In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with three researchers who recently published projects looking at the intersection of generative AI with elections around the world, including: Samuel Woolley, Dietrich Chair of Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the authors of a set of studies titled Generative Artificial Intelligence and Elections ; Lindsay Gorman, Managing Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States ...
Oct 27, 2024•40 min
Martin Husovec is an associate law professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He works on questions at the intersection of technology and digital liberties, particularly platform regulation, intellectual property and freedom of expression. He's the author of Principles of the Digital Services Act , just out from Oxford University Press. Justin Hendrix spoke to him about the rollout of the DSA, what to make of progress on trusted flaggers and out-of-court dispute res...
Oct 27, 2024•48 min
In her new book , Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment , Dr. Mary Anne Franks challenges First Amendment orthodoxy and critiques “reckless speech,” which endangers vulnerable groups and protects corporate interests, in order to advance “fearless speech,” which seeks to advance equality and democracy.
Oct 20, 2024•47 min
A lot of folks frustrated with major social media platforms are migrating to alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, which operate on decentralized protocols. This summer, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi released a report on the governance on fediverse microblogging servers and the moderation practices of the people who run them. Justin Hendrix caught up with Erin Kissane about their findings, including the emerging forms of diplomacy between different server operators, the types of political and...
Oct 20, 2024•46 min
With Sam Woolley , Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Inga K. Trauthig are authors of a new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin titled "Covert Campaigns: Safeguarding Encrypted Messaging Platforms from Voter Manipulation." Justin Hendrix caught up with them to learn more about how political propagandists are exploiting the features of encrypted messaging platforms to man...
Oct 20, 2024•38 min
The results in this year’s installment of the Freedom House Freedom on the Net report generally follow the same distressing trajectory as prior reports, marking a 14th consecutive year in declines in internet freedom around the world. But in this year of elections, the Freedom House analysts also identified a set of concerning phenomena related to this most fundamental act of democracy and how governments are asserting themselves, for better or worse. Justin Hendrix spoke to report authors Allie...
Oct 19, 2024•32 min
In this episode, we're crashing a funeral... for CrowdTangle , a piece of software that allowed journalists and independent researchers to get insights into social media. Not our usual material, but this particular loss marks a huge blow in the ongoing fight for public access to data from the platforms, and underscores why we need to continue to fight for transparency. And the folks convened by the Knight-Georgetown Institute and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research refused to let i...
Oct 18, 2024•26 min
Barry Lynn is the executive director of the Open Markets Institute in Washington DC and the author of this month's cover essay in Harper's titled " The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech ." Justin Hendrix spoke to him about his essay, about the remedy framework proposed by the US Department of Justice following the ruling in the Google search antitrust trial, and about what to anticipate for the antitrust movement following the 2024 US presidential election....
Oct 13, 2024•35 min
Today’s guest is Sam Jeffers , cofounder and executive director of Who Targets Me . Jeffers has spent several yearshas spent several years building a suite of capabilities to make political advertising more transparent, including tools for individuals and data and support for academics, researchers and journalists . His organization also advocates for better policy from platforms, regulators and governments. (You can download the Who Targets Me browser extension to contribute your data to the pr...
Oct 11, 2024•30 min
Last week, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz first reported on details of an unredacted version of a complaint against Snap brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke to Horwitz about its details, and questions it leaves unanswered....
Oct 06, 2024•34 min
One of the most significant concepts in Europe’s Digital Services Act is that of “systemic risk,” which relates to the spread of illegal content, or content that might have foreseeable negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights or on on civic discourse, electoral processes, public security and so forth. The DSA requires companies to carry out risk assessments to detail whether they are adequately addressing such risks on their platforms. What exactly amounts to systemic risk and how ...
Oct 06, 2024•46 min
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are the authors of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference , published September 24 by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix focuses in particular on the book's Chapter 6, "Why Can't AI Fix Social Media?"...
Sep 29, 2024•36 min
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) recently assessed social media platforms’ policies, public commitments, and product interventions related to election integrity across six major issue areas: platform integrity, violent extremism and hate speech, internal and external resourcing, transparency, political advertising and state-affiliated media. Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the report's authors: ISD's Director of Technology & Society, Isabelle Frances-Wright, and its Senior US digita...
Sep 25, 2024•33 min
Marietje Schaake is the author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley . Dr. Alondra Nelson, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), calls Schaake “a twenty-first century Tocqueville” who “looks at Silicon Valley and its impact on democratic society with an outsider’s gimlet eye.” Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa says Schaake's ne...
Sep 22, 2024•37 min
Gary Marcus writes that the companies developing artificial intelligence systems want the citizens of democracies “to absorb all the negative externalities ” that might arise from their products, “such as the damage to democracy from Generative AI–produced misinformation, or cybercrime and kidnapping schemes using deepfaked voice clones—without them paying a nickel.” And, he says, we need to fight back. His new book is called Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us , publis...
Sep 22, 2024•45 min
In 2019, Thierry Breton , a French business executive who became the France’s Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, was nominated by President Emmanuel Macron to become a member of the European Commission for the Internal Market. In that role his name and face were closely associated with Europe’s push to regulate digital markets and the passage of legislation such as the Digital Services Act and the EU’s AI Act. On Monday, September 16 - in a letter that called into question EU Commission Pres...
Sep 21, 2024•21 min
At Tech Policy Press, we’re closely following the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Union law designed to regulate online platforms and services. One of the DSA’s key objectives is to identify and mitigate systemic risks.But how do we gauge what rises to the level of a systemic risk? How do we get the sort of information we need from platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risk, and how do we create the kinds of collaborations between regulators and the research commun...
Sep 15, 2024•21 min
Paris Marx , a Canadian tech critic, recently authored a post under the headline "Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions: The actions against Telegram and Twitter/X are about sovereignty, not speech." Justin Hendrix spoke to Paris about his assessment of these matters, and why those making claims in defense of free speech in the wake of Brazil’s ban on X and Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France may in fact be undermining free expression and internet freedoms i...
Sep 15, 2024•44 min
Today is Monday, September 9th. Today Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is presiding over the start of a trial in which the United States Department of Justice accuses Google of violating antitrust law, abusing its power in the market for online advertising. Google contests the allegations against it. To get a bit more detail on what to expect, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals covering the case closely who take a critical view of Google, t...
Sep 09, 2024•35 min
Thirty tech bills went through the law making sausage grinder in California this past session, and now Governor Gavin Newsom is about to decide the fate of 19 that passed the state legislature. The Governor now has until the end of September to sign or veto the bills, or to permit them to become law without his signature. To learn a little more about some of the key pieces of legislation and the overall atmosphere around tech regulation in California, Justin Hendrix spoke to two journalists who ...
Sep 08, 2024•34 min
On August 26th, Justin Hendrix moderated a panel convened by the Social Science Research Council at its offices in Brooklyn, New York. The panel was titled “Platforms and Elections: the Global State of Play, and it featured: Dr. Shannon McGregor , associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator with the Center for Information Technology in Public Life (CITAP); Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong , professor of global digital media. at the University of Mass...
Sep 08, 2024•57 min
Renée DiResta , who serves on the board of Tech Policy Press and has been an occasional contributor, is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality , published by Hachette Book Group in June. Justin Hendrix had a chance to catch up with DiResta last week to discuss some of the key ideas in the book, and how she sees them playing out in current moment headed into the 2024 US election....
Sep 01, 2024•48 min
The billionaire owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk , has been in a prolonged dispute with a Supreme Court Judge in Brazil regarding X’s content moderation practices. Earlier this year, Judge Alexandre de Moraes launched an investigation into X after Musk defied a court order to block accounts that supported former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and were accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech. On Friday afternoon, August 30, following a standoff over an order requir...
Aug 30, 2024•53 min
Justin Hendrix speaks with Mark Surman , President of Mozilla, about Mozilla’s work promoting open source AI, the importance of competition in the tech sector, and the regulatory challenges facing the industry. Surman discusses Mozilla's initiatives in AI investment and development, and reflects on what the recent ruling the Google search cases might mean for the future of Mozilla and the tech economy. And, Surman shares his hopes for the future- that we can arrive at a tech economy that is not ...
Aug 25, 2024•25 min
On Friday, August 16, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in NetChoice v. Bonta , partially upholding and partially vacating a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. The court affirmed that certain provisions of the law are likely to violate the First Amendment by compelling online businesses to assess and mitigate potential harms to children, but it vacated the broader injunction, remanding the case to the district court for fur...
Aug 18, 2024•28 min
Raúl Torrez was sworn in as New Mexico’s 32nd Attorney General in January 2023. Last December, Attorney General Torrez filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly failing to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking. The outcome of this case could have broader implications for how online platforms are regulated and held accountable for user safety in the future, including through litigation. Justin Hendrix spoke to Attorney General Torrez in advance of a panel...
Aug 11, 2024•29 min
In May, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion with David Rand , who is a professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. David's work cuts across fields such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, and with his collaborators he's done a substantial amount of work on the psychological ...
Aug 04, 2024•36 min
The Distributed AI Research Institute, or DAIR—which seeks to conduct community-rooted AI research that is independent from the technology industry—has launched a new project called the Data Workers' Inquiry to invite data workers to create their own research and recount their experiences. The project is supported by DAIR, the Weizenbaum Institute, and TU Berlin. For this episode, journalist and audio producer Rebecca Rand parsed some of the ideas and experiences discussed at a virtual launch ev...
Jul 28, 2024•29 min
It goes without saying that privacy and the creation of laws and regulations around it are fundamental to determining how we will live and work with technology, and whether technology operates in service of democratic societies or only in service of governments and corporations. A couple of weeks ago, Justin Hendrix had a chance to speak with two leaders from the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF)- Jules Polonetsky , its CEO, and Anne J. Flanagan , the head of its new Center on AI. They discussed the...
Jul 21, 2024•45 min
In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, Justin Hendrix invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including: Henry Farrell , a professor of the international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abr...
Jul 21, 2024•45 min
