The Tech Policy Press Podcast

In this episode, Justin Hendrix is joined by a columnist and author who’s spent the last few years thinking about a past era of automation, a process that yielded him a valuable perspective when considering this moment in time. Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant is the author of a recent column under the headline, "Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be," and the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, which tells the story of the 19th century Luddite movement.

This is Part 1 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future.In this first episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with David Carroll, a 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. Carroll legally challenged Cambridge Analytica in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law, events that were chronicled in the 2019 Netflix documentary The Great Hack.

This is Part 2 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future.In this second episode, we’ll hear a panel discussion hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center that I helped moderate at the end of March. The panel featured Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive who is now a Fellow in the Digital Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center; Alex Lundry, Co-Founder, Tunnl, Deep Root Analytics; and Matthew Rosenberg, a Washington-based Correspondent for the New York Times and one of the individuals on the byline of that first story on Cambridge Analytica.

Two weeks ago, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix participated in Tech and Society week, a series of events across Georgetown’s campus hosted by Emily Tavoulareas, Managing Chair of the Georgetown Initiative on Tech & Society. The panel featured a discussion between three podcast hosts focused on tech and tech policy, including Hendrix and:Bridget Todd, director of public communications for Ultraviolet, a gender justice organization trying to build a more feminist, anti-racist internet and the creator and host of the iHeartRadio tech and culture podcast There Are No Girls on the InternetQuinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a senior editor at Lawfare, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Jurecic is one of an array of hosts on the Lawfare podcast, and she’s the co-host of a long running series called Arbiters of Truth that focuses on the information ecosystem.

Across the United States, there is a growing number of lawsuits that seek to hold tech firms accountable for various alleged harms. My guest today is tracking such suits closely. Gaia Bernstein is a Law Professor, Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes teaches and lectures in the intersection of law, technology, health and privacy, and she is the author of a new book on the subject, just out from Cambridge University Press, titled Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies.

Is technology ultimately neutral? Are the biases we discover in the systems we interact with today just bugs or defects that we can trust will be addressed in version 2.0 or 3.0 of the system? Or is there something inherently wrong with the tech industry’s approach to developing algorithms and software? In today’s podcast, we speak to the author of a new book that takes on this question. In More than a Glitch. Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, data scientist and journalist Meredith Broussard considers the ways in which racism, sexism, and ableism are coded into systems, and what we must do to ensure a more inclusive future.

In this episode of the podcast, we hear three perspectives on generative AI systems and the extent to which their makers may be exposed to potential liability. I spoke to three experts, each with their own views on questions such as whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act-- which has provided broad immunity to internet platforms that host third party content-- will apply to systems like ChatGPT. Guests, in order of appearance, include: Jess Miers, legal advocacy counsel at the Chamber of Progress, an industry coalition whose partners include Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others;James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell with appointments at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School;Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California Berkeley with a joint appointment in the computer and information science departments.

At Columbia University, data scientist Chris Wiggins and historian Matthew Jones teach a course called Data: Past, Present and Future. Out of this collaboration has come a book, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, to be published on Tuesday, March 21st by W.W. Norton. It should be required reading for anyone working with data of any sort to solve problems. The book promises a sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on people and power.

Answers on how best to regulate technology differ depending on the values and politics of any particular jurisdiction. Yet it’s worth looking for points of consensus. In general these days, we in the United States have a lot to learn from lawmakers and regulators in Europe, who are further down the path in their regulatory experiments. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with one German lawmaker, Tobias Bacherle, who was elected to the Bundestag in 2021 representing Alliance 90/The Greens. The conversation touches on issues including encryption, the Digital Services Act, the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, and the relationship between tech and the environment.

In the spring, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix teaches a course called Tech, Media and Democracy that is a partnership of faculty at NYU, Cornell Tech, CUNY’s Queens College, The New School and Columbia Journalism School. The course hosts a range of expert speakers on issues at the intersection of those topics, and graduate students in journalism, information science, computer science, media studies and design collaborate to produce prototypes and investigations of key issues. A recent guest speaker was Peter Pomerantzev, an author and researcher who is concerned with propaganda, polarization and how we come to understand the world around us. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center at Columbia and one of the faculty on the course, led the discussion, which ranges from topics including the information component of the war in Ukraine to the tension between democracy and authoritarianism to the role of journalism and technology in shaping public discourse.

In this episode we look at questions around ethical, legal and business risks surrounding so-called generative AI and synthetic media, and the opportunity that exists if they are employed responsibly. The first segment features Matthew Ferraro, an attorney at the firm WilmerHale who counsels clients about such risks and, with his colleagues, recently wrote a piece for Tech Policy Press on the "Ten Legal and Business Risks of Chatbots and Generative AI." And the second segment features Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI and Sam Gregory from the human rights organization WITNESS, who worked together with other partners to develop a set of Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media.

How will so-called "generative AI" tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT change our politics, and change the way we interact with our representatives in democratic government? This episode features three segments, with:Kadia Goba, a politics reporter at Semafor and author of a recent report on the AI Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives;Micah Sifry, an expert observer of the relationship between tech and politics and the author of The Connector, a Substack newsletter on democracy, organizing, movements and tech, where he recently wrote about ChatGPT and politics;Zach Graves, executive director of Lincoln Network, and Marci Harris, CEO and co-founder of PopVox.com, co-authors with Daniel Schuman at DemandProgress of a recent essay in Tech Policy Press on the risks and benefits of emerging AI tools in the legislative branch.

The past few years have seen a number of high profile hearings on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers expressing concern and even outrage at tech CEOs often for their failures to just satisfy their own policies. And, there have been high profile investigations by certain committees, including the investigation of competition in digital markets in the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. But when it comes to passing laws, Congress has made little progress in the domain of tech policy. An academic and a tech policy expert, today’s guest played an active role in the investigations and legislative proposals led by Democrats over the last few years. Anna Lenhart served as a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee under then Chairman David Cicilline (R-RI), where she supported tech oversight and investigations. And, she was senior technology policy Advisor to Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA), who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee. I caught up with Anna for a kind of exit interview, as she recently left Congress to return to academia and a handful of projects focused on some of the issues she cared most about in her time on the Hill. 

Amazon is one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies. Yet one of the engines of its might is largely invisible to customers- its vast network of millions of third party sellers. In today’s episode we talk with Moira Weigel, an Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and the author of a recent report for Data & Society, Amazon's Trickle Down Monopoly: Third Party Sellers and the Transformation of Small Businesses. For the report, Weigel spent a good amount of time trying to understand experience of the people operating the small businesses that power Amazon’s global expansion. 

This episode features four segments that dive into Gonzalez v. Google, a case before the Supreme Court that could have major implications on platform liability for online speech. First, we get a primer on the basics of the case itself; then, three separate perspectives on it. Asking the questions is Ben Lennett, a tech policy researcher and writer focused on understanding the impact of social media and digital platforms on democracy. He has worked in various research and advocacy roles for the past decade, including serving as the Editor in Chief of Recoding.tech and as policy director for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.Ben’s first interview is with two student editors at the publication Just Security, Aaron Fisher and Justin Cole, whom Tech Policy Press worked with this week to co-publish a review of key arguments in the amicus briefs filed with the Court on the Gonzalez case. Then, we’ll hear three successive interviews, with Mary McCord, Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center; Anupam Chander, a Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown Law; and David Brody, Managing Attorney of the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. 

Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, says that Twitter is both a social media company and a "crime scene." The crime he appears most concerned about is purported censorship by the tech firms, which he says has occurs at the U.S. government’s direction. Musk, who claims he is leading a “revolution” against such practices, has given a small number of people access to internal Twitter documents- the so-called Twitter Files- including emails and internal message board communications that, in their selective release, demonstrate executives at the firm engaging with politicians and federal agencies on a range of issues, from COVID-19 to election disinformation. This week, there were two hearings in the House of Representatives on this subject, including a Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing titled “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” and a hearing of the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that was intended to “discuss the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties.”If we look past the conspiracy theories and legal gibberish, is there any there there? Should we pursue reforms and require greater transparency around the interaction between platforms and government? In this episode, we hear from three experts:Shoshana Weissmann, Digital Director and Fellow at the R Street InstituteDarren Linvill, Associate Professor, Clemson University Media Forensics Hub Mike Masnick, Founder of TechDirt and CEO of the Copia Institute

Today, we’re going to listen in on a panel discussion that took place at the end of last year, hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The Institute’s Research Director, Katy Glenn Bass, hosted a conversation with based on themes from the scholar David G. Robinson’s first book Voices in the Code. The book contains the story of how a group of patients, doctors, data scientists, and advocates worked together to develop a new way to match kidney donations for transplants, with the goal of making the process fair and open. The book bears insights on how algorithmic systems that are often heavily freighted with moral and political complexity can and should be developed with care to avoid excluding the voices of non-technical stakeholders in the outcome, and is a guide for policymakers concerned with questions around transparency, safety and equity in such systems. Panelists included Robinson, as well as scholars Deborah Raji and J. Nathan Matias.

Frequently on this podcast we come back to questions around information, misinformation, and disinformation. In this age of digital communications, the metaphorical flora and fauna of the information ecosystem are closely studied by scientists from a range of disciplines. We're joined in this episode by one such scientist who uses observation and ethnography as his method, bringing a particularly sharp eye to the study of propaganda, media manipulation, and how those in power— and those who seek power— use such tactics. Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Age of Automation and Anonymity, just out this week from Yale University Press. He’s also the author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth; co-author, with Nick Monaco, of a book on Bots; and co-editor, with Dr. Philip N. Howard, of a book on Computational Propaganda.

Earlier this month, Getty Images, one of the world’s most prominent suppliers of editorial photography, stock images, and other forms of media, announced that it had commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI, a British startup firm that says it builds AI solutions using "collective intelligence," claiming Stability AI infringed on Getty’s intellectual property rights by including content owned or represented by Getty Images in its training data. Getty says Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images without a license, which the company says is to the detriment of the content’s creators. The notion at the heart of Getty’s assertion- that generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALLE-2 are in fact exploiting the creators of the images their models are trained on- could have significant implications for the field. Earlier this month I attended a symposium on Existing Law and Extended Reality, hosted at Stanford Law School. There, I met today’s guest, Michael Running Wolf, who brings a unique perspective to questions related to AI and ownership, as a former Amazon software engineer, a PhD student in computer science at McGill University, and as a Northern Cheyenne man intent on preserving the language and culture of native people.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook” at Harvard University before rolling the social networking site out to other students at Dartmouth, Columbia, and Yale. Soon, it was available on hundreds of college and university campuses, and thereafter the rollout included high schools. Now, there are nearly 3 billion monthly active users of the site, and it is readily apparent that it has had a significant impact on society in a variety of ways. One such impact is on mental health. Researchers have found that Facebook use is associated with multiple mental health issues, ranging from anxiety, insomnia, depression and addiction to body image and eating disorders, alcohol use, and more. But while much of the evidence collected is concerning, most such studies have not identified a solid causal connection between Facebook and negative mental health, and many skeptics remain. But in today’s episode, we’re going to discuss one study that does appear to draw a causal connection between the use of Facebook and poor mental health with two its authors: Luca Braghieri, an Assistant Professor in the department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University in Italy; and Alexey Makarin, an Assistant Professor in the Applied Economics group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

In the years following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much effort has been put into understanding foreign influence campaigns, and into disrupting efforts by Russia and other countries, such as China and Iran, to interfere in U.S. elections. Political and other computational social scientists continue to whittle at questions as to how much influence such campaigns have on domestic politics. One such question is how much did the Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) tweets, specifically, affect voting preferences and political polarization in the United States? A new paper in the journal Nature Communications provides an answer to that specific question. Titled Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior, the paper matches Twitter data with survey data to study the impact of the IRA's tweets. To learn more about the paper, Justin Hendrix spoke with one of its authors, Joshua Tucker, a professor of politics at NYU, where he also serves as the director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). Hendrix and Tucker talked about the study, as well as what can and cannot be understood about the impact of the broader campaign of the IRA, or certainly the broader Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. election, from its results.

To learn more about the events on January 8th, 2023, when supporters of former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country's capital, and the connection between U.S. and Brazilian election disinformation, Justin Hendrix spoke with a prominent Brazilian journalist who has been covering these issues for years: Patrícia Campos Mello, a reporter at large and columnist at the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. They discussed the role of social media in Brazilian politics, as well as the possibility that the attacks may spur new regulations.

Imagine a company that hides who it works with and where billions of dollars flow around the world. That earns its profits financing a global network containing piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation, even doing business with figures sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, including Russian companies that may access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine, potentially opening a mechanism for Russian intelligence to target individuals there. A company that tells the public that it doesn’t make money from guns that nevertheless does business with the maker of the AR-15, the weapon used in so many horrific mass killings, including the recent massacre of teachers and students in Uvalde, Texas. Is this some organized crime syndicate or shady offshore shell company? No, it’s Google, one of the biggest and most prominent technology companies on the planet. This episode features a conversation with Craig Silverman, a journalist who has spent years uncovering fraud in the opaque world of digital advertising and media manipulation. With his colleagues at ProPublica, in a recent series of articles Silverman employed a unique investigative approach to uncover just exactly how Google operates in a shadowy realm of deceit and disinformation.

According to the legislation that established the January 6th Committee, the members were mandated to examine “how technology, including online platforms” such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit and others “may have factored into the motivation, organization, and execution” of the insurrection. When the Committee issued subpoenas to platforms a year ago, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said, “Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.” In order to learn what came of this particular aspect of the Committee’s sprawling, 18 month investigation, in this episode I’m joined by four individuals who helped conduct it, including staffing the depositions of social media executives, message board operators, far-right online influencers, militia members, extremists and others that gave testimony to the Committee:Meghan Conroy is the U.S. Research Fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a co-founder of the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC), and was an Investigator with the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.Dean Jackson is Project Manager of the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and was formerly an Investigative Analyst with the Select Committee. Alex Newhouse is the Deputy Director at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism and the Director of Technical Research at the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC), and served as an Investigative Analyst for the Select Committee.Jacob Glick is Policy Counsel at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and served as an Investigative Counsel on the Select Committee.

Avi Asher-Schapiro is a journalist covering digital rights and technology for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. For the final Tech Policy Press podcast of 2022, Justin Hendrix spoke to Asher-Schapiro about some of the most significant stories he and his colleagues covered in 2022, as well as what may make headlines in 2023 at the intersection of technology and society, delving into topics ranging from surveillance and crypto to social media and tech policy. 

On Friday, Congresswoman Lori Trahan, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led a group of Democrats including Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Katie Porter, Stephen Lynch, Susan Wild, Mondaire Jones, Kathy Castor, Adam Schiff, and Elissa Slotkin to sign letters requesting information from gaming companies about their efforts to combat hate, harassment, and extremism in online games. The letters were sent to companies including Activision Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive, Riot Games, Epic Games, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox. The letters followed a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) earlier this month that found that 77 percent of adults and 66 percent of teens have reported experiences of harassment while playing online games over the past year, and identified a number of other concerns about social gaming environments. Today, I’m joined by one of the authors of that report, ADL Center for Technology and Society Director of Strategy and Operations Daniel Kelley; as well as by Queens University professor Amarnath Amarasingam, coauthor of a report commissioned by the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism on the intersection of gaming and violent extremism that was released in October. 

A little more than a year ago, in the first article announcing the release of the Facebook Files, the documents brought out of the company by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz reported on Cross Check, a Facebook system that “exempted high-profile users from some or all” of the platform’s rules. The program shields millions of elites from normal content moderation enforcement. While the existence of such a program was known, its scale was and perhaps still is shocking.Following the Journal’s reporting and subsequent concern in the public, Facebook (now Meta) President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg announced the company would request a policy advisory opinion from its independent Oversight Board. 14 months later, the Oversight Board has completed its review and published its opinion. To talk more about the opinion, the Cross Check system and the problem of content moderation more generally, I’m joined with one member of the Oversight Board, Nighat Dad, a lawyer from Pakistan and founder of the Digital Rights Foundation; and one outside observer who answered the board’s call for opinions about the Cross Check system, R Street Institute senior fellow and University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center distinguished research fellow Chris Riley.

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the second part, and it features a conversation with two individuals covering China for the New York Times, Paul Mozur and Muyi Xiao. In their collaborative coverage they have mixed open source visual investigations methods with traditional reporting to get a sense of the protests and the state’s response. 

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the first part, and it features a conversation with Liza Lin, a Reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She covers Asia technology news for the Journal from Singapore. Before that she was the paper’s China correspondent, based in Shanghai. She was part of a team at the Journal to named as Pulitzer Finalists for the International Reporting category in 2021 for coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and with other Journal reporters won the Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting in 2018 for a series of stories on China's Surveillance state. She’s co-author of a book on that subject titled Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, with Josh Chin. 

On Friday, Elon Musk announced via tweet that documents related to Twitter’s decision to intervene in the propagation of an October 2020 story in the New York Post about then candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, would be made public. The incident caused a furor at the time, with some Republicans and supporters of former President Donald Trump insinuating that it was proof that social media firms are biased against conservative interests. Some even maintain that the actions of Twitter and Facebook with regard to this particular New York Post story may have had some impact on the outcome of the election, as far-fetched as that might be. Today, we’ll hear two voices on the disclosures. The first is David Ingram, who covers tech for NBC News and will walk us through what happened. And the second is Mike Masnick, the editor of the influential site Tech Dirt, who offers his first thoughts on the disclosures, and what they portend for the future of Twitter under Elon Musk.

For this episode of the Tech Policy Press podcast, I had the chance to speak to Chris Anderson, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Milan who is leading a course on tech manifestos and their evolution, inviting his students to dissect the language for what it can tell us about politics and power. Documents such as A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and A Manifesto for Cyborgs have given way to more vacuous statements from billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook manifesto, Building Global Community. These days a lot of Silicon Valley’s leaders don’t have much in the way of ideas, but they do have a lot of money, so either way they can push whatever agenda they may have on the rest of us. From promises of abundance delivered by artificial intelligence, to a 'global community' convened on social media platforms, to reimagined economies or even a new world order built on the blockchain, tech manifestos remain important, since they often signify large amounts of capital are about to be deployed to try to manifest someone's new vision.

By all accounts, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not going well. And yet many have the real sense that something important may be lost if the platform collapses, or if there is a substantial migration away from it to alternatives like Mastodon, the open source, decentralized platform that has grown from three hundred thousand monthly active users to nearly two million since Musk bought Twitter. In this episode, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the chance to discuss Musk’s takeover with Dr. Johnathan Flowers, and to learn more about some of the exclusive norms he’s observed that may create obstacles to communities of color when contemplating the switch to Mastodon.

Today we’re going to hear from the editor of-- and two authors included in-- a book of essays about how particular bits of software have changed the world in different ways, the just-published "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World from Princeton University Press. The book is at once delightful and enlightening, revealing how technology interacts with people and society in both good and bad ways, and how important and long lasting the decisions we take when designing software and systems can be on the world. This episode features:Torie Bosch, the editor of Future Tense, a collaborative project of Slate magazine, New America, and Arizona State University, and the editor of the book;Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest TechnologyCharlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development at New York University and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Media reports suggest that large swathes of employees at Twitter have resigned after the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, issued a kind of ultimatum asking them to commit to "long hours at high intensity" to build “Twitter 2.0.” Last night, according to an internal Twitter email shared with CNN, employees who decided to stay at the company received an email that said the company's offices will be temporarily closed and badge access will be restricted through Monday. Whether the platform will remain functional with so many core engineering and other crucial teams decimated is an open question. To talk more about Twitter, Musk, and what is potentially lost, Justin Hendrix spoke to Dr. Meredith Clark, whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. She’s leading a project to archive Black Twitter, as part of a larger project to archive the Black web. And, she’s the author of a forthcoming book on Black Twitter.

According to the BBC, to date at least 348 Iranian protesters have been killed and nearly 16,000 arrested in women-led protests that erupted three months ago after the death Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being detained by morality police for allegedly breaking the strict rules on the wearing of hijabs.One way the regime has responded to these antigovernment protests is to block access to the internet, independent news sites and social media and communication platforms. To talk more about how these tactics are being applied in Iran and around the world, and what policymakers in democratic countries can do to help dissidents on the ground, I spoke to two experts on digital and human rights:Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw and author of a recent piece in Wired on Iran's internet blackoutsKian Vesteinsson, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House, one of the authors of the 12th annual Internet Freedom Report

Voting in the U.S. midterm elections closed on Tuesday, and as of Sunday morning, November 13, Democrats secured another majority in the Senate. But ballots are still being counted in key races that will determine which party controls the House.  It is clear, however, that the margins determining leadership in both chambers will be extremely small. In order to explore how the elections may impact the legislative debate over tech policy issues, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke with three experts from civil society groups that regularly engage with lawmakers to find what scenarios and considerations are front of mind, even as we wait for the final tally:Emma Llansó, Director of the Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy and TechnologyYosef Getachew, Director of the Media and Democracy Program, Common CauseMatt Wood, Vice President of Policy and General Counsel, Free Press

This episode features a discussion with Brandi Collins-Dexter, the author of the new book BLACK SKINHEAD: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future. Brandi is both an academic and a civil rights activist in the fight for media and tech justice, and her book is a rollercoaster ride through those issues through culture and music and politics. Part media and cultural criticism, part memoir, and part warning, the book takes us to the fringes of Black communities and tries to make sense of our political moment.

As the U.S. midterm elections approach next week, there is a renewed focus on understanding the spending on and claims made in political advertising in digital channels, particularly on social media. But what is going on across the web, beyond the social media platforms? A recent report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center on Technology Policy found that as a result of restrictions on political ads instituted by major platforms ahead of the 2020 elections, political advertisers are increasingly turning to political advertising on other platforms. Programmatic advertising accounts for a substantial and increasing share of political advertising, they say, and more attention needs to be paid to this complex and confusing ecosystem of companies- large and small- that serve up ads on websites, apps, streaming services, and other digitally connected devices. This episode features a discussion with the report's authors, J. Scott Babwah Brennen & Matt Perault.

Danielle Citron is the inaugural Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she teaches and writes about information privacy, free expression and civil rights. She is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age, and in 2019 she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. Her latest book, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age, published by W.W. Norton and Penguin Vintage UK, was released this month.

In this episode of the podcast, we present two segments that explore how the combination of media, platforms, politics and people play out in Latino communities in the U.S., particularly at crucial moments for democracy, such as at election time. The first segment is with individuals who are leading efforts to understand and confront mis- and disinformation targeting Latino communities:Roberta Braga, Director of Counter-Disinformation Strategies at EquisJaime Longoria, Manager of Research and Training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund.And the second segment is a discussion with two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who spent the summer talking specifically to Latino users of WhatsApp about how the political discourse plays out in their communities on that widely used messaging app, and wrote about it for Tech Policy Press as part of a special series of essays on race, ethnicity, technology and elections:Inga Kristina Trauthig, Ph.D., Research Manager of the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at AustinKayo Mimizuka, Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Media Engagement and a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin.

In recent episodes of this podcast we’ve explored the policies and practices of the social media platforms with regard to elections. In this week’s episode, we’ll hear two segments on this theme. First, an interview with Daniel Kriess, an Associate Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher at the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. With Ph.D candidate Erik Brooks, Daniel is the author of Looking to the Midterms: The State of Platform Policies on U.S. Political Speech, a recent post at Tech Policy Press.In the second segment, we zoom out and discuss the trajectory of tech company policies on elections over the last twenty six years with Katie Harbath and Collier Fernekes, authors of a recent report for the Bipartisan Policy Center that was based on an archive of public announcements made by the firms. Katie is a former Facebook public policy director and now leads Anchor Change, a consultancy she started after leaving the tech company. Collier is a research analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Earlier this year, an investigation published in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow suggested that commercial spyware called Pegasus, developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, is being used by governments in at least 45 countries around the world, including by U.S. and European intelligence and law enforcement services. The technology permits government agents to gain access to the contents of cell phones by exploiting flaws in device operating systems and software. In this episode, we hear from three individuals in Bangkok, Thailand; pro-democracy activists who have seen their community targeted with Pegasus, part of a range of activities intended to discourage dissent and limit free expression:Yingcheep Atchanont, a program manager at iLawRuchapong Chamjirachaikul, advocacy officer at iLawDarika Bamrungchok, a program manager at Thai Netizen

Regular users of social media platforms are well aware that they often produce toxic discourse. Scholars continue to produce results that bring clarity to the mechanisms by which digital and social media exacerbate partisan and identity-based conflict. A better understanding is crucial for keying in on what platforms should be held responsible for, devising better policy, and potentially designing solutions. A new peer-reviewed paper from Petter Törnberg, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, contributes to this understanding by developing a computational model that “suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division.” 

Last week, President Joe Biden’s White House published a 73-page document produced by the Office of Science and Technology Policy titled Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People. The White House says that “among the great challenges posed to democracy today is the use of technology, data, and automated systems in ways that threaten the rights of the American public.“ The Blueprint, then, is “a guide for a society that protects all people from these threats—and uses technologies in ways that reinforce our highest values.”To discuss the blueprint and the broader context into which it was introduced, Tech Policy Press spoke to one expert who had a hand in writing it, and one external observer who follows these issues closely. Joining the discussion are Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor of computer science and data science and director of the Data Science Initiative at Brown University, who recently completed a 15-month appointment as an advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Alex Engler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he researches algorithms and policy.

Some of the most controversial debates over speech and content moderation on social media platforms are now due for consideration in the Supreme Court. Last month, Florida’s attorney general asked the Court to decide whether states have the right to regulate how social media companies moderate content on their services, after Florida and Texas passed laws that challenge practices of tech firms that lawmakers there regard as anti-democratic. And this month, the Supreme Court decided to hear two cases that will have bearing on interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally provides platforms with immunity from legal liability for user generated content. To talk about these various developments, Justin Hendrix spoke to three people covering these issues closely. Guests include:Brandie Nonnecke, Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley and the Director of Our Better WebJameel Jaffer, Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia UniversityWill Oremus, a news analysis writer focused on tech and society at The Washington PostThe guests also made time to discuss Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again pursuit of Twitter, which appears to be on-again, and how his potential acquisition of the company relates to the broader debate around speech and moderation issues. 

On September 21, Justin Hendrix moderated a panel discussion for the McCourt Institute at a pre-conference spotlight session on digital governance ahead of Unfinished Live, a conference on tech and society issues hosted at The Shed in New York City. The topic given by the organizers was Digital Governance and the State of Democracy: Why Does it Matter? Panelist included:  Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy LabMaggie Little, Director of the Ethics Lab at Georgetown UniversityEli Pariser, Co-Director of New_Public, an initiative focused on developing better digital public spaces; andEric Salobir, the Chair of the Executive Committee, Human Technology Foundation, a research and action network placing the human being at the heart of technology development

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases that concern whether tech platforms can be held liable for user generated content, as well as for content that users see because of a platform’s algorithmic systems. In deciding to hear Gonzalez et al vs. Google and Taamneh, Mehier et al vs Twitter et al, the Court will broach the question of whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be narrowed, and whether it still immunizes the owners of websites when that algorithmically “recommend” third-party content into a user’s feed.To learn more about these cases and the potential implications of the Court’s decision, Tech Policy Press spoke to an expert on tech and internet law: Anupam Chander, the Scott K. Ginsberg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University.

The former President and his supporters continue to sow doubt in the outcome of the 2020 election, and in the election system more generally. Now, with the the 2022 midterm elections just a month away, a number of observers are perplexed at the posture of large social media platforms, where false claims continue to fester and efforts to mitigate misinformation always seem puny compared to the scale of the problem. This week we hear from three experts who are following these issues closely: Nora Benavidez, Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights, Free PressPaul Barrett, Deputy Director, Center for Business & Human Rights, NYU Stern School of BusinessMike Caulfield, Research Scientist at the Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington

In a new paper-- "The uselessness of AI Ethics," published in the online edition of the journal AI and Ethics, Luke Munn, points to over 80 lists of AI ethical principles produced by governments, corporations, research groups and professional societies. In is paper, he expresses concern that most of these ethics statements deal in vague terms and lack any kind of actual enforcement. But in critiquing attempts at defining an ethical code for AI, he is not suggesting we let the technology develop in a technical vacuum. On the contrary, he wants us to think more deeper about the potential problems in deploying AI. In this episode of the podcast, Mark Hansen, Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, speaks with Munn about his ideas, which are part of a growing movement that sees the problems with AI less in purely computational terms, but instead as an area of social science.

As content moderation and other trust and safety issues have been, to put it mildly, at the fore of tech concerns over the last few years, it’s interesting to take a step back and look at the various conferences, professional organizations and research communities that have emerged to address this broad and challenging set of subjects. To get a sense of where trust and safety is as a field at this moment in time, Tech Policy Press spoke to three individuals involved in it, each coming from different perspectives:Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a leader in the community of academic researchers studying trust and safety issues as co-editor of the recently launched Journal of Online Trust and SafetyDavid Sullivan, the leader of an industry funded consortium focused on developing best practices for the field called the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership; andJeff Allen, co-founder and chief research officer of an independent membership organization of trust and safety professionals, the Integrity Institute.