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?"...
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 ...
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...
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 U...
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 c...
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...
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...
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...
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 journalist...
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...
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....
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...
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 ...
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 dist...
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...
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 ...
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 laun...
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...
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...
On June 26, the US Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v Missouri , a cased that considered whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in its efforts to address COVID-19 mis- and disinformation on social media. Tech Policy press fellow Dean Jackson , who studied the case closely , discussed the outcome and what it means for the future with three experts: Olga Belogolova , director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Internati...
In this episode, David Carroll , an associate 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, speaks to Ravi Naik , legal director at AWO, a consultancy with offices in London, Brussels, and Paris that works on a range of data protection and tech policy issues. Their discussion delves into the evolution of data protection from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to current quest...
In April, Google DeepMind published a paper that boasts 57 authors, including experts from a range of disciplines in different parts of Google, including DeepMind, Jigsaw, and Google Research, as well as researchers from academic institutions such as Oxford, University College London, Delft University of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and a think tank at Georgetown, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The paper speculates about the ethical and societal risks posed by the types...
News and journalism organizations and dominant tech companies are in a years-long battle over content, clicks and revenue, and the tech companies are winning. What are policy options that encourage both the sustainability and quality of news content on popular online platforms? In this episode, Rebecca Rand explores perspectives on the subject, drawing on a conversation hosted by Justin Hendrix with experts Anya Schiffrin and Cory Doctorow at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference earlier t...
Angela Zhang is the author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy , published this year by Oxford University Press. With a career in the practice of law and in teaching it, Zhang has held roles King’s College London and at New York University School of Law, and most recently served as Director of Philip K. H. Wong Center for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. She will join the University of Southern California as a Professor of Law in fall 2024....
In October 2023, during the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China's leader Xi Jinping signaled a shift in focus from more grandiose physical infrastructure projects to 'small yet smart' initiatives. This shift underscores the need to understand China's ambitions to reshape global digital governance, moving away from an open and free internet towards a model rooted in government control and mass surveillance. The advocacy group Article 19 documents this shift in a recent report titled " The...
In this episode, we explore a topic that sits at the heart of global digital policy: the contrasting visions of internet governance championed by the United States and its Western allies versus those promoted by China and nations in its orbit. This debate is playing out across various international venues and has profound implications for the future of digital rights, privacy, and the open internet. Justin Hendrix is joined by experts at the Atlantic Council that study these issues from a variet...
A topic we returned to often in this podcast is the dire need for independent technology researchers to have access to platform data. Without it, we cannot understand the extent of the harms and effects of social media on people and on society, and we cannot understand the limits of those harms. This makes it difficult to respond in acute moments such as elections, and to understand issues such as the relationship between tech platforms and social cohesion, or mental health, or any number of the...
Madhumita Murgia , AI editor at the Financial Times, is the author of a new book called Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI . The book combines reporting and research to provide a look at the role that AI and automated decision-making is playing in reshaping our lives, our politics, and our economies across the world.
Dr. Arati Prabhakar the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to President Joe Biden . This week, she hosted an event in Washington DC called "AI Aspirations: R&D for Public Missions." Speakers included executive branch officials and agency leaders, from the Secretary of Education to the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, as well as lawmakers such as Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner , and Representativ...
What are the risks to democracy as AI is incorporated more and more into the systems and platforms we use to find and share information and engage in communication? In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with Elise Silva , a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh Cyber Institute for Law, Policy, and Security, and John Wihbey , an associate professor at Northeastern University in the College of Arts, Media, and Design. Silva is the author of a recent piece in Tech Policy Press tit...
