This is Part 2 of four special episodes focused on the revelations in what has come to be known as the Facebook papers, reports based on a trove of documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen. In the first part, we heard from the Executive Editor of The Atlantic , Adrienne LaFrance, who wrote about the challenge Facebook poses to democracy. In this episode, I had a chance to catch up with two people- first, Jeff Horwitz, a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and one of t...
Oct 29, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s revelations in what has come to be known as the Facebook papers- reports based on a trove of documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen- are keeping Facebook and its senior executives at the top of news feeds around the world. In the avalanche of coverage, one particular piece stood out to me-one written by Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic , and a writer and observer that I regard has having a keen insight into issues at the intersection of tec...
Oct 27, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, Evan Selinger , a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, published a paper with co-author Darrin Durant in the journal Science as Culture titled Amazon’s Ring: Surveillance as a Slippery Slope . Last month, a must-read profile of Chris Gilliard by Will Oremus for The Washington Post also started out with concerns about Ring, before detailing Gilliard’s perspective and background. I invited Evan and Chris to join me to discuss their writings on Ring,...
Oct 24, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a two part show- first, a discussion about how to make sure independent researchers have access to the data from technology platforms; and second, a book talk with the author of How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News: Exploring the Impacts of Social Media, Deepfakes, GPT-3 and More . In the wake of the revelations brought forward by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, there is a great deal of focus among lawmakers and regulators in many capitals to figure out how to see inside th...
Oct 17, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference, Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. This fift...
Oct 16, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The...
Oct 16, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The ...
Oct 16, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The ...
Oct 14, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy. While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. The...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The United Nations General Assembly just took place in New York. We get a report on it from Maya Plentz, who covers technology and innovation at the United Nations and its agencies, for The UN Brief, a subscription-based news platform. Then, we’re going to hear from Ari Ezra Waldman, a lawyer and sociologist, and Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University. He’s the author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power.
Oct 10, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast The relationship between Facebook and political polarization is in the spotlight. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower that took documents to the Wall Street Journal , Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, appeared on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday night. “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world," she said. Yet Facebook executives such as Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg take pains to disavow the connection between so...
Oct 04, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Most Tech Policy Press podcast listeners will by now be well familiar with the Facebook Files, a series of Wall Street Journal articles revealing internal research and information from Facebook that show the company aware of a variety of serious problems on its platforms that affect people’s lives and our politics. This week, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Safety, was brought before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security to discuss the reve...
Oct 03, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve got a three part jumbo show today. First, we’ll dive in to the results of the annual Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House with Allie Funk, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House. Then, we’re going to look at one place where internet freedoms are at risk- Canada, where a new proposal to regulate online harms looms- with Michael Geist, Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and Daphne Keller...
Sep 26, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Monday, September 13th, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published a report titled Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization – And What Can Be Done About It , written by the Center’s deputy director, Paul Barrett, research fellow Grant Sims, and Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix. Then on Wednesday, September 15th, the Wall Street Journal published an article in a series of exclusives, based on leaked internal documents from Facebook, wi...
Sep 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I spoke with Representative Lori Trahan, the Congresswoman for the third district in Massachussetts, to get her reaction to a disturbing report in the Wall Street Journal about internal research at Instagram related to mental health impacts of that social media service, particularly on teens. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published its headline, “ Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.” The Journal ’s Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa See...
Sep 17, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast In August, researchers Bridget Barrett and Daniel Kreiss from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media joined with Katharine (Kate) Dommett of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics and International Relations to publish research in the journal Policy & Internet that took a hard look at how democratic values express themselves in technology policy documents in the UK and the US in a paper titled, The capricious relationship betwee...
Sep 12, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tomorrow is Labor Day. This week, we hear from someone who studies gig workers and the systems and companies that manage them. Diana Enriquez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies labor, technology, informal economies, and law, particularly in the US and Latin America. This interview with Diana is about two papers she helped author in recent months- Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy, published in the journal Sociologica earlier th...
Sep 05, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features two interviews. The first looks at the struggles of those in the sex and sextech industries to get access to capital and to create products and services that respect users and creators, and the second considers the state of privacy and its relationship to power. OnlyFans, a UK-based site that built a billion dollar business enabling creators to post and get paid for sexually explicit material, announced this month that as of October 1st it would no longer permit anything mu...
Aug 29, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we have two segments. The first is a conversation with Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, about the fall of Kabul and the rise of the Taliban, and the role that digital and social media have and will continue to play there. And second, we turn to a discussion I had with Emerson’s Atlantic Council college, Rose Jackson, and the Institute for Security Technology’s Vera Zakem, about the nascent pro-democracy effort ...
Aug 22, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features an interview with Roger McNamee. His official bio at Elevation Partners, an investment firm, says that since 2017 he has been involved in ”a campaign to trigger a national conversation about the dark side of social media“. He is the author of a book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, published by HarperCollins in 2019, that has an account of his role as an investor and advisor to the company and his ultimate recognition of the harms it causes at scale. To many ...
Aug 15, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we have two interviews. First we hear from two researchers in Britain- Chico Carmargo and Felix Simon- who recently published a paper that takes a critical look at a term that has been often used in recent months to describe a stew of problems in the information ecosystem- the term “infodemic”. Then, our feature interview this week is with the authors of the bestselling book AN UGLY TRUTH: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination - New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Ka...
Aug 08, 2021•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's show features two interviews. The first is with Albert Fox Cahn, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project's (S.T.O.P.) founder and executive director, about a column he wrote in Wired magazine about problems with the twitter verification process that disadvantage activists. And second, I talk with Jonathan Stray, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley about whether social media can help depol...
Aug 01, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's episode features two segments. The first conversation is a conversation focused on the rise of the global surveillance industry with Marietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. We consider what the revelations of the Pegasus Project about the Israeli firm NSO group means for democracies. The second segment considers Chinese tech in the world, looking at how the Chinese Communist Party uses technology to facilitate political author...
Jul 25, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features two interviews. The first focuses on extremism, law enforcement and social media monitoring, and the second on what news that an AI voice clone was used to generate segments of a new Anthony Bourdain documentary tells us about the future of synthetic media. The January 6 insurrection was preceded by weeks of online promotion and planning- including from former President Donald Trump, who told his supporters the event would be wild. What should the FBI have known in ad...
Jul 18, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Social media, message apps and other digital communications technologies restructure the ways in which information flows, and thus how humans interact with one another, how they make sense of the world and how they come to consensus on how to deal with problems. Now, more than a dozen researchers at multiple universities who study technology, behavior and complex systems believe questions about the impact of communications technology on collective behavior should be regarded as a “crisis discipl...
Jul 11, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode focuses on issues of identity, extremism, and violence, and the role that technology plays in societies in conflict. First up, we speak to Hakeem Jefferson , a political scientist at Stanford University. Jefferson describes the underlying grievance driving the right in the United States- white supremacy- and how it combined with demagoguery, disinformation, and the ability to organize at scale on social media to produce the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6th. Then, we spe...
Jun 27, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is in two parts. Both get at hard problems in how to deal with technology companies- first, around the regulation of algorithmic amplification on social media, and second, around competition. On algorithms, we hear from Daphne Keller , who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. Daphne recently published an essay, Amplification and Its Discontents: Why regulating the reach of online content is hard , on the website of the Knight First Amendment ...
Jun 20, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features two segments that focus on reimagining our relationship to technology, and the ways in which it contributes to our reality. First up, we speak with JAZSALYN, an anti-disciplinary artist, curator and creative director and a graduate student in an MFA student in Parsons' Design + Technology program and one of the creators of black beyond , a platform making space for artists and activists to speculate alternate realities for Blackness. black beyond is hosting a virtual ...
Jun 13, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most hyped technology in the world. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear a discussion that invites the listener to think about how money, power and other troubling forces and ideas that shape our society are built into AI systems and the ways we think about deploying them. In May, the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab and Center for an Informed Public cohosted a virtual book talk featuring Kate Crawford, a leading s...
Jun 06, 2021•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast There are three parts in this week's episode. The first two reflect on the Christchurch Call Summit, a meeting of world leaders and tech executives to discuss efforts to police hate speech and extremism on social media. Moderated by Courtney Radsch , a member of the Tech Policy Press masthead, our guests include Paul Ash , the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Cyber and Digital and the Coordinator of the Christchurch Call; and Dia Kayyali , Associate Director for Advocacy at...
May 30, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
