A unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release of four peer-reviewed studies last week in Science and Nature mark the first of as many as sixteen studies that promise fresh insights into the complex dynamics of social media and public discourse. But beyond the findings of the research, the partnership between Meta and some of the most p...
Aug 02, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In today’s podcast, Justin Hendrix talks with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect , is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."...
Jul 30, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s guest on the podcast is Ifeoma Ajunwa , the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Director of AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School, and author of the Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace . from Cambridge University Press. The book considers how data and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace, and whether the law is more equipped to help workers in this transition, or to provide for the interests of employers....
Jul 23, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companie...
Jul 23, 2023•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most urgent debates in tech policy at the moment concerns encrypted communications. At issue in proposed legislation, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill or the EARN It Act put forward in the US Senate, is whether such laws break the privacy promise of end to end encryption by requiring content moderation mechanisms like client-side scanning. But to what extent are such moderation techniques legal under existing laws that limit the monitoring and interception of communications? ...
Jul 16, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tomorrow's virtual worlds will be governed, at least at first, by today's legal and regulatory regimes. How will privacy law, torts, IP, or even criminal law apply in 'extended reality' (XR)? Drawing from the discussion at a conference hosted earlier this year at Stanford University called " Existing Law and Extended Reality ," this episode asks what challenges will emerge from human behavior and interaction-- with one another and with technology-- inside XR experiences, and what choices governm...
Jul 09, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook , which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Hand...
Jul 06, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alex Hanna , the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and Emily M. Bender , a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, are the hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 , a show that seeks to "break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation." Justin Hendrix spoke to Alex and Emily about the show's origins, and what they hope will come of the effort to scrutinize statements about the potential of AI that are often fantasti...
Jul 02, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, Canada passed the Online News Act, legislation that requires tech platforms to remunerate Canadian news outlets, and the platforms are not happy. In response, Google announced it will remove links to Canadian news outlets from its products. Meta also said it would remove Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram. The Act itself has yet to be implemented- it has to first go through a regulatory process to sort out how it will work. So, these moves by the platforms may be a t...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past few months, there have been a range of voices calling for the urgent regulation of artificial intelligence. Comparisons to the problems of nuclear proliferation abound, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some want a new international body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when it comes to AI and global governance, there’s already a lot in play- from ethics councils to various schemes for industry governance, activity on standards, various international agr...
Jun 25, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, Justin Hendrix traveled to RightsCon, the big gathering of individuals and organizations concerned with human rights and technology organized by Access Now. The sprawling event had hundreds of sessions on a wide range of themes, but one topic discussed across multiple tracks was the importance of encrypted communications, especially to groups such as political dissidents and journalists. A key panel at RightsCon featured Signal President Meredith Whittaker , who spoke out abo...
Jun 18, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the United States, it’s fair to say that federal, state and local governments have struggled in the era of digitalization. Decades in to that era, there is still a gap between the policy outcomes we seek and what citizens often get when they engage with government agencies and services online. At its worst this gap means people aren’t receiving critical services that sustain their lives; and at the very least it reduces faith in government to be able to solve problems right at the moment when...
Jun 11, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, a group of very important people, including the U.S Secretaries of State and Commerce and trade representatives from President Joe Biden’s administration, met with top European Union officials in the heart of the Swedish Lapland for the fourth Ministerial meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, or “TTC”. Pressing needs were tackled, new initiatives were launched, commitments were made, and cooperation was deepened on a range of tech policy issues, at least according to th...
Jun 04, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s show has two segments both focused on generative AI. In the first segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Irene Solaiman , a researcher who has put a lot of thought into evaluating the release strategies for generative AI systems. Organizations big and small have pursued different methods for release of these systems, some holding their models and details about them very close, and some pursuing a more open approach. And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Calli Schroeder and B...
May 28, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, the Supreme Court released decisions in Gonzalez v. Google , LLC , and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh . In this episode we’ll discuss what it tells us about how the Court is thinking about social media and intermediary liability, and what it might tell us about future cases the Court may hear. I’m joined by an expert who follows these issues closely, and has shared his expertise with us on this podcast before: Anupam Chander , a law professor at Georgetown University....
May 21, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode features a discussion with Nick Seaver , a professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation from the University of Chicago Press. Nick is an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. His book is the product of ethnographic observation and conversations with developers working on music recommendation algorithms and other systems designed to understand and cater to user pr...
May 14, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Justin Hendrix speaks to writer Malcolm Harris about his book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD , which considers the historical antecedents for the project of Silicon Valley.
May 07, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Recently Justin Hendrix caught up with Gus Hurwitz , a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Hurwitz told Hendrix he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced. The conversation covered...
May 03, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the course of its investigation into the insurrection at the US Capitol, the House Select Committee on January 6th spoke to hundreds of witnesses, including social media executives with insight into the role that platforms played in propagating the false claims that motivated violence that day, and in connecting and facilitating the movement and organization of people that sought to overthrow the election. One of the individuals that testified to the Select Committee was a former Twitter offi...
Apr 30, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
