The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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.

On Monday, Feb. 26, 2024, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton. The cases are on similar but distinct state laws in Florida and Texas that would restrict social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms. Justin Hendrix speaks with Tech Policy Press staff writer Gabby Miller and contributing editor Ben Lennett about key highlights from the discussion.

This week, a public consultation period ended for a new Hong Kong national security law, known as Article 23. Article 23 ostensibly targets a wide array of crimes, including treason, theft of state secrets, espionage, sabotage, sedition, and "external interference" from foreign governments. The Hong Kong legislature, dominated by pro-Beijing lawmakers, is expected to approve it, even as its critics argue that the law criminalizes basic human rights, such as the freedom of expression, signaling a further erosion of the liberties once enjoyed by the residents of Hong Kong.To learn more about what is happening in Hong Kong and what role tech firms and other outside voices could be doing to preserve freedoms for the people of Hong Kong, Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts who are following developments there closely:Chung Ching Kwong, senior analyst at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on ChinaLokman Tsui, a fellow at Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, andMichael Caster, the Asia Digital Program Manager with Article 19.

A new book that ships this week from Oxford University Press titled simply Media and January 6th assembles a varied collection of experts that aim to shed light on the interplay between the media and the bloody coup attempt that then President Donald Trump led to try to hang on to power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. It delves into the reasons behind the occurrence of January 6th and highlights the pivotal role of media in this context. The book is structured to explore three essential inquiries: What is our interpretation of January 6, 2021? How should research evolve post-January 6, 2021? And what measures can be taken to avert a similar incident in the future? Justin Hendrix spoke to three of the book's four editors: Khadijah Costley White, Daniel Kreiss, and Shannon C. McGregor.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know we’ve spent countless hours together talking about the problems of mis- and disinformation, and what to do about them. And, we’ve tried to focus on the science, on empirical research that can inform efforts to design a better media and technology environment that helps rather than hurts democracy and social cohesion. Today’s guests are Jon Bateman and Dean Jackson. The two have just produced a report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that looks at what is known about a variety of interventions against disinformation, and provides evidence that should guide policy in governments and at technology platforms.

It's become trite to say there are a lot of elections taking place this year. But of course, technology is playing a role in them all. At Tech Policy Press, we're lucky to have a group of seven fellows this year who are based on four continents. They are paying close attention to elections in the nations they know best. To learn more about the recent election in Pakistan, its chaotic aftermath, and the unique role of technology and events there, I spoke to one of our fellows last week: Ramsha Jahangir, a Pakistani journalist currently based in the Netherlands.

In May 2022, Alvaro Bedoya was sworn in as a Commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission following his nomination by President Joe Biden and confirmation in the Senate. In this conversation, Commissioner Bedoya discusses a recent settlement over the commercial use of facial recognition technologies and what it should signal to other businesses, voice cloning and the growing problem of impersonations utilizing AI, and how he thinks about the future.

Today's guests are Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Center for Human Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley, and Ravi Iyer, managing director of the Neely Center at the University of Southern California's Marshall School. Both are keenly interested in what happens when platforms optimize for variables other than engagement, and whether they can in fact optimize for prosocial outcomes. With several coauthors, they recently published a paper based in large part on discussion at an 8-hour working group session featuring representatives from seven major content-ranking platforms and former employees of another major platform, as well as university and independent researchers. The authors say "there is much unrealized potential in using non-engagement signals. These signals can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole."

Multiple past episodes of this podcast have focused on the topic of AI governance. But today’s guest, Blair Attard-Frost, has put forward a set of ideas they term "AI countergovernance." These are alternative mechanisms for community-led and worker-led governance that serve as means for resisting or contesting power, particularly as it manifests in AI systems and the companies and governments that advance them. 

On Wednesday, January 31st, the US Senate Judiciary Committee hosted a hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis." The CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Discord and Snap were called to the Capitol to answer questions from lawmakers on their efforts to protect children from sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, dangerous content, and other online harms. Gabby Miller reported on the hearing from New York, and Haajrah Gilani reported from Washington D.C.

Last year, the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research organization, conducted an international review of AI governance tools. The organization analyzed various documents, frameworks, and technical material related to AI governance from around the world. Importantly, the review found that a significant percentage of the AI governance tools include faulty AI fixes that could ultimately undermine the fairness and explainability of AI systems. Justin Hendrix talked to Kate Kaye, one of the report’s authors, about a range of issues it covers, from the involvement of large tech companies in shaping AI governance tools the role of organizations like the OECD in developing AI governance tools, to the need to consult people and communities that are often overlooked when making decisions about how to think about AI.

In October 2022, a group of researchers published a manifesto establishing a Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “Society needs trustworthy, independent research to relieve the harms of digital technologies and advance the common good,” they wrote. “Research can help us understand ourselves more clearly, identify problems, hold power accountable, imagine the world we want, and test ideas for change. In a democracy, this knowledge comes from academics, journalists, civil society, and community scientists, among others. Because independent research on digital technologies is a powerful force for the common good, it also faces powerful opposition.”In the months since that document was published, that opposition has grown. From investigations in Congress to lawsuits aimed at specific researchers, there is a backlash particularly against those who study communications and media, especially where the subjects of that research are often those most interested in advancing false and misleading claims about issues including elections and public health. Justin Hendrix, who is a member of the coalition, caught up with Brandi Geurkink, who was hired as the coalition's first Executive Director in December 2023, to discuss its priorities.

Today’s guest is Robert Weissman, president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. He is the author of a letter addressed to the California Attorney General that raises significant concerns about OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The letter questions whether OpenAI has deviated from its nonprofit purposes, alleging that it may be acting under the control of its for-profit subsidiary, potentially violating its nonprofit mission. The letter raises broader issues about the future of AI and how it will be governed. 

Today is the three month anniversary of the vicious Hamas attack and abduction of hostages that ignited the current war in Gaza. Just before the New Year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) published a report titled “Distortion by Design: How Social Media Platforms Shaped Our Initial Understanding of the Israel-Hamas Conflict.” This week, Justin Hendrix spoke to the report’s authors— Emerson T. Brooking, Layla Mashkoor, and Jacqueline Malaret— about their observations of the role that platforms operated by X, Meta, Telegram, and TikTok have played in shaping perceptions of the initial attack and the brutal ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, which now continues into its fourth month. “Evident across all platforms,” they write, “is the intertwined nature of content moderation and political expression—and the critical role that social media will play in preserving the historical record.”

In a report released December 20, 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory said it had detected more than 1,000 instances of verified child sexual abuse imagery in a significant dataset utilized for training generative AI systems such as Stable Diffusion 1.5. This troubling discovery builds on prior research into the “dubious curation” of large-scale datasets used to train AI systems, and raises concerns that such content may contributed to the capability of AI image generators in producing realistic counterfeit images of child sexual exploitation, in addition to other harmful and biased material. Justin Hendrix spoke the report’s author, Stanford Internet Observatory Chief Technologist David Thiel.

If you’ve listened to some of the dialogue in hearings on Capitol Hill about how to regulate AI, you’ve heard various folks suggest the need for a regulatory agency to govern, in particular, general purpose AI systems that can be deployed across a wide range of applications. One existing agency is often mentioned as a potential model: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But how would applying the FDA work in practice? Where does the model break down when it comes to AI and related technologies, which are different in many ways from the types of things the FDA looks at day to day? To answer these questions, Justin Hendrix spoke to Merlin Stein and Connor Dunlop, the authors of a new report published by the Ada Lovelace Institute titled Safe before sale: Learnings from the FDA’s model of life sciences oversight for foundation models.

At the end of this year in which the hype around artificial intelligence seemed to increase in volume with each passing week, it’s worth stepping back and asking whether we need to slow down and put just as much effort into questions about what it is we are building and why. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear from two researchers at two different points in their careers who spend their days grappling with questions about how we can develop systems and modes of thinking about systems that lead to more just and equitable outcomes, and that preserve our humanity and the planet:Dr. Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School and holds adjunct appointments in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the School of Law, and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington, where she co-directs the Value Sensitive Design Lab and the UW Tech Policy Lab.Dr. Aylin Caliskan is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, is an affiliate of the UW Tech Policy Lab, part of the Responsible AI Systems and Experiences Center, the NLP Group, and the Value Sensitive Design Lab. She is also co-director elect for the Tech Policy Lab, a role she will assume when Dr. Friedman retires from the university.

In April 2021, the European Commission introduced the first regulatory framework for AI within the EU. This Friday, after a marathon set of negotiations, EU policymakers reached a political consensus on the details of the legislation. This AI Act represents the most significant comprehensive effort in the world’s democracies to regulate a technology that promises major social and economic impact. While the AI Act will still have to go through a few final procedural steps before its enactment, the contours of it are now set. To find out more about what was decided, Justin Hendrix spoke to one journalist who reported directly on the negotiations in Brussels: Luca Bertuzzi, technology editor at EURACTIV.

In both the US and Europe, policymakers are making important decisions about the governance of the bulk collection of communications and data for intelligence purposes. In the US, some of these questions are at the fore as Congress considers how to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's Section 702 program, which is set to expire at the start of 2024. To get a sense of how the broader policy debate around government surveillance is advancing in both the US and Europe, Justin Hendrix spoke to two experts on the subject who happened to be meeting together in Washington DC last week: Dr. Thorsten Wetzling, head of the Digital Rights, Surveillance and Democracy research unit of the Berlin think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV), and Greg Nojeim, Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

For the past two years, there has been a steady stream of news out of Kenya about the relationships between major tech firms – including Meta, TikTok and OpenAI – and outsourcing firms like Sama and Majorel that have employed content moderators on their behalf. In the spring of this year, more than 150 moderators announced the formation of the African Content Moderators Union, which advocates for better pay and working conditions, and a lawsuit against Meta is working its way through Kenya’s courts. This month will see an important ruling in that case. To learn more about the situation on the ground and what it’s been like for the individuals involved in this fight while the legal progress unfolds, Justin Hendrix spoke to Njenga Kimani, a researcher at Siasa Place, a youth-led, prodemocracy NGO based in Nairobi, and three moderators who’ve worked on platforms including TikTok, Meta, and OpenAI: James Oyange Odhiambo, Sonia Kgomo, and Richard Mathenge.

To learn more about the recent leadership crisis at OpenAI and what lessons policymakers should take from it, Justin Hendrix spoke to Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic who is currently working on a book about OpenAI. With staff writer Charlie Warzel, Hao wrote a piece for The Atlantic under the headline "Inside the Chaos at OpenAI," drawing on conversations with current and former employees of the company.

On November 15, the Open Markets Institute and the AI Now Institute hosted an event in Washington D.C. featuring discussion on how to understand the promise, threats, and practical regulatory challenges presented by artificial intelligence. Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion on harms to artists and creators, exploring questions around copyright and fair use, the ways in which AI is shaping the entire incentive structure for creative labor, and the economic impacts of the "junkification" of online content. The panelists included Liz Pelly, a freelance journalist specialized in the music industry; Ashley Irwin, President of the Society of Composers & Lyricists; and Jen Jacobsen, Executive Director of the Artist Rights Alliance.

This episode explores Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets, a new book by Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz. His relentless coverage of Meta, including first reporting on the documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen in the fall of 2021, has been pivotal in shedding light on the complex interplay between social media platforms, society, and democracy. Justin Hendrix talks to him about his journey, new details revealed in the book, and the impact his reporting has had in driving platform accountability both in the United States and internationally. 

Today's guest is Dr. Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the new book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, just out from Duke University Press. Guariglia says we're really living in a world of police surveillance built in the early 20th century, even as police departments wield powers that only a few years ago we thought might only be in the hands of federal intelligence agencies.

Today’s guest is Wiebke Hutiri, a researcher with a particular expertise in design patterns for detecting and mitigating bias in AI systems. Her recent work has focused on voice biometrics, including work on an open source project called Fair EVA that gathers resources for researchers and developers to audit bias and discrimination in voice technology. Justin Hendrix spoke to Hutiri about voice biometrics, voice synthesis, and a range of issues and concerns these technologies present alongside their benefits.

Today’s guest is Ravi Iyer, a data scientist and moral psychologist at the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also a former Facebook executive, and at the company he worked on a variety of civic integrity issues. The Neely Center has developed a design code that seeks to address a number of concerns about the harms of social media, including issues related to child online safety. It is endorsed by individuals and organizations ranging from academics at NYU and USC to the Tech Justice Law Project and New Public, as well as technologists that have worked at platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Justin Hendrix spoke to Iyer about the details of the proposed code, and in particular how they relate to the debate over child online safety.

At the September G20 summit in Delhi, the government of prime minister Narendra Modi promoted the country’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) as a model for the world for how to develop digital systems that enable countries to deliver social services and provide access to infrastructure and economic opportunities to residents. Other world leaders were enthusiastic about the pitch, endorsing a common framework for DPI systems. But even as an Indian vision for DPI appears to be attractive beyond that country’s borders, what are the ideas and events that shaped India’s approach? Today's guest is Mila Samdub, a researcher at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who recently published an essay titled “The Bangalore Ideology: How an amoral technocracy powers Modi’s India,” looking at histories of technocratic ideas in India, and how they have combined with Modi’s particular brand of populism.

A lot is written about the supply side of mis- and disinformation, including how propagandists and political leaders are using messages and platforms to impact public opinion. But less is written about the demand side. When it comes to false beliefs that each of us adopt and harbor to help us understand the world and events in it, what are the incentives and social dimensions that each of us as individuals and as members of the community are responding to that drive our appetite for misinformation? Today’s guest has devoted her research to this subject, and has just published a book that serves as a very accessible entry point to the latest scholarship on this question. Dannagal Young is a Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware and the author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.

There is a term you've likely heard on the Tech Policy Press podcast in the past: the Brussels Effect. The term is meant to describe the European Union’s outsized influence on global markets through its regulations. You may not know that the term was first coined by Anu Bradford, a professor at Columbia Law School. She wrote a book about it called The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Now, she has a new book, just out from Oxford University Press, called Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology The book describes the geopolitical competition to establish digital governance models between the US, the EU, and China. Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to speak to Bradford about the book, and why she thinks the US government, by failing to regulate its tech companies, may ultimately imperil not only the US model but internet freedom more broadly.

The 13th installment of the Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House finds that "while advances in artificial intelligence offer benefits for society, they have also been used to increase the scale and efficiency of digital repression." Justin Hendrix spoke with two of the report's authors- Allie Funk and Kian Vesteinsson about their findings, which unfortunately do not represent a change of trajectory from prior years.

While US Senators are busy holding hearings and forums and posing for pictures with the CEOs of AI companies, the European Union is just months away from passing sweeping regulation of artificial intelligence. As negotiations continue between the European Parliament, Council, and Commission, Justin Hendrix spoke to one observer who is paying close attention to every detail: the Ada Lovelace Institute's European Public Policy Lead, Connor Dunlop. Connor recently published a briefing on five areas of focus for the trilogue negotiations that recommence next week.

In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has written a new history of perhaps one of the most famous movements for worker rights and power in the face of automation. The book sets the record straight on the Luddites, and unpacks what today’s workers can learn from them. 

The ubiquity of cameras in our phones and our environment, coupled with massive social media networks that can share images and video in an instant, means we see often graphic and disturbing images with great frequency. How are people processing such material? And how is it different for people working in newsrooms, social media companies, and human rights and social justice organizations? What protections might be put in place to protect people from vicarious trauma and other harms, and what is the ultimate benefit of doing this work?In their new book, Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives, University of California Berkeley scholars Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros set out to answer those questions.

In 2019, journalist Kashmir Hill had just joined The New York Times when she got a tip about the existence of a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone with a photo. But the company was hard to contact, and people who knew about it didn’t want to talk. Hill resorted to old fashioned shoe-leather reporting, trying to track down the company and its executives. By January of 2020, the Times was ready to report what she had learned in a piece titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” Three years later, Hill has published a book that tells the story of Clearview AI, but with the benefit of a great deal more reporting and study on the social, political, and technological forces behind it. It's called Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It, just out from Penguin Random House.

Today’s episode features two segments, both of which consider the scale of technology platforms and their power over markets and people. In the first, Rebecca Rand delivers a conversation with University of Technology Sydney researcher Dr. Luis Lozano-Paredes about a community of drivers in Colombia who have hacked together a way to preserve their power alongside the adoption of ride sharing apps. And in the second, Justin Hendrix speaks with Columbia University Law School Professor of Law, Science and Technology Tim Wu, who recently spent two years on the National Economic Council in the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Competition and Technology. The conversation touches on privacy legislation, ideas about competition and scale, and Wu's observations on the landmark antitrust trial between the Justice Department and Google, which wrapped up its first week of testimony on Friday. The conversation took place at the All Tech is Human Responsible Tech Summit, hosted with the Consulate General of Canada in New York, on September 14th.

This episode features two segments on the subject of disinformation. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Dr. Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, on recent research that looks at whether AI can write persuasive propaganda. In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Dr. Kirsty Park, the Policy Lead at the European Media Observatory Ireland, and Stephan Mündges, the manager of the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University and one of the coordinators of the German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory, about the report they authored that looks in detail at baseline reporting from big technology platforms that are part of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

One of the problems we come back to again and again on the Tech Policy Press podcast is the problem of how to govern social media platforms. Today’s guest is Paul Gowder, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a founding fellow of the Integrity Institute. Gowder is the author of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms, a book that he says takes an institutional political science approach to the problem of tech platform governance, arguing “that the goals of effective governance capacity development and of global justice” can come together, and that we can build “worldwide direct democratic institutions to exercise public authority over the operations of the big platforms.”

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Alina Leidinger, a researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam about her research- with coauthor Richard Rogers- into which stereotypes are moderated and under-moderated in search engine autocompletion. In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Associated Press investigative journalist Garance Burke about a new chapter in the AP Stylebook offering guidance on how to report on artificial intelligence.

This episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand considers the social consequences of "machine allocation behavior" with Cornell researchers Houston Claure and Malte Jung, authors of a recent paper on the topic with coauthors Seyun Kim and René Kizilcec.In the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Tom Kemp, author of a new book out August 22 from Fast Company Press titled Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy.