The Tech Policy Press Podcast

This week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to request information from companies and to issue orders to block content. While there is still work to do to determine how the law will be administered, it joins a range of new tech policy laws and regulations enacted against a backdrop of the increasing centralization of power in India’s government.To discuss the bill, Justin Hendrix is joined by Aditi Agrawal, an independent technology journalist based in New Delhi; Kamesh Shekar, a tech policy expert who leads the privacy and data governance vertical at The Dialogue, a think tank based in Delhi; and Prateek Waghre, the Policy Director at the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization based in India.

Lots of voices are calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the US, at present it seems there is no federal legislation close to becoming law. But in 2023 legislative sessions in states across the country, there has been a surge in AI laws proposed and passed, and some have already taken effect. To learn more about this wave of legislation, I spoke to two people who just posted a comprehensive review of AI laws in US states: Katrina Zhu, a law clerk at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and a law student at the UCLA School of Law, and EPIC senior counsel Ben Winters.

A unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release of four peer-reviewed studies last week in Science and Nature mark the first of as many as sixteen studies that promise fresh insights into the complex dynamics of social media and public discourse. But beyond the findings of the research, the partnership between Meta and some of the most prominent researchers in the field has been held up as a model. With active discussions ongoing in multiple jurisdictions about how best to facilitate access to platform data for independent researchers, it’s worth scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of this partnership. And to do that, Justin Hendrix is joined by one researcher who was able to observe and evaluate nearly every detail of the process for the last three years: the project's rapporteur, Michael Wagner, who in his day job is a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In today’s podcast, Justin Hendrix talks with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect, is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."

Today’s guest on the podcast is Ifeoma Ajunwa, the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Director of AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School, and author of the Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace. from Cambridge University Press. The book considers how data and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace, and whether the law is more equipped to help workers in this transition, or to provide for the interests of employers.

Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companies that employ them. Today’s guest is Justine Bateman, a writer, director, producer, author, and member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the WGA, and SAG-AFTRA. Bateman has been on both sides of the camera for much of her life, and has a particularly sharp perspective on how AI may change the entertainment industry, and why it matters to all workers that the unions are standing up on these issues now.

One of the most urgent debates in tech policy at the moment concerns encrypted communications. At issue in proposed legislation, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EARN It Act put forward in the US Senate, is whether such laws break the privacy promise of end to end encryption by requiring content moderation mechanisms like client-side scanning. But to what extent are such moderation techniques legal under existing laws that limit the monitoring and interception of communications? Today’s guest is James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar with a computer science background who recently conducted a review of various moderation technologies to determine how they might hold up in under US federal communication privacy regimes including the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The conversation touches on how technologies like server side and client side scanning work, the extent to which the law may fail to accommodate or even contemplate such technologies, and where the encryption debate is headed as these technologies advance.

Tomorrow's virtual worlds will be governed, at least at first, by today's legal and regulatory regimes. How will privacy law, torts, IP, or even criminal law apply in 'extended reality' (XR)?Drawing from the discussion at a conference hosted earlier this year at Stanford University called "Existing Law and Extended Reality," this episode asks what challenges will emerge from human behavior and interaction-- with one another and with technology-- inside XR experiences, and what choices governments and tech companies will face in addressing those challenges.This episode of The Sunday Show was produced by Tech Policy Press audio and reporting intern Rebecca Rand, and features the voices of experts such as Brittan Heller (the organizer of the Stanford conference), Mary Anne Franks, Kent Bye, Jameson Spivack, Joseph Palmer, Eugene Volokh, Amie Stepanovich, Susan Aaronson, Florence G'Sell, and Avi Bar Zeev.

This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook, which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Handbook is intended as a resource to help knowledge-producing organizations in the “amplification of fact-based information.” To learn more about the handbook and the ideas on which it is based, Justin Hendrix spoke to GMF research assistant Adrienne Goldstein, as well as Kathryn Peters, executive director of UNC CITAP.

Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, are the hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, a show that seeks to "break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation." Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex and Emily about the show's origins, and what they hope will come of the effort to scrutinize statements about the potential of AI that are often fantastical.

Last week, Canada passed the Online News Act, legislation that requires tech platforms to remunerate Canadian news outlets, and the platforms are not happy. In response, Google announced it will remove links to Canadian news outlets from its products. Meta also said it would remove Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram. The Act itself has yet to be implemented- it has to first go through a regulatory process to sort out how it will work. So, these moves by the platforms may be a tactic in the negotiation of the particulars. But the platforms also clearly want to send a message to other jurisdictions where similar legislation is under consideration.For an expert opinion on the politics surrounding Canada’s Online News Act and its broader implications, Tech Policy Press Contributing Editor Ben Lennett spoke to one person who has been following it closely from his perch in Montreal. Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, the founding director of The Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an Associate Professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. 

Over the past few months, there have been a range of voices calling for the urgent regulation of artificial intelligence. Comparisons to the problems of nuclear proliferation abound, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some want a new international body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when it comes to AI and global governance, there’s already a lot in play- from ethics councils to various schemes for industry governance, activity on standards, various international agreements, and legislation that will have international impact, such as the EU’s AI Act. To help get his head around the complicated, evolving ecology of global AI governance, Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the three authors of a recent paper in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science that attempts to take stock of and explore the tensions between different approaches, including Michael Veale, an associate professor in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where he works on the intersection of computer science, law, and policy; and Robert Gorwa, a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center, a large publicly-funded research institute in Germany.

Earlier this month, Justin Hendrix traveled to RightsCon, the big gathering of individuals and organizations concerned with human rights and technology organized by Access Now. The sprawling event had hundreds of sessions on a wide range of themes, but one topic discussed across multiple tracks was the importance of encrypted communications, especially to groups such as political dissidents and journalists. A key panel at RightsCon featured Signal President Meredith Whittaker, who spoke out about policies proposed in legislatures around the world that threaten the promise of end-to-end encryption to preserve the privacy of messages sent between individuals and groups. Leaders of encrypted apps have pulled together of late to speak out against the proposed UK Online Safety Bill, signing letters and appearing at events. Shortly after RightsCon, Hendrix connected with Whittaker to learn more about Signal’s posture against such legislation, why she sees encrypted communications as so crucial to freedom and human rights, and how the company thinks about safety and its role in the broader digital ecosystem.

In the United States, it’s fair to say that federal, state and local governments have struggled in the era of digitalization. Decades in to that era, there is still a gap between the policy outcomes we seek and what citizens often get when they engage with government agencies and services online. At its worst this gap means people aren’t receiving critical services that sustain their lives; and at the very least it reduces faith in government to be able to solve problems right at the moment when it’s clear the collective challenges we face are going to Jennifer Pahlka, who served in President Barack Obama’s administration as deputy chief technology officer and founded the nonprofit Code for America, has written a book that asks us to reexamine how government works, and how it should work, in the digital age. It's called Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, and it's the subject of the podcast today.

Last week, a group of very important people, including the U.S Secretaries of State and Commerce and trade representatives from President Joe Biden’s administration, met with top European Union officials in the heart of the Swedish Lapland for the fourth Ministerial meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, or “TTC”. Pressing needs were tackled, new initiatives were launched, commitments were made, and cooperation was deepened on a range of tech policy issues, at least according to the press releases. To hear an unvarnished view from someone who was at the meeting about what might actually come of it all, Justin Hendrix invited on a journalist who is, in my opinion, one the best tech policy reporters in the world: Mark Scott, Chief Technology Correspondent for Politico.

Today’s show has two segments both focused on generative AI. In the first segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Irene Solaiman, a researcher who has put a lot of thought into evaluating the release strategies for generative AI systems. Organizations big and small have pursued different methods for release of these systems, some holding their models and details about them very close, and some pursuing a more open approach. And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Calli Schroeder and Ben Winters at the Electronic Privacy Information Center about a new report they helped write about the harms of generative AI, and what to do about them.

Last week, the Supreme Court released decisions in Gonzalez v. Google, LLC, and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh. In this episode we’ll discuss what it tells us about how the Court is thinking about social media and intermediary liability, and what it might tell us about future cases the Court may hear. I’m joined by an expert who follows these issues closely, and has shared his expertise with us on this podcast before: Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Today’s episode features a discussion with Nick Seaver, a professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation from the University of Chicago Press. Nick is an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. His book is the product of ethnographic observation and conversations with developers working on music recommendation algorithms and other systems designed to understand and cater to user preferences. His research gives us a better understanding of the motivations of the executives and engineers designing systems to command our attention, which he considers to be “a currency, a capacity, a filter, a spotlight, and a moral responsibility.”

Justin Hendrix speaks to writer Malcolm Harris about his book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD, which considers the historical antecedents for the project of Silicon Valley.

Recently Justin Hendrix caught up with Gus Hurwitz, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Hurwitz told Hendrix he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced. The conversation covered a range of topics, from how to think about the relationship between technology and the law, how to get engineers to engage with ethical and legal concepts, the view of the coastal tech policy discourse from Hurwitz’s vantage in the middle of the country, the role and politics of the Federal Trade Commission, and why he finds some inspiration in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In the course of its investigation into the insurrection at the US Capitol, the House Select Committee on January 6th spoke to hundreds of witnesses, including social media executives with insight into the role that platforms played in propagating the false claims that motivated violence that day, and in connecting and facilitating the movement and organization of people that sought to overthrow the election.One of the individuals that testified to the Select Committee was a former Twitter official, Anika Collier Navaroli. Justin Hendrix had a chance to speak with Anika earlier this month, to hear how her thinking has evolved in this time under the spotlight, and what she’s hoping to do next to continue her journey as an intellectual and an activist working at the intersection of tech, media and democracy.

Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix is joined by a UK lawmaker and advocate who has been influential in the global push for more protections for children online. Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a Crossbench member of the House of Lords and sits on the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee, and she’s a Commissioner for UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, where she is a member of the Working Group on Child Online Safety. She’s the Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation, which seeks to ensure children and young people are afforded the right to participate in the digital world “creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly.” 5Rights played a key role in advancing the UK Children’s Code, as well as the California Age Appropriate Design Code Act, passed last year. Baroness Kidron discussed the broad trajectory of efforts to address online child safety, what she thinks about the legal challenge to the California law and some of the harsher provisions of child safety laws in other parts of the country, and where she believes the fight for child digital safety is headed in the future. 

In this episode, Tech Policy Press board member and UCLA School of Law postdoctoral research fellow Courtney Radsch interviews Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen, Denmark’s Tech Ambassador, who represents the Danish Government to the global tech industry and in global governance forums on emerging technologies. The discussion focuses on the role of tech in society, how to regulate artificial intelligence, how to accommodate non-English and indigenous languages in a tech ecosystem focused on scale, and how to capitalize journalism in the age of social media.

This episode features two segments. We’ll hear from Ellen P. Goodman, Senior Advisor for Algorithmic Justice at the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which just launched an inquiry seeking comment on “what policies will help businesses, government, and the public be able to trust that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems work as claimed – and without causing harm.” And, we’ll speak with Dr. Michal Luria, a Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who had a column in Wired this month under the headline, Your ChatGPT Relationship Status Shouldn’t Be Complicated. She says the way people talk to each other is influenced by their social roles, but ChatGPT is blurring the lines of communication. 

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 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.

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.

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.