The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are the authors of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, published September 24 by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix focuses in particular on the book's Chapter 6, "Why Can't AI Fix Social Media?"

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) recently assessed social media platforms’ policies, public commitments, and product interventions related to election integrity across six major issue areas: platform integrity, violent extremism and hate speech, internal and external resourcing, transparency, political advertising and state-affiliated media. Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the report's authors: ISD's Director of Technology & Society, Isabelle Frances-Wright, and its Senior US digital Policy Manager, Ellen Jacobs. ISD's assessment included Snap, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X.

Gary Marcus writes that the companies developing artificial intelligence systems want the citizens of democracies “to absorb all the negative externalities” that might arise from their products, “such as the damage to democracy from Generative AI–produced misinformation, or cybercrime and kidnapping schemes using deepfaked voice clones—without them paying a nickel.” And, he says, we need to fight back. His new book is called Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us, published by MIT Technology Press on September 17, 2024.

Marietje Schaake is the author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Dr. Alondra Nelson, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), calls Schaake “a twenty-first century Tocqueville” who “looks at Silicon Valley and its impact on democratic society with an outsider’s gimlet eye.” Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa says Schaake's new book “exposes the unchecked, corrosive power that is undermining democracy, human rights, and our global order.” And author and activist Cory Doctorow says the book offers “A thorough and necessary explanation of the parade of policy failures that enshittified the internet—and a sound prescription for its disenshittification.” Justin Hendrix spoke to Schaake just before the book's publication on September 24, 2024.

In 2019, Thierry Breton, a French business executive who became the France’s Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, was nominated by President Emmanuel Macron to become a member of the European Commission for the Internal Market. In that role his name and face were closely associated with Europe’s push to regulate digital markets and the passage of legislation such as the Digital Services Act and the EU’s AI Act. On Monday, September 16 - in a letter that called into question EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s governance - Breton resigned his post. While certain tech executives may be happy to see him go- Elon Musk posted “bon voyage” to the news - his departure spells change for Europe’s approach to tech going forward. To learn more, Justin Hendrix reached out to a European journalist who is covering these matters closely, and who has been kind enough to share his reporting on the EU AI Act with Tech Policy Press in the past: MLex Senior AI Correspondent Luca Bertuzzi.

Paris Marx, a Canadian tech critic, recently authored a post under the headline "Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions: The actions against Telegram and Twitter/X are about sovereignty, not speech." Justin Hendrix spoke to Paris about his assessment of these matters, and why those making claims in defense of free speech in the wake of Brazil’s ban on X and Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France may in fact be undermining free expression and internet freedoms in the long run. 

At Tech Policy Press, we’re closely following the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Union law designed to regulate online platforms and services. One of the DSA’s key objectives is to identify and mitigate systemic risks.But how do we gauge what rises to the level of a systemic risk? How do we get the sort of information we need from platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risk, and how do we create the kinds of collaborations between regulators and the research community that are necessary to answer complex questions?Ramsha Jahangir, a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press, recently discussed these questions with Dr. Oliver Marsh, who is head of tech research at Algorithm Watch, an NGO with offices in Berlin and Zurich that works on issues at the intersection of technology and society. Dr. Marsh has been leading research on systemic risks and the DSA’s approach, and just put out a detailed summary of his work. 

Today is Monday, September 9th. Today Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is presiding over the start of a trial in which the United States Department of Justice accuses Google of violating antitrust law, abusing its power in the market for online advertising. Google contests the allegations against it. To get a bit more detail on what to expect, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals covering the case closely who take a critical view of Google, the government’s allegations about its power in the online advertising market, and the company’s effect on journalism and the overall media and information ecosystem:Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy at Check My Ads, which is running a comprehensive tracker on the case;Karina Montoya, a senior reporter and policy analyst at the Center for Journalism and Liberty, a program of the Open Markets Institute, who has covered the case extensively for Tech Policy Press.

Thirty tech bills went through the law making sausage grinder in California this past session, and now Governor Gavin Newsom is about to decide the fate of 19 that passed the state legislature. The Governor now has until the end of September to sign or veto the bills, or to permit them to become law without his signature. To learn a little more about some of the key pieces of legislation and the overall atmosphere around tech regulation in California, Justin Hendrix spoke to two journalists who live and work in the state and cover these issues regularly:Jesús Alvarado, a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press and author of a recent post on SB 1047, a key piece of the California legislation; Khari Johnson, a technology reporter at CalMatters,a fellow in the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia, and the author of a recent article on the California legislation.

On August 26th, Justin Hendrix moderated a panel convened by the Social Science Research Council at its offices in Brooklyn, New York. The panel was titled “Platforms and Elections: the Global State of Play, and it featured:Dr. Shannon McGregor, associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator with the Center for Information Technology in Public Life (CITAP);Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, professor of global digital media. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, inaugural director of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab; andDr. Chris Tenove, research associate and instructor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the University of British Columbia.This episode features a lightly edited recording of the conversation, which touches on topics ranging from the role of civil society and independent researchers in engaging with efforts to protect the integrity of elections and mitigate the spread of misinformation to current questions about how generative AI may impact politics.

Renée DiResta, who serves on the board of Tech Policy Press and has been an occasional contributor, is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, published by Hachette Book Group in June. Justin Hendrix had a chance to catch up with DiResta last week to discuss some of the key ideas in the book, and how she sees them playing out in current moment headed into the 2024 US election.

The billionaire owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk, has been in a prolonged dispute with a Supreme Court Judge in Brazil regarding X’s content moderation practices. Earlier this year, Judge Alexandre de Moraes launched an investigation into X after Musk defied a court order to block accounts that supported former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and were accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech.On Friday afternoon, August 30, following a standoff over an order requiring X to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil, the Judge issued an order to suspend X in the country. Justin Hendrix spoke to three people following the situation closely in Brazil: Laís Martins, a journalist at the The Intercept in Brazil; Sérgio Spagnuolo, executive director & founder of the data-driven tech news organization Nucleo Journalism; and Dr. Ivar Alberto Hartmann, an associate professor at the Insper Institute of Education and Research in Brazil.