The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

Justin Hendrix speaks with Mark Surman, President of Mozilla, about Mozilla’s work promoting open source AI, the importance of competition in the tech sector, and the regulatory challenges facing the industry. Surman discusses Mozilla's initiatives in AI investment and development, and reflects on what the recent ruling the Google search cases might mean for the future of Mozilla and the tech economy. And, Surman shares his hopes for the future- that we can arrive at a tech economy that is not purely extractive, but rather one that respects people’s values and dignity. 

On Friday, August 16, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in NetChoice v. Bonta, partially upholding and partially vacating a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. The court affirmed that certain provisions of the law are likely to violate the First Amendment by compelling online businesses to assess and mitigate potential harms to children, but it vacated the broader injunction, remanding the case to the district court for further consideration of other parts of the statute, including restrictions on the collection and use of children's data. In this episode, Justin Hendrix recounts the basics of the Ninth Circuit ruling. And in a second segment that was recorded just days before Friday's ruling, Tech Policy Press fellow Dean Jackson is joined by Tech Justice Law Project executive director Meetali Jain and USC Marshall School Neely Center managing director Ravi Iyer for a discussion on key questions that were before the Ninth Circuit and their implications for future efforts at tech regulation.

Raúl Torrez was sworn in as New Mexico’s 32nd Attorney General in January 2023. Last December, Attorney General Torrez filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly failing to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking. The outcome of this case could have broader implications for how online platforms are regulated and held accountable for user safety in the future, including through litigation. Justin Hendrix spoke to Attorney General Torrez in advance of a panel discussion he participated in alongside the Attorney General of Virginia at the 2024 Coalition to End Exploitation Global Summit on Wednesday, August 7, 2024 in Washington DC.

In May, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion with David Rand, who is a professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. David's work cuts across fields such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, and with his collaborators he's done a substantial amount of work on the psychological underpinnings of belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories.David is one of the authors, with Thomas Costello and Gordon Pennycook, of a paper published this spring titled "Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI." The paper considers the potential for people to enter into dialogues with LLMs and whether such exchanges can change the minds of conspiracy theory believers. According to the study, dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo reduced belief in various conspiracy theories, with effects lasting many months. Even more intriguingly, these dialogues seemed to have a spillover effect, reducing belief in unrelated conspiracies and influencing conspiracy-related behaviors.While these findings are certainly promising, the experiment raises a variety of questions. Some are specific under the premise of the experiment- such as how compelling and tailored does the counter-evidence need to be, and how well do the LLMs perform? What happens if and when they make mistakes or hallucinate? And some of the questions are bigger picture- are there ethical implications in using AI in this manner? Can these results be replicated and scaled in real-world applications, such as on social media platforms, and is that a good idea? Is an internet where various AI agents and systems are poking and prodding us and trying to shape or change our beliefs a good thing? This episode contains an edited recording of the discussion, which was hosted at Betaworks.

The Distributed AI Research Institute, or DAIR—which seeks to conduct community-rooted AI research that is independent from the technology industry—has launched a new project called the Data Workers' Inquiry to invite data workers to create their own research and recount their experiences. The project is supported by DAIR, the Weizenbaum Institute, and TU Berlin. For this episode, journalist and audio producer Rebecca Rand parsed some of the ideas and experiences discussed at a virtual launch event for the inquiry that took place earlier this month. 

In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, Justin Hendrix invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including:Henry Farrell, a professor of the international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.Elizabeth Spiers, a writer and digital strategist and contributing writer for the New York Times, and co-host the Slate Money Podcast.Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs.

It goes without saying that privacy and the creation of laws and regulations around it are fundamental to determining how we will live and work with technology, and whether technology operates in service of democratic societies or only in service of governments and corporations. A couple of weeks ago, Justin Hendrix had a chance to speak with two leaders from the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF)-Jules Polonetsky, its CEO, and Anne J. Flanagan, the head of its new Center on AI. They discussed the recent US Supreme Court decision to overturn the Chevron doctrine and its implications for privacy legislation in the United States, the fierce battle over privacy laws in the US, and potential conflicts between Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the new AI Act. And, they talked about how the 15-year-old Future of Privacy Forum envisions its role in the age of artificial intelligence.

On June 26, the US Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v Missouri, a cased that considered whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in its efforts to address COVID-19 mis- and disinformation on social media. Tech Policy press fellow Dean Jackson, who studied the case closely, discussed the outcome and what it means for the future with three experts:Olga Belogolova, director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS);Mayze Teitler, a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute; andNina Jankowicz, co-Founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project.

In this episode, David Carroll, an associate professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design at The New School, speaks to Ravi Naik, legal director at AWO, a consultancy with offices in London, Brussels, and Paris that works on a range of data protection and tech policy issues. Their discussion delves into the evolution of data protection from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to current questions provoked by generative AI, with a focus on a GDPR complaint against OpenAI brought by Noyb, the non-profit founded by Austrian activist Max Schrems.

In April, Google DeepMind published a paper that boasts 57 authors, including experts from a range of disciplines in different parts of Google, including DeepMind, Jigsaw, and Google Research, as well as researchers from academic institutions such as Oxford, University College London, Delft University of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and a think tank at Georgetown, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The paper speculates about the ethical and societal risks posed by the types of AI assistants Google and other tech firms want to build, which the authors say are “likely to have a profound impact on our individual and collective lives.” Justin Hendrix the chance to speak to two of the papers authors about some of these issues:Shannon Vallor, a professor of AI and data ethics at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Center for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute; andIason Gabriel, a research scientist at Google DeepMind in its ethics research team.

News and journalism organizations and dominant tech companies are in a years-long battle over content, clicks and revenue, and the tech companies are winning. What are policy options that encourage both the sustainability and quality of news content on popular online platforms? In this episode, Rebecca Rand explores perspectives on the subject, drawing on a conversation hosted by Justin Hendrix with experts Anya Schiffrin and Cory Doctorow at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference earlier this year.

In this episode, we explore a topic that sits at the heart of global digital policy: the contrasting visions of internet governance championed by the United States and its Western allies versus those promoted by China and nations in its orbit. This debate is playing out across various international venues and has profound implications for the future of digital rights, privacy, and the open internet. Justin Hendrix is joined by experts at the Atlantic Council that study these issues from a variety of angles and across multiple geographies, including:Rose Jackson, the director of the Democracy + Tech Initiative within the Atlantic Council Technology Programs;Konstantinos Komaitis, a nonresident fellow with the Democracy + Tech Initiative of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab;Kenton Thibaut, a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab; andIria Puyosa, a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

In October 2023, during the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China's leader Xi Jinping signaled a shift in focus from more grandiose physical infrastructure projects to 'small yet smart' initiatives. This shift underscores the need to understand China's ambitions to reshape global digital governance, moving away from an open and free internet towards a model rooted in government control and mass surveillance. The advocacy group Article 19 documents this shift in a recent report titled "The Digital Silk Road: China and the Rise of Digital Repression in the Indo-Pacific," examining China's influence on digital infrastructure and governance in Cambodia, Malaysia, Nepal, and Thailand. As the Indo-Pacific remains strategically significant for China in deploying next-generation technologies, the report argues that assessing China’s regional partnerships and their implications for digital repression is crucial for understanding its broader ambitions to reshape global digital norms. To discuss these issues in more depth, Justin Hendrix is joined by:Michael Caster, Asia Digital Program Manager at ARTICLE 19; andCatherine Tai, the deputy director for Asia and the Pacific team at Center for International Enterprise (CIPE).

Angela Zhang is the author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, published this year by Oxford University Press. With a career in the practice of law and in teaching it, Zhang has held roles King’s College London and at New York University School of Law, and most recently served as Director of Philip K. H. Wong Center for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. She will join the University of Southern California as a Professor of Law in fall 2024.

A topic we returned to often in this podcast is the dire need for independent technology researchers to have access to platform data. Without it, we cannot understand the extent of the harms and effects of social media on people and on society, and we cannot understand the limits of those harms. This makes it difficult to respond in acute moments such as elections, and to understand issues such as the relationship between tech platforms and social cohesion, or mental health, or any number of the other issues policymakers care about. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with two people on the front lines of the fight to secure access to data, including advocating for Meta to do better in light of the impending deprecation of CrowdTangle, a tool used by researchers study Meta's products, including Facebook and Instagram. They are:Brandi Guerkink, the executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, andClaire Pershan, EU advocacy lead at the Mozilla Foundation.

Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at the Financial Times, is the author of a new book called Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. The book combines reporting and research to provide a look at the role that AI and automated decision-making is playing in reshaping our lives, our politics, and our economies across the world.

Dr. Arati Prabhakar the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to President Joe Biden. This week, she hosted an event in Washington DC called "AI Aspirations: R&D for Public Missions." Speakers included executive branch officials and agency leaders, from the Secretary of Education to the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, as well as lawmakers such as Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner, and Representative Don Beyer. Prior to the event, Justin Hendrix spoke to Dr. Prabhakar about OSTP's priorities.

What are the risks to democracy as AI is incorporated more and more into the systems and platforms we use to find and share information and engage in communication? In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with Elise Silva, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh Cyber Institute for Law, Policy, and Security, and John Wihbey, an associate professor at Northeastern University in the College of Arts, Media, and Design. Silva is the author of a recent piece in Tech Policy Press titled "AI-Powered Search and the Rise of Google’s 'Concierge Wikipedia.'” Wihbey is the author a paper published last month titled "AI and Epistemic Risk for Democracy: A Coming Crisis of Public Knowledge?"

What role did technology play in India's elections, and what impact will the outcome have on tech policy in the country? Joining Justin Hendrix are three experts: Amber Sinha and Vandinika Shukla, both fellows at Tech Policy Press, and Prateek Waghre, the executive director at the Internet Freedom Foundation. Plus, Tech Policy Press program manager Prithvi Iyer sums up the election result.

The guests in this episode are authors of a new study titled Political Machines: Understanding the Role of AI in the US 2024 Elections and Beyond. The study is based on interviews with a variety of individuals who are currently grappling with how generative AI tools and systems will change the way the work. In a series of field interviews, the authors spoke with three vendors of political generative AI tools, a political candidate, a legal expert, a technology expert, an extremism expert, a digital organizer, a trust and safety industry professional, four Republican campaign consultants, and eight Democratic campaign consultants. Joining Justin Hendrix to discuss the results are:Dean Jackson, the principal at Public Circle LLC and a reporting fellow with Tech Policy Press;Zelly Martin, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior research fellow at the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement; and Inga Trauthig, head of research at the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.

This episode focuses on the role of shareholder activism in pursuing transparency and accountability from tech firms. In a week where board resolutions are up for a vote at Meta and Alphabet related to each company's development and deployment of artificial intelligence, Justin Hendrix spoke to five individuals working at the intersection of sustainable investing in tech accountability:Michael Connor, Executive Director of Open MICJessica Dheere, Advocacy Director at Open MICNatasha Lamb, Chief Investment Officer at Arjuna CapitalJonas Kron, Chief Advocacy Officer at Trillium Asset ManagementChristina O'Connell, Senior Manager for Shareholder Engagement and Investments at Ekō

As we documented in Tech Policy Press, when the US Senate AI working group released its roadmap on policy on May 17th, many outside organizations were underwhelmed at best, and some were fiercely critical of the closed door process that produced it. In the days after the report was announced, a group of nonprofit and academic organizations put out what they call a "shadow report" to the US Senate AI policy roadmap. The shadow report is intended as a complement or counterpoint to the Senate working group's product. It collects a bibliography of research and proposals from civil society and academia and addresses several issues the Senators largely passed over. To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke to some of the report's authors, including:Sarah West, co-executive director of the AI Now InstituteNasser Eledroos, policy lead on technology at Color of ChangeParamita Shah, executive director of Just Futures LawCynthia Conti-Cook, director of research and policy at the Surveillance Resistance Lab

A conversation with Marwa Fatafta, who serves as policy and advocacy director for the nonprofit Access now, which has worked on digital civil rights, connectivity and censorship issues for the past 15 years. Along with other groups, Access Now has engaged Meta in recent months over what it says is the “systematic censorship of Palestinian voices” amidst the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. 

On Wednesday, May 15, 2024, a bipartisan US Senate working group led by Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) released a report titled "Driving U.S. Innovation in Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States Senate." Just hours after the report was released, Justin Hendrix spoke to two civil rights advocates who are working on AI policy about the good and the bad of the Senate report, and more broadly about how to set AI policy priorities that ensure a brighter future for all:Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, Senior Director at the Center for Civil Rights & Tech at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human RightsClaudia Ruiz, Senior Civil Rights Policy Analyst at UnidosUS

One tech journalist whose byline always draws me in is Chris Stokel-Walker. He writes for multiple publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Wired, Fast Company, and New Scientist. Now, he’s got a new book out: How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future. Last week, I had the chance to speak with him about it, and about how he covers technology and tech policy generally.

Last October, Dr. Jasmine McNealy, as an associate professor at the University of Florida, a Senior Fellow in Tech Policy with the Mozilla Foundation, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, wrote in Tech Policy Press about the need for a policy agenda for "Rural AI." “Rural communities matter,” she wrote. “And that means they should matter when it comes to the development of policies on artificial intelligence.” The piece was a preview of sorts to a two-day workshop Dr. McNealy organized at the University of Florida in Gainesville that touched on topics ranging from connectivity to bias and discrimination in algorithmic systems to the connection between AI and natural resources. Justin Hendrix attended the workshop, and recently he checked in with Dr. McNealy and three of the other attendees he met there:Michaela Henley, program director and curriculum writer at Black Tech Futures and a senior research fellow representing Black Tech Futures at the Siegel Family Endowment;Dr. Dominique Harrison, founding principal of Equity Innovation Ventures; andDr. Theodora Dryer, who is director of the Water Justice and Technology Studio, founder of the Critical Carbon Computing Collective, and teaches on technology and environmental justice at New York University.

The Hippocratic oath, named for a Greek physician who lived ~2,500 years ago that some call the father of modern medicine, is one of the earliest examples of an expression of professional ethics. It is a symbol of a profession that has built in a number of protections for patient interests, with ethical frameworks and requirements that seek to assure they are maintained.Today’s guest is Chinmayi Sharma, an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. Sharma thinks there should be a similar professional ethics framework in place for the developers of AI systems, and she’s written a substantial paper on the 'why' and the 'how' of her proposal. 

One topic we come back to again and again on this podcast is disinformation. In many episodes, we’ve discussed various phenomena related to this ambiguous term, and we’ve tried to use science to guide the way.But the guests in this episode suggest that in the broader political discourse, the term is more than over used. Often, they say, lawmakers and other elites that employ it are crossing the line into hyping the effects of disinformation, which they say only helps propagandists and diminishes trust in society. To learn more Justin Hendrix spoke with Gavin Wilde, Thomas Rid, and Olga Belogolova, who with Lee Foster are the authors of an essay in the publication Foreign Affairs titled "Don’t Hype the Disinformation: Downplaying the Risk Helps Foreign Propagandists, But So Does Exaggerating It." 

In an introduction to a special issue of the journal First Monday on topics related to AI and power, Jenna Burrell and Jacob Metcalf argue that "what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science." The papers in the journal go on to interrogate the epistemic culture of AI safety, the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence how to debunk robot rights, and more. To learn more about some of the ideas in the special issue, Justin Hendrix spoke to Burrell, Metcalf, and two of the other authors of papers included in it: Shazeda Ahmed and Émile P. Torres.

Last week President Joe Biden signed into law a measure that would force the Chinese firm ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok, or risk the app being banned in the US. The measure also included restrictions on the sale of personal data to foreign entities. What are the implications of these moves for US and global tech policy going forward? What will the inevitable legal challenges look like?To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke with Anupam Chander, law professor at Georgetown and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University; Rose Jackson, the director of the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council; and Justin Sherman, CEO of global cyber strategies and adjunct professor at Duke University.

Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing: “Legislative Solutions to Protect Kids Online and Ensure Americans’ Data Privacy Rights.” Between the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), both of which have bipartisan and bicameral support, Congress may be closer to acting on the issues than it has been recent memory.One of the witnesses that the hearing was David Brody, who is managing attorney of the Digital Justice Initiative of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Justin Hendrix caught up with Brody the day after the hearing, we spoke about the challenges of advancing the American Privacy Rights Act, and why he connects fundamental data to privacy rights to so many of the other issues that the Lawyers' Committee cares about, including voting rights and how to counter disinformation that targets communities of color.

This episode features two conversations. Both relate to efforts to better understand the impact of technology on society. In the first, we’ll hear from Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and Rishi Bommasani, the society lead at the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models. They are two of the authors of a recent paper titled On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models. And in the second, we’ll hear from Politico Chief Technology Correspondent Mark Scott about the US-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) meeting, and what he’s learned about the question of access to social media platform data by interviewing over 50 stakeholders, including regulators, researchers, and platform executives.

Last week, a federal judge granted a motion to dismiss and strike a lawsuit brought by X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, against a nonprofit research outfit called The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).  To learn more about why the ruling matters, Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; and Roberta Kaplan, a partner at the law firm of Kaplan, Hecker, and Fink, which represented CCDH in this matter. 

On this show, when we talk about technology and democracy, guests are often talking about the relationship between technology and existing democratic systems. Today's guest wants us to think more expansively about what doing democracy means and the role the technology can play in it. Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the author of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.

Last year, researchers at Human Rights Watch wrote about the global backlash against women’s rights. In multiple countries, they say, hard-won progress has been reversed amidst a wave of anti-feminist rhetoric and policies, and it may take decades to reverse the trajectory. It’s against that backdrop that today’s guest pursues concerns at the intersection of tech and digital rights with women’s human rights. Justin Hendrix speaks with Lucy Purdon, the founder of Courage Everywhere and author of a recent report for the Mozilla Foundation titled "Unfinished Business: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into Digital Advertising Reform in the UK and EU."

On Monday, March 18, the US Supreme Court heard oral argument in Murthy v Missouri. In this episode, Tech Policy Press reporting fellow Dean Jackson is joined by two experts- St. John's University School of Law associate professor Kate Klonick and UNC Center on Technology Policy director Matt Perault- to digest the oral argument, what it tells us about which way the Court might go, and what more should be done to create good policy on government interactions with social media platforms when it comes to content moderation and speech.

On March 18, the US Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Murthy v Missouri, a case that asks the justices to consider whether the government coerced or “significantly encouraged” social media executives to remove disfavored speech in violation of the First Amendment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tech Policy Press reporting fellow Dean Jackson speaks to experts including the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University's Mayze Teitler and Jennifer Jones, and the Tech Justice Law Project's Meetali Jain.

At INFORMED 2024, a conference hosted by the Knight Foundation in January, one panel focused on the subject of information integrity, race, and US elections. The conversation was compelling, and the panelists agreed to reprise it for this podcast. So today we're turning over the mic to Spencer Overton, a Professor of Law at the George Washington University, and the director of the GW Law School's Multiracial Democracy Project.He's joined by three other experts, including: Brandi Collins-Dexter, a media and technology fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, a fellow at the National Center on Race and Digital Justice, and the author of the recent book, Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future. Brandi is developing a podcast of her own with MediaJustice that explores 1980s era media, racialized conspiracism, and politics in Chicago;Dr. Danielle Brown, a social movement and media researcher who holds the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism professorship at Michigan State and is the founding director of the LIFT project, which is focused on mapping, networking and resourcing, trusted messengers to dismantle mis- and disinformation narratives that circulate in Black communities and about Black communities; andKathryn Peters, who was the inaugural executive director of University of North Carolina's Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and was the co-founder of Democracy Works, where she built programs to help more Americans navigate how to vote. These days, she's working on a variety of projects to empower voters and address election mis- and disinformation.