Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix is joined by a UK lawmaker and advocate who has been influential in the global push for more protections for children online. Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a Crossbench member of the House of Lords and sits on the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee, and she’s a Commissioner for UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, where she is a member of the Working Group on Child Online Safety. She’s the Founder and Chair of 5Rights F...
Apr 27, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Tech Policy Press board member and UCLA School of Law postdoctoral research fellow Courtney Radsch interviews Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen , Denmark’s Tech Ambassador, who represents the Danish Government to the global tech industry and in global governance forums on emerging technologies. The discussion focuses on the role of tech in society, how to regulate artificial intelligence, how to accommodate non-English and indigenous languages in a tech ecosystem focused on scale, ...
Apr 23, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features two segments. We’ll hear from Ellen P. Goodman , Senior Advisor for Algorithmic Justice at the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which just launched an inquiry seeking comment on “what policies will help businesses, government, and the public be able to trust that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems work as claimed – and without causing harm.” And, we’ll speak with Dr. Michal Luria , a Research Fellow at the Center fo...
Apr 21, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Justin Hendrix is joined by a columnist and author who’s spent the last few years thinking about a past era of automation, a process that yielded him a valuable perspective when considering this moment in time. Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant is the author of a recent column under the headline, " Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be ," and the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech , which tells ...
Apr 18, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is Part 2 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “ How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions ,” while the Guardian went with “ Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach .” That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. I...
Apr 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is Part 1 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “ How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions ,” while the Guardian went with “ Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach .” That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. I...
Apr 16, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Two weeks ago, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix participated in Tech and Society week, a series of events across Georgetown’s campus hosted by Emily Tavoulareas , Managing Chair of the Georgetown Initiative on Tech & Society. The panel featured a discussion between three podcast hosts focused on tech and tech policy, including Hendrix and: Bridget Todd, director of public communications for Ultraviolet, a gender justice organization trying to build a more feminist, anti-racist in...
Apr 09, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Across the United States, there is a growing number of lawsuits that seek to hold tech firms accountable for various alleged harms. My guest today is tracking such suits closely. Gaia Bernstein is a Law Professor, Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes teaches and lectures in the intersection of law, technology, health and privacy, and she is the author of a...
Apr 02, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is technology ultimately neutral? Are the biases we discover in the systems we interact with today just bugs or defects that we can trust will be addressed in version 2.0 or 3.0 of the system? Or is there something inherently wrong with the tech industry’s approach to developing algorithms and software? In today’s podcast, we speak to the author of a new book that takes on this question. In More than a Glitch. Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech , data scientist and journali...
Mar 26, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the podcast, we hear three perspectives on generative AI systems and the extent to which their makers may be exposed to potential liability. I spoke to three experts, each with their own views on questions such as whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act-- which has provided broad immunity to internet platforms that host third party content-- will apply to systems like ChatGPT. Guests, in order of appearance, include: Jess Miers, legal advocacy counsel at th...
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast At Columbia University, data scientist Chris Wiggins and historian Matthew Jones teach a course called Data: Past, Present and Future . Out of this collaboration has come a book, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms , to be published on Tuesday, March 21st by W.W. Norton. It should be required reading for anyone working with data of any sort to solve problems. The book promises a sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on ...
Mar 19, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Answers on how best to regulate technology differ depending on the values and politics of any particular jurisdiction. Yet it’s worth looking for points of consensus. In general these days, we in the United States have a lot to learn from lawmakers and regulators in Europe, who are further down the path in their regulatory experiments. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with one German lawmaker, Tobias Bacherle , who was elected to the Bundestag in 2021 representing Alliance 90/The Greens.&n...
Mar 17, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the spring, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix teaches a course called Tech, Media and Democracy that is a partnership of faculty at NYU, Cornell Tech, CUNY’s Queens College, The New School and Columbia Journalism School. The course hosts a range of expert speakers on issues at the intersection of those topics, and graduate students in journalism, information science, computer science, media studies and design collaborate to produce prototypes and investigations of key issues. A recent g...
Mar 12, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we look at questions around ethical, legal and business risks surrounding so-called generative AI and synthetic media, and the opportunity that exists if they are employed responsibly. The first segment features Matthew Ferraro , an attorney at the firm WilmerHale who counsels clients about such risks and, with his colleagues, recently wrote a piece for Tech Policy Press on the " Ten Legal and Business Risks of Chatbots and Generative AI ." And the second segment features Claire ...
Mar 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast How will so-called "generative AI" tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT change our politics, and change the way we interact with our representatives in democratic government? This episode features three segments, with: Kadia Goba , a politics reporter at Semafor and author of a recent report on the AI Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives; Micah Sifry , an expert observer of the relationship between tech and politics and the author of The Connector , a Substack newsletter on democracy, orga...
Mar 04, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The past few years have seen a number of high profile hearings on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers expressing concern and even outrage at tech CEOs often for their failures to just satisfy their own policies. And, there have been high profile investigations by certain committees, including the investigation of competition in digital markets in the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. But when it comes to passing laws, Congress has ...
Feb 26, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Amazon is one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies. Yet one of the engines of its might is largely invisible to customers- its vast network of millions of third party sellers. In today’s episode we talk with Moira Weigel , an Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and the author of a recent report for Data & Society, Amazon's Trickle Down Monopoly: Third Party Sellers and the Transformation of Small Businesses . For the report, Weigel spent a g...
Feb 26, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode features four segments that dive into Gonzalez v. Google , a case before the Supreme Court that could have major implications on platform liability for online speech. First, we get a primer on the basics of the case itself; then, three separate perspectives on it. Asking the questions is Ben Lennett , a tech policy researcher and writer focused on understanding the impact of social media and digital platforms on democracy. He has worked in various research and advocacy roles for the...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, says that Twitter is both a social media company and a "crime scene." The crime he appears most concerned about is purported censorship by the tech firms, which he says has occurs at the U.S. government’s direction. Musk, who claims he is leading a “revolution” against such practices, has given a small number of people access to internal Twitter documents- the so-called Twitter Files- including emails and internal message board communications that, in their s...
Feb 12, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re going to listen in on a panel discussion that took place at the end of last year, hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The Institute’s Research Director, Katy Glenn Bass , hosted a conversation with based on themes from the scholar David G. Robinson ’s first book Voices in the Code . The book contains the story of how a group of patients, doctors, data scientists, and advocates worked together to develop a new way to match kidney donation...
Feb 05, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Frequently on this podcast we come back to questions around information, misinformation, and disinformation. In this age of digital communications, the metaphorical flora and fauna of the information ecosystem are closely studied by scientists from a range of disciplines. We're joined in this episode by one such scientist who uses observation and ethnography as his method, bringing a particularly sharp eye to the study of propaganda, media manipulation, and how those in power— and those who seek...
Jan 31, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, Getty Images, one of the world’s most prominent suppliers of editorial photography, stock images, and other forms of media, announced that it had commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against Stability AI, a British startup firm that says it builds AI solutions using "collective intelligence," claiming Stability AI infringed on Getty’s intellectual property rights by including content owned or represented by Getty Images in its training ...
Jan 29, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook” at Harvard University before rolling the social networking site out to other students at Dartmouth, Columbia, and Yale. Soon, it was available on hundreds of college and university campuses, and thereafter the rollout included high schools. Now, there are nearly 3 billion monthly active users of the site, and it is readily apparent that it has had a significant impact on society in a variety of ways. One such impact is on mental health. Resea...
Jan 22, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the years following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much effort has been put into understanding foreign influence campaigns, and into disrupting efforts by Russia and other countries, such as China and Iran, to interfere in U.S. elections. Political and other computational social scientists continue to whittle at questions as to how much influence such campaigns have on domestic politics. One such question is how much did the Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) tweets, specifically,...
Jan 15, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast To learn more about the events on January 8th, 2023, when supporters of former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country's capital, and the connection between U.S. and Brazilian election disinformation, Justin Hendrix spoke with a prominent Brazilian journalist who has been covering these issues for years: Patrícia Campos Mello, a reporter at large and columnist at the newspaper Folha de São Paulo . They discussed the role of social media in Brazilian politics, as well as ...
Jan 14, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine a company that hides who it works with and where billions of dollars flow around the world. That earns its profits financing a global network containing piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation, even doing business with figures sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, including Russian companies that may access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine, potentially opening a mechanism for Russian intelligence to target individuals there. A company that tells the public that...
Jan 08, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast According to the legislation that established the January 6th Committee, the members were mandated to examine “how technology, including online platforms” such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit and others “may have factored into the motivation, organization, and execution” of the insurrection. When the Committee issued subpoenas to platforms a year ago, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said, “Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and vi...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Avi Asher-Schapiro is a journalist covering digital rights and technology for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. For the final Tech Policy Press podcast of 2022, Justin Hendrix spoke to Asher-Schapiro about some of the most significant stories he and his colleagues covered in 2022, as well as what may make headlines in 2023 at the intersection of technology and society, delving into topics ranging from surveillance and crypto to social media and tech policy. ...
Dec 28, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Friday, Congresswoman Lori Trahan , a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led a group of Democrats including Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Katie Porter, Stephen Lynch, Susan Wild, Mondaire Jones, Kathy Castor, Adam Schiff, and Elissa Slotkin to sign letters requesting information from gaming companies about their efforts to combat hate, harassment, and extremism in online games. The letters were sent to companies including Activision Blizzard, Take-Two In...
Dec 18, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A little more than a year ago, in the first article announcing the release of the Facebook Files, the documents brought out of the company by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz reported on Cross Check, a Facebook system that “exempted high-profile users from some or all” of the platform’s rules. The program shields millions of elites from normal content moderation enforcement. While the existence of such a program was known, its scale was and perhaps still is sh...
Dec 14, 2022•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
