in state tech policy.

This week’s guest is Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab. Benjamin was recently named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, and she’s written and edited multiple books, including 2019’s Race After Technology and 2022’s Viral Justice. Last week she joined Justin Hendrix to discuss her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, published this year by WW Norton & Company.

This close to the end of 2024, it’s clear that one of the most significant tech stories of the year was the outcome of the Google search antitrust case. It will also make headlines next year and beyond as the remedies phase gets worked out in the courts. For this episode, Justin Hendrix turns the host duties over to someone who has looked closely at this issue: Alissa Cooper, the Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI). Alissa hosted a conversation with three individuals who are following the remedies phase with an expert eye, including:Cristina Caffarra is a competition economist and an honorary Professor at University College London, and cofounder of the Competition Research Policy Network at CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research), London.Kate Brennan is associate director at the AI Now Institute; andDavid Dinielli is an attorney and a visiting clinical lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School.

Mass migration presents a challenge to democracy in multiple ways. Chief among them is that anti-immigrant sentiment often plays a major role in the advance of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. We've seen this play out in the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised a dramatic crackdown on immigration and the mass deportation of millions. But the scale of today's migration may be dwarfed by what's to come. How has the movement of people affected the politics driving the development of surveillance, biometrics, big data and artificial intelligence technologies? And how do these technologies employed at borders and in governments themselves drive policy and change the way we think about the movement of people?Today's guest has spent years traveling the world to study how technology is being deployed in border regions and conflict zones, and she's written a book about it. Petra Molnar is a lawyer and an anthropologist and the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Kate Starbird is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation Laboratory at the University of Washington, and co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. Justin Hendrix interviewed her about her team’s ongoing efforts to study online rumors, including during the 2024 US election; the differences between the left and right media ecosystems in the US; and how she believes the research field is changing. 

Robert Gorwa is the author of a new book titled The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, published by Oxford University Press. (The book is available open access- download a free copy here.) It is an analysis of how and why governments around the world engage in platform regulation. The lessons he draws from case studies of key regulatory developments in Europe, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia help explain the adoption of different regulatory strategies by these governments and the underlying politics that shape their approach.

At its November 21st "Summit of the Future of the Internet," billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty hosted a panel discussion featuring Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, on a panel with Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, that was moderated by the media personality Charlemagne the God. Last month, Congresswoman Mace led an effort to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the US Capitol in response to the election of Sarah McBride, who is set to be the first openly transgender person in Congress representing voters in Delaware. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a tech advocacy organization, took the opportunity to confront Congresswoman Mace's bigotry during the Project Liberty conference. Justin Hendrix spoke to Evan last week about the incident, where she believes the tech accountability and digital rights movement should draw the line when it comes to engaging with far-right politicians, and how we can go about building spaces where we can imagine a different future that is truly just and liberatory.

During his recent campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made various promises consistent with the ongoing effort by Elon Musk and MAGA Republicans to target researchers and civil society groups that study issues such as propaganda and mis- and disinformation. Today's guest has looked deeply at this effort, conducting an analysis of over 1800 pages of primary documents to identify the strategic approaches employed by these parties, including the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the outcomes and broader democratic implications of the campaign. Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research for the Sanford School at Duke University. His findings are published in a new paper The Information Society titled "In pursuit of ignorance: The institutional assault on disinformation and hate speech research."

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. Her new book, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World tells a tale of rivalry and ambition as it chronicles the rush to exploit artificial intelligence. The book explores the trajectories of Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis and their roles in advancing artificial intelligence, the challenges posed by corporate power, and the extraordinary economic stakes of the current race to achieve technological supremacy.

These days, if you see someone with their head bowed, you’re much more likely observing them staring into their phone than in prayer. But from digital rituals to the promises of abundance from Silicon Valley elites, has technology become the world’s most powerful religion? What kinds of promises of salvation and abundance are its leaders making? And how can thinking about technology in this way help us generate ways to reform our approach to it, particularly if we aim to restore humanist principles?Today’s guest is Greg Epstein, who drew on lessons from his vocation as a humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT to write a new book, just out from MIT Press, called Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

Today’s guest is Boston University School of Law professor Woodrow Hartzog, who, with the George Washington University Law School's Daniel Solove, is one of the authors of a recent paper that explored the novelist Franz Kafka’s worldview as a vehicle to arrive at key insights for regulating privacy in the age of AI. The conversation explores why privacy-as-control models, which rely on individual consent and choice, fail in the digital age, especially with the advent of AI systems. Hartzog argues for a "societal structure model" of privacy protection that would impose substantive obligations on companies and set baseline protections for everyone rather than relying on individual consent. Kafka's work is a lens to examine how people often make choices against their own interests when confronted with complex technological systems, and how AI is amplifying these existing privacy and control problems.

On Tuesday, November 5th, the final ballots will be cast in the 2024 US presidential election. But the process is far from over. How prepared are social media platforms for the post-election period? What should we make of characters like Elon Musk, who is actively advancing conspiracy theories and false claims about the integrity of the election? And what can we do going forward to support election workers and administrators on the frontlines facing threats and disinformation? To help answer these questions, Justin Hendrix spoke with three experts: Katie Harbath, CEO of Anchor Change and chief global affairs officer at Duco Experts;Nicole Schneidman, technology policy strategist at Protect Democracy; andDean Jackson, principal of Public Circle LLC and a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press.

If you’re trying to game out the potential role of technology in the post-election period in the US, there is a significant "X" factor. When he purchased the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.” So says today’s guest, a journalist who is one of the keenest observers of phenomena on the internet: Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain. Justin Hendrix caught up with him about what to make of Musk and the broader health of the information environment.

Martin Husovec is an associate law professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He works on questions at the intersection of technology and digital liberties, particularly platform regulation, intellectual property and freedom of expression. He's the author of Principles of the Digital Services Act, just out from Oxford University Press. Justin Hendrix spoke to him about the rollout of the DSA, what to make of progress on trusted flaggers and out-of-court dispute resolution bodies, how transparency and reporting on things like 'systemic risk' is playing out, and whether the DSA is up to the ambitious goals policymakers set for it.

In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with three researchers who recently published projects looking at the intersection of generative AI with elections around the world, including:Samuel Woolley, Dietrich Chair of Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the authors of a set of studies titled Generative Artificial Intelligence and Elections;Lindsay Gorman, Managing Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an author of a report and online resource titled Spitting Images: Tracking Deepfakes and Generative AI in Elections; andScott Babwah Brennen, Director of the NYU Center on Technology Policy and one of the authors of a deep dive into the literature on the effectiveness of AI content labels and another on the efficacy of recent US state legislation requiring labels on political ads that use generative AI.

With Sam Woolley, Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Inga K. Trauthig are authors of a new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin titled "Covert Campaigns: Safeguarding Encrypted Messaging Platforms from Voter Manipulation." Justin Hendrix caught up with them to learn more about how political propagandists are exploiting the features of encrypted messaging platforms to manipulate voters, and what can be done about it without breaking the promise of encryption for all users.

In her new book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment, Dr. Mary Anne Franks challenges First Amendment orthodoxy and critiques “reckless speech,” which endangers vulnerable groups and protects corporate interests, in order to advance “fearless speech,” which seeks to advance equality and democracy.

A lot of folks frustrated with major social media platforms are migrating to alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, which operate on decentralized protocols. This summer, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi released a report on the governance on fediverse microblogging servers and the moderation practices of the people who run them. Justin Hendrix caught up with Erin Kissane about their findings, including the emerging forms of diplomacy between different server operators, the types of political and policy decisions moderators must make, and the need for more resources and tooling to enable better governance across the fediverse.

The results in this year’s installment of the Freedom House Freedom on the Net report generally follow the same distressing trajectory as prior reports, marking a 14th consecutive year in declines in internet freedom around the world. But in this year of elections, the Freedom House analysts also identified a set of concerning phenomena related to this most fundamental act of democracy and how governments are asserting themselves, for better or worse. Justin Hendrix spoke to report authors Allie Funk and Kian Vesteinsson about their findings.

In this episode, we're crashing a funeral... for CrowdTangle, a piece of software that allowed journalists and independent researchers to get insights into social media. Not our usual material, but this particular loss marks a huge blow in the ongoing fight for public access to data from the platforms, and underscores why we need to continue to fight for transparency. And the folks convened by the Knight-Georgetown Institute and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research refused to let it go unmarked.

Barry Lynn is the executive director of the Open Markets Institute in Washington DC and the author of this month's cover essay in Harper's titled "The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech." Justin Hendrix spoke to him about his essay, about the remedy framework proposed by the US Department of Justice following the ruling in the Google search antitrust trial, and about what to anticipate for the antitrust movement following the 2024 US presidential election.

Today’s guest is Sam Jeffers, cofounder and executive director of Who Targets Me. Jeffers has spent several yearshas spent several years building a suite of capabilities to make political advertising more transparent, including tools for individuals and data and support for academics, researchers and journalists. His organization also advocates for better policy from platforms, regulators and governments. (You can download the Who Targets Me browser extension to contribute your data to the project.)

Last week, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz first reported on details of an unredacted version of a complaint against Snap brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke to Horwitz about its details, and questions it leaves unanswered.

One of the most significant concepts in Europe’s Digital Services Act is that of “systemic risk,” which relates to the spread of illegal content, or content that might have foreseeable negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights or on on civic discourse, electoral processes, public security and so forth. The DSA requires companies to carry out risk assessments to detail whether they are adequately addressing such risks on their platforms. What exactly amounts to systemic risk and how exactly to go about assessing it is still up in the air in these early days of the DSA’s implementation. In today’s episode, Tech Policy Press Staff Writer Gabby Miller speaks with three experts involved in conversations to try and get to best practices:Jason Pielemeier, Executive Director of the Global Network Initiative;David Sullivan, Executive Director of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership; andChantal Joris, Senior Legal Officer at Article 19