A little more than a year ago, a coalition of multidisciplinary researchers at Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia set out to crowd source ideas to address the political divide in what was dubbed the Strengthening Democracy Challenge . “Anti-democratic attitudes and support for political violence are at alarming levels in the US," said Robb Willer , Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and Professor of Sociology at Stanford, at the time of the a...
Aug 24, 2022•44 min
With the U.S. midterm election cycle about to kick into high gear, social media platforms are announcing updates to their civic integrity policies and approaches to countering election mis- and disinformation. In this week's podcast, we hear from election administrators themselves about the impact of election misinformation. This is the first in an occasional series Tech Policy Press will publish this fall on social media and election integrity. This episode draws audio from a panel discussion h...
Aug 21, 2022•23 min
When most people think about the problem of mis- and disinformation, they think first of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But how might the affordances of search engines, when used by ideologically motivated individuals, contribute to an unhealthy information ecosystem? Dr. Francesca Tripodi has a new book out on the subject, The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy , which I had the chance to discuss with her this week....
Aug 17, 2022•47 min
In recent months, press reports have emerged about individuals in multiple countries falling victim to extortion and fraud schemes enabled by often highly rated lending apps downloaded from Google’s Play Store. Last week, Diana Baptista and Avi Asher-Schapiro , journalists at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, told the story of how a man fell prey to one of these apps operating in Mexico. In this podcast episode, Baptista describes the man's experience, the broader phenomenon and the surrounding co...
Aug 14, 2022•31 min
Earlier this year in California, two State Assembly members— Democrat Buffy Wicks and Republican Jordan Cunningham — introduced the California Age Appropriate Design Code Bill. The California Age Appropriate Design Code would place limitations on what companies can do with youth data, including tracking location and profiling. It puts limitations on manipulative design, and includes transparency measures so users are aware and consent to the use of their information. The bill makes the Californi...
Aug 07, 2022•34 min
This episode features two segments. First up, an interview with Solana Larsen and Bridget Todd , two of the folks behind Mozilla’s Internet Health Report and its award-winning podcast , IRL. This year, Mozilla decided to publish its Internet Health Report as a series of podcast episodes delving into the experiences of people building AI and working on AI policy. The series digs into a range of topics, including surveillance, labor, healthcare, geospatial data, and disinformation in social media....
Jul 31, 2022•51 min
In today’s episode of the podcast, we’re going to hear from FTC Chair Lina Khan , who was appointed in June 2021, as well as FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter , who was appointed to a Democratic seat on the Commission in 2018. This isn’t a typical episode- what you’ll hear is audio of a special event hosted on Tuesday, July 19 by the Economic Security Project (ESP) and the Law and Political Economy Project (LPE). These organizations brought together scholars, advocates, and government off...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 36 min
On Wednesday, July 20, the United States House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee held a markup that included H.R. 8152, the "American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” which is touted as the first comprehensive national privacy legislation with bipartisan support. To discuss the bill and its prospects in detail, Tech Policy Press spoke with two experts on tech policy and civil rights issues: Nora Benavidez, Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free ...
Jul 24, 2022•48 min
This episode features a conversation with the author of a new book that makes a compelling argument for the substantial deprivatization of the Internet. In Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future , Ben Tarnoff says to create a more democratic and equitable society we need to diminish the role of the market in the future of the internet, and reduce the power of profit motive to define our online experience....
Jul 20, 2022•42 min
For the second year running, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation- GLAAD- has released a Social Media Safety Index that finds that major tech platforms are failing to keep LGBTQ users safe. The report was released at a time when the broader social and political context is growing more dangerous- in the US, nearly 250+ anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in legislatures this year, even as we see a surge of online hate speech and disinformation about the LGBTQ community, as well as ...
Jul 17, 2022•35 min
India is the world’s most populous democracy, and also one that is facing challenges. This week we focus on the Indian government’s efforts to create a bureaucratic apparatus to enforce what appears to be an ever more frequent number of requests for social media platforms to remove content deemed inappropriate for one reason or another. And for this week’s episode, I’m joined by the author of a recent piece on this subject , Angrej Singh , who is interning with Tech Policy Press this summer. Ang...
Jul 10, 2022•49 min
At this year’s Collision, a tech conference that took place in June in Toronto, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to interview two editors about how they think about the problem of disinformation, and how they direct their publication’s coverage of it as an issue. This short podcast installment is audio of the live stage discussion with Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept , and Matt Kaminski, editor in chief of Politico . Many thanks to Stephen Twomey and the o...
Jul 06, 2022•19 min
One of the areas where applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence are most fraught with ethical concerns is in law enforcement and criminal justice. To learn more about the opportunities and the concerns, Tech Policy Press spoke to Renée Cummings , who joined the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science in 2020 as the School’s first Data Activist in Residence. In addition to being an AI ethicist, she is also a Criminologist and Criminal Psychologist....
Jul 03, 2022•31 min
In the age of social media and disinformation, journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and media watchdogs in democracies are figuring out how to band together to create a line of defense against those who seek to sow division and doubt in advance of elections. This week, a French coalition calling itself the Online Election Integrity Watch Group published a summary report on its activities ahead of this spring’s national election there. The group includes entities such as the Alliance f...
Jun 30, 2022•35 min
This episode focuses on how best to create mechanisms for outside scrutiny of technology platforms. The first segment is with Brandon Silverman , the founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, an analytics toolset acquired by Facebook in 2016 that permitted academics, journalists and others to inspect how information spreads on the platform. And the second segment is a panel provided courtesy of the non-partisan policy organization the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On June 15, GMF hoste...
Jun 26, 2022•1 hr 33 min
This week, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report on YouTube that Tech Policy Press Editor Justin Hendrix helped write with the Center’s Deputy Director, Paul Barrett . YouTube is generally understood to have avoided the scrutiny of journalists, researchers and lawmakers, at least relative to other social media platforms like Facebook. But there is a cost to flying under the radar. To address some of the key issues, this episode features two segments. The first is a...
Jun 19, 2022•50 min
When it comes to visions of the way that technology will intersect with society in the future, Silicon Valley has a near monopoly. It’s been nearly 30 years since Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published the essay The Californian Ideology , which they say naturalized and gave a “technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures,” a “faith” that is “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.” Now, the ...
Jun 14, 2022•43 min
On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it. There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect. A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginning of...
Jun 12, 2022•41 min
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not mince words. They say that “climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people.” The quality of the public discourse on climate issues plays a role. A report released by the IPCC in February says that the “[r]hetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific ...
Jun 11, 2022•36 min
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, there is a good amount of science emerging about the relationship between the information environment and vaccine uptake. Today we’ll hear from two researchers from different disciplines about their work on social media and vaccine misinformation. First up is John Alexander Bryden , Executive Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, with whom I discuss the results of some recent research his team had conducted on the pr...
Jun 05, 2022•45 min
When it comes to content moderation and the regulation of harmful content on social media, there are various metaphors at play for how to think about doing it. One that we’ve explored on this podcast in the past is to see it as a form of administration, or what legal scholar evelyn douek calls the “rough online analogue of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bu...
Jun 02, 2022•27 min
This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines. To learn more about the role ...
May 29, 2022•41 min
For the past six years, an independent research program at New America called Ranking Digital Rights has evaluated the policies and practices of some of the world’s largest technology and telecom firms, producing a dataset that reveals their shortcomings with respect to human rights obligations. Ranking Digital Rights evaluates more than 300 aspects of each company it ranks that fall broadly into three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. Following the release of this year...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 5 min
The June cover story for Wired magazine is on a movement in tech that many see as having the potential to rewire not just the internet, but to produce a fundamentally more democratic and equitable society. The story is titled “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution,” and I had the chance to speak to its author, Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman.
May 22, 2022•44 min
UN human rights experts that chronicled Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar concluded that it played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook’s own investigation into the situation also found fault with the company’s practices, and made various recommendations for how it should develop a human rights strategy to protect against such things from happening again. Today, we’re going to hear from a refugee from the violence, who is with other Rohingy...
May 15, 2022•37 min
Researchers Alice Marwick, Benjamin Clancy, and Katherine Furl this week released Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature , an analysis of "cross-disciplinary work on radicalization to better understand the present concerns around online radicalization and far-right extremist and fringe movements." In order to learn more about the issues explored in the review, I spoke to Marwick, who is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil...
May 13, 2022•39 min
Over the past year of publishing this podcast, we’ve looked again and again at the issue of the power of tech platforms in society. Now, there is a book titled The Power of the Platforms: Shaping Media and Society , by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter , just published at the end of last month by Oxford University Press. Justin Hendrix had the chance to catch up with one of the authors about what they learned in writing the book, and the complexities of the subject....
May 08, 2022•46 min
If you take the time to look at the SEC filings for Meta Platforms, Inc. - the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - you will find various disclosures about its ongoing legal battles. Taken together they reveal patterns, particularly in how the company is led. To get an update on some of the key cases under consideration, from Cambridge Analytica to competition, I spoke with one particularly keen observer of Meta: Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next.
May 01, 2022•40 min
Last week at Stanford University, former President Barack Obama gave a keynote address at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm." This week, many of the issues Obama discussed were brought into sharp relief when it was announced that billionaire Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars. For reactions to Obama's speech- and to Musk’s antics- I spoke with David Kaye, Professor of Law at UC I...
Apr 28, 2022•31 min
There is a growing literature and practice around how to equitably collaborate with traditionally marginalized communities to build better technology. A pair of investigative reports into Worldcoin’s launch may well serve as the basis for an instructive case study in what not to do. The first report , by Richard Nieva and Aman Sethi at BuzzFeed News , was published April 5th. It’s titled Inside Worldcoin’s Globe-Spanning, Eyeball-Scanning, Free Crypto Giveaway: The Sam Altman–founded company Wor...
Apr 24, 2022•1 hr 6 min
