In February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Vera Zakem as California’s State Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the California Department of Technology. Zakem brings deep experience from national security, democracy and human rights, and technology policy. Most recently, under former President Joe Biden, she served as the Chief Digital Democracy and Rights Officer at USAID, where she led global efforts to align emerging technologies with democratic values. Zakem assumes the r...
May 29, 2025•28 min
On May 29, the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights released its Innovation Framework , which it calls a “new guiding document for companies that invest in, create, and use artificial intelligence (AI), to ensure that their AI systems protect and promote civil rights and are fair, trusted, and safe for all of us, especially communities historically pushed to the margins.” Justin Hendrix spoke to the Center’s senior policy advisor on Civil ...
May 29, 2025•23 min
On Thursday, May 22, the United States House of Representatives narrowly advanced a budget bill that included the "Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Modernization Initiative," which includes a 10-year moratorium on the enforcement of state AI laws. Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix and associate editor Cristiano Lima-Strong discussed the moratorium, the contours of the debate around it, and its prospects in the Senate....
May 25, 2025•20 min
In his New York Times review of the book, Columbia Law School professor and former White House official Tim Wu calls journalist Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI , “a corrective to tech journalism that rarely leaves Silicon Valley.” Hao has appeared on this podcast before, to help us understand how the business model of social media platforms incentivizes the deterioration of information ecosystems, the series of events around OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’...
May 23, 2025•45 min
Today’s guest is Milton L. Mueller , a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Public Policy and the head of an advocacy policy analysis group called the Internet Governance Project. Mueller has long walked the halls and sat in the rooms where internet governance is discussed and debated, and has played a role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions. He’s the author of a new book called Declaring Independence in Cyberspace: Internet Self-Governance and the ...
May 18, 2025•48 min
In the wake of the most intense India-Pakistan escalation in two decades, experts are still trying to make sense of the role that the information war played in the physical one. In this episode, Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir speaks to two experts from India and Pakistan who tirelessly navigated the deluge of rumor and disinformation during the crisis, and who came away with thoughts about the role of social media platforms and the incentives they create, particularly in time...
May 13, 2025•28 min
Last year, a United States federal judge ruled that Google is a monopolist in the market for online search. For the past three weeks, the company and the Justice Department have been in court to hash out what remedies might look like. Tech Policy Press associate editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to two experts who are following the case closely, including Karina Montoya, a senior reporter and analyst for Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, and Joseph Coniglio , the ...
May 11, 2025•34 min
Last year, Elon Musk's xAI set up its "Colossus" supercomputer in an old Electrolux manufacturing facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Now, the residents of nearby neighborhoods are pushing for facts and fair treatment as the company looks to expand its footprint amid questions about its environmental impact. Justin Hendrix considers the state of play with Dara Kerr , a reporter for The Guardian; Amber Sherman , a Memphis activist; and artifacts from local media reporting over the past year....
May 06, 2025•26 min
Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. Justin Hendrix spoke with her about her new book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy . In it, she suggests how the venture capital industry must be reformed to deliver true innovation that advances society rather than merely outsized returns for an increasingly monolithic set of investors....
May 04, 2025•35 min
From visions of AI paradise to the project to defeat death, many dangerous and unscientific ideas are driving Silicon Valley leaders. Justin Hendrix spoke to Adam Becker , a science journalist and author of MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity , just out from Basic Books....
Apr 27, 2025•40 min
For a special series of episodes that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting a series of discussions intended to help us imagine possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the moment we are in. Dubbed Through to Thriving , the first episode in the series features a discussion on how to build community and solidarity with Ellen Pao , currently the co-founder of a nonprofit called Project Include , which focuses on...
Apr 20, 2025•50 min
Last month, a group of researchers published a letter “Affirming the Scientific Consensus on Bias and Discrimination in AI.” The letter, published at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back policies and threatening research aimed at protecting people from bias and discrimination in AI, carries the signatures of more than 200 experts. To learn more about their goals, Justin Hendrix spoke to three of the signatories: J. Nathan Matias , an Assistant Professor in the Department of Commu...
Apr 16, 2025•19 min
On Monday, April 14, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will kick off its trial against Meta . In process for years, the case is over whether Mark Zuckerberg’s company has an illegal monopoly over social media and whether it should be forced to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. To prepare to cover the arguments, Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to two experts to better understand the issues at play. William (Bill) Kovacic is a Professor of Law and Policy and Direc...
Apr 13, 2025•35 min
On April 4, The New York Times reported that the European Commission is considering finding X, formerly Twitter, as part of its ongoing DSA investigation, which began in 2023. Tech Policy Press has discussed at length the extent and quality of transparency from platforms under the DSA, but there is limited insight into how the Commission is conducting its investigations into large online platforms and search engines. In most cases, the publicly available documents on cases are just press release...
Apr 08, 2025•30 min
Across the United States and in some cities abroad yesterday, protestors took to the streets to resist the policies of US President Donald Trump . Dubbed the "Hands Off" protests, over 1,400 events took place, including in New York City, where protestors called for billionaire Elon Musk to be ousted from his role in government and for an end to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has gutted government agencies and programs and sought to install artificial intelligence systems t...
Apr 06, 2025•54 min
On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir in discussion with Rina Chandran , Rest of World; Natalia Anteleva , Coda Story; An...
Mar 30, 2025•37 min
On Tuesday, March 25th, Tech Policy Press hosted a webinar discussion to talk shop with others on the tech and democracy beat. We gathered seven colleagues from around the world to explore how tech journalists are grappling with the current political moment in the United States and beyond. In this episode, you'll hear the first session of the day, which features a discussion with Michael Masnick from Techdirt, Vittoria Elliot from Wired , and Emmanuel Maiberg from 404 Media. This session explore...
Mar 30, 2025•46 min
Every now and again, a story that has a significant technology element really breaks through and drives the news cycle. This week, the Trump administration is reeling after The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he was on the receiving end of Yemen strike plans in a Signal group chat between US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other top US national security officials. User behavior, a common failure point, appears to be to blame in this scenario. But what are the broader con...
Mar 27, 2025•28 min
Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency that enforces federal consumer protection and competition laws and that, under former President Joe Biden , turned up its scrutiny of the tech sector's biggest companies. The two commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter , plan to challenge Trump's firing, which they said will only benefit billionaire tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos ...
Mar 25, 2025•40 min
What is necessary to develop a future that is less hospitable to authoritarianism and, indeed, to fascism? How do we build collective power against authoritarian forms of corporate and state power? Is an alternative form of computing possible? Dan McQuillan is the author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence , published in 2022 by Bristol University Press....
Mar 23, 2025•53 min
Dr. Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she has served on the faculty since 2019. From 2021 to 2023, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She was deeply involved in the Biden administration’s approach to artificial intelligence. Sh...
Mar 16, 2025•31 min
The goal of achieving "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, is shared by many in the AI field. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” and last summer, the company announced its plan to achieve AGI within five years. While other experts at companies like Meta and Anthropic quibble with the term, many AI researchers recognize AGI as either an explicit or implicit goal. Google Deepmind went so far as to set o...
Mar 09, 2025•43 min
A year ago, Europe’s Digital Markets Act—the DMA—went into effect. The European Commission says the purpose of the regulation is to make “ digital markets in the EU more contestable and fairer.” In particular, the DMA regulates gatekeepers, the large digital platforms whose position gives them greater leverage over the digital economy. One year in, how has the DMA performed? Do Europeans enjoy more choice and competition? And what are the new politics of the DMA as European regulations are ...
Mar 09, 2025•59 min
Could AI help design better, more democratic platforms and online environments for public discourse? What are the opportunities, challenges, and risks of deploying AI in contexts where people are engaged in political discussion? Today’s guests are among the more than two dozen authors of a new paper on AI and the future of digital public squares: Audrey Tang , Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and former Digital Minister Ravi Iyer , managing director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center for Ethical L...
Mar 06, 2025•51 min
On this podcast, we regularly engage with questions about redesigning social media networks to make them more democratic, pluralist, and prosocial. One hypothesis people have about how to do that is through the decentralization of platforms and the introduction of middleware—tools built to give users more control over their social media experience and, thus, more autonomy in how they engage in public discourse. In this episode, you’ll hear a discussion with one entrepreneur building middleware f...
Mar 03, 2025•38 min
Last week, Tech Policy Press joined the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (EL CLIP) in publishing a report and series of articles documenting how adult users use public Facebook groups to identify and target accounts that indicate they are children for sexual exploitation. The “Innocence at Risk (Inocencia en Juego)” project, coordinated by EL CLIP with participation from Chequeado, includes a report from Lara Putnam , a professor of Latin American history and Direct...
Mar 02, 2025•31 min
On January 22, President Donald Trump terminated all three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an intelligence watchdog charged with monitoring the United States government's compliance with procedural safeguards on surveillance activities. The PCLOB's independence is also of concern to the European Commission, which relies on its reports in its assessment of whether US intelligence practices are aligned with EU Data Protection Framework standards. On F...
Feb 28, 2025•30 min
Tech Policy Press Associate Editor Ramsha Jahangir hosts a roundtable discussion on the first systemic risk assessments and independent audit reports from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines produced in compliance with the European Union's Digital Services Act. Ramsha is joined by: Hillary Ross , program lead at the Global Network Initiative (GNI); Magdalena Jozwiak , associate researcher at the DSA Observatory; and Svea Windwehr , the assistant director of EU policy at the Electronic...
Feb 23, 2025•39 min
This week, RightsCon , which bills itself as "the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age," descends on Taipei. To better understand the dynamics in the civil society community working on digital rights and tech policy matters in Taiwan, Justin Hendrix spoke to three experts: Liu I-Chen (劉以正), Asia Program Officer at ARTICLE 19 Kuan-Ju Chou (周冠汝), Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights Grace Huang (黃寬心), Dire...
Feb 23, 2025•42 min
At the Paris AI Action Summit on February 10-11, remarks by EU and US leaders indicated significant divergence on how to think about AI. But on balance, nations are moving decisively toward innovation and exploitation of this technology and away from containing it or restricting it. In this episode, Justin Hendrix surfaces voices from the Summit, as well as reactions and discussion on these matters at this year's State of the Net conference on February 11 in Washington, DC, including comments by...
Feb 16, 2025•23 min
