For the latest episode in her series of podcast discussions , Through to Thriving , Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli spoke to Vaishnavi J , founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies (VYS), a trust and safety advisory firm focusing on youth safety, and a former safety leader at Meta, Twitter, and Google. Anika and Vaishnavi discussed a range of issues on the theme of how to center the views and needs of young people in trust and safety and tech policy development. They considered...
Sep 07, 2025•49 min
Today’s guest is Petter Törnberg , who with Justus Uitermark is one of the authors of a new book, titled Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity , that sets out to address the “entanglement of epistemology, technology, and politics in digital modernity,” and what studying that entanglement can tell us about the workings of power. The book is part of a part of a series of research monographs that intend to encourage social scientists to embrace a “complex system...
Aug 31, 2025•41 min
Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence measure into law. The Colorado AI Act would require developers of high-risk AI systems to take reasonable steps to prevent harms to consumers, such as algorithmic discrimination, including by conducting impact assessments on their tools. But last week, the state kicked off a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. The chapter unfolded amid fierce lobbying by...
Aug 29, 2025•23 min
On this podcast, we’ve come back again and again to questions around mis- and disinformation, propaganda, rumors, and the role that digital platforms play in anti-democratic phenomena. In a new book published this summer by Oxford University Press called Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy , a group of scholars from varied research traditions set out to find new ways to marry more traditional political science with computational socia...
Aug 24, 2025•51 min
In the latest installment in her series of podcasts called Through to Thriving, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navoroli speaks with Dr. Jasmine McNealy , an attorney, critical public interest technologist, and professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology at the University of Florida;, and Naomi Nix , a staff writer for The Washington Post, where she reports on technology and social media companies. They discuss how they found themselves on the path through ...
Aug 17, 2025•51 min
Today’s guest, journalist Rahul Bhatia , has written a book that is part journalistic account, part history, and part memoir titled The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy . Reviewing the book in The Guardian , Salil Tripathi writes that “Bhatia’s remarkable book is an absorbing account of India’s transformation from the world’s largest democracy to something more like the world’s most populous country that regularly holds elections.” Bhatia considers the role of technology,...
Aug 17, 2025•47 min
On Thursday, Reuters tech reporter Jeff Horwitz , who broke the story of the Facebook Papers back in 2021 when he was at the Wall Street Journal , published two pieces, both detailing new revelations about Meta’s approach to AI chatbots. In a Reuters special report, Horwitz tells the story of a man with a cognitive impairment who died while attempting to travel to meet a chatbot character he believed was real. And in a related article , Horwitz reports on an internal Meta policy document that ap...
Aug 14, 2025•24 min
Daniel J. Solove is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. The project of his latest book, On Privacy and Technology , is to synthesize twenty five years of thinking about privacy into a “succinct and accessible” volume and to help the reader understand “the relationship between law, technology, and privacy” in rapidly changing world. Justin Hendrix spoke to him about the book and how recent event...
Aug 10, 2025•48 min
Through To Thriving is a a special series of podcast episodes hosted by Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli . With her guests, Anika is imagining futures beyond our current moment. For this episode, she spoke with Nora Benavidez , senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at the nonprofit Free Press. Anika and Nora discussed the past and present state of platform accountability advocacy, the steps of building a campaign, the possibility of forming a creative age...
Aug 03, 2025•49 min
On Saturday, July 26, three days after the Trump administration published its AI action plan , China’s foreign ministry released that country’s action plan for global AI governance . As the US pursues “global dominance,” China is communicating a different posture. What should we know about China’s plan , and how does it contrast with the US plan? What's at stake in the competition between the two superpowers? To answer these questions, Justin Hendrix reached out to a close observer of China's te...
Aug 02, 2025•49 min
Yesterday, United States President Donald Trump took to the stage at the "Winning the AI Race Summit" to promote the administration's AI Action Plan . Shortly after it was published, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix sat down with Sarah Myers West , the co-director of the AI Now Institute; Maia Woluchem , the program director of the Trustworthy Infrastructures team at Data and Society; and Ryan Gerety , the director of the Athena Coalition, to discuss the plan and what it portends for the ...
Jul 24, 2025•54 min
This weekend, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turns 35. Signed into law on July 26, 1990, the law provides broad anti-discrimination protections for people with disabilities in the US, and has impacted how people with disabilities interact with various technologies. To discuss how the law has aged and what the fight for equity and inclusion looks like going forward, Tech Policy Press fellow Ariana Aboulafia spoke with three leaders working at the intersection of disability and technolo...
Jul 24, 2025•46 min
Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is the host of Through to Thriving , a special podcast series where she talks with technology policy practitioners to explore futures beyond our current moment. For this episode, Anika spoke with two experts on Trust & Safety about balance and resilience in a notoriously difficult field. Alice Hunsberger is the head of Trust & Safety at Musubi, a firm that sells AI content moderation solutions. Jerrel Peterson is the director of content pol...
Jul 20, 2025•55 min
Last week, following months of negotiation and just weeks before the first legal deadlines under the EU AI Act take effect, the European Commission published the final Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI. The Code is voluntary and intended to help companies demonstrate compliance with the AI Act. It sets out detailed expectations around transparency, copyright, and measures to mitigate systemic risks. Signatories will need to publish summaries of training data, avoid unauthorized use of copyr...
Jul 13, 2025•22 min
In the United States, state legislatures are key players in shaping artificial intelligence policy, as lawmakers attempt to navigate a thicket of politics surrounding complex issues ranging from AI safety, deepfakes, and algorithmic discrimination to workplace automation and government use of AI. The decision by the US Senate to exclude a moratorium on the enforcement of state AI laws from the budget reconciliation package passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump over the July 4 w...
Jul 13, 2025•30 min
Helen Nissenbaum , a philosopher, is a professor at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science Department at Cornell University. She is director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, which was launched in 2017 to explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology. Her work on contextual privacy, trust, accountability, security, and values in technology design led her to work with collaborators on projects such as TrackMeNot, a tool to mask ...
Jul 06, 2025•46 min
At Tech Policy Press we’ve been tracking the emerging application of generative AI systems in content moderation. Recently, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) released a comprehensive report titled Algorithmic Gatekeepers: The Human Rights Impacts of LLM Content Moderation , which looks at the opportunities and challenges of using generative AI in content moderation systems at scale. Justin Hendrix spoke to its primary author, ECNL senior legal manager Marlena Wisniak ....
Jul 06, 2025•42 min
If you’ve been reading Tech Policy Press closely over the last three weeks, you may have come across one or more posts from collaboration with Data & Society called “ Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis .” The articles in the series examine how powerful tech billionaires and authoritarian leaders and thinkers are leveraging AI and digital infrastructure to advance anti-democratic agendas, consolidate control, and reshape society in ways that threaten privacy, ...
Jun 29, 2025•36 min
For a special series of episodes dubbed Through to Thriving that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting discussions intended to help us imagine possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the moment we are in. The third episode in the series features her conversation with Dr. Timnit Gebru , the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Last year, Dr. Gebru wrote ...
Jun 22, 2025•53 min
Concerns about AI chatbots delivering harmful, even profoundly dangerous advice or instructions to users is growing. There is deep concern over the effects of these interactions on children, and a growing number of stories—and lawsuits—about when things go wrong, particularly for teens. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix is joined by three legal experts who are thinking deeply about how to address questions related to chatbots, and about the need for substantially more research on human-AI int...
Jun 15, 2025•55 min
In Europe, the digital regulatory landscape is in flux. Over the past few years, the EU has positioned itself as a global leader in tech regulation, rolling out landmark laws like the AI Act. But now, as the much-anticipated AI Act approaches implementation, the path forward is looking anything but smooth. Reports suggest the European Commission is considering a delay to the AI Act’s rollout due to mounting pressure from industry, difficulties in finalizing technical standards, and geopolitical ...
Jun 15, 2025•44 min
For a special series of episodes dubbed Through to Thriving that will air throughout the year, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli is hosting discussions intended to help us imagine possible futures—for tech and tech policy, for democracy, and society—beyond the moment we are in. The second episode in the series features her conversation with Dr. Desmond Upton Patton , who has long studied the intersection of technology and social issues and advised companies developing technologies ...
Jun 08, 2025•41 min
In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with Nerima Wako-Ojiwa , director of Siasa Place , and Odanga Madung , a tech and society researcher and journalist , about the intersection of technology, labor rights, and political power in Kenya and across Africa. The conversation explores the ongoing struggles of content moderators and AI data annotators, who face exploitative working conditions while performing essential labor for major tech companies; the failure of platforms fail to address harmful ...
Jun 08, 2025•45 min
Canadian political leaders are in a precarious moment. Fresh off the resignation of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and ascendancy of his successor, new Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Mark Carney , the nation faces a brewing trade war with the United States and a deteriorating relationship with its president, Donald Trump . In addition to managing those global tensions, Canadian leaders have a long to-do list on tech policy, including figuring out the nation’s approach to artificia...
Jun 06, 2025•40 min
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna are the authors of a new book that The Guardian calls “refreshingly sarcastic” and Business Insider calls a “funny and irreverent deconstruction of AI.” They are also occasional contributors to Tech Policy Press. Justin Hendrix spoke to them about their new book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want , just out from Harper Collins....
Jun 01, 2025•37 min
Earlier this year, an entity called the Observatory on Information and Democracy released a major report called INFORMATION ECOSYSTEMS AND TROUBLED DEMOCRACY: A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on News Media, AI and Data Governance . The report is the result of a combination of three research assessment panels comprised of over 60 volunteer researchers all coordinated by six rapporteurs and led by a scientific director that together considered over 1,600 sources on topics at the inters...
Jun 01, 2025•52 min
In February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Vera Zakem as California’s State Chief Technology 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 role ...
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
