The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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 good amount of time trying to understand experience of the people operating the small businesses that power Amazon’s global expansion. 

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 past decade, including serving as the Editor in Chief of Recoding.tech and as policy director for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.Ben’s first interview is with two student editors at the publication Just Security, Aaron Fisher and Justin Cole, whom Tech Policy Press worked with this week to co-publish a review of key arguments in the amicus briefs filed with the Court on the Gonzalez case. Then, we’ll hear three successive interviews, with Mary McCord, Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center; Anupam Chander, a Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown Law; and David Brody, Managing Attorney of the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. 

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 selective release, demonstrate executives at the firm engaging with politicians and federal agencies on a range of issues, from COVID-19 to election disinformation. This week, there were two hearings in the House of Representatives on this subject, including a Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing titled “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” and a hearing of the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that was intended to “discuss the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties.”If we look past the conspiracy theories and legal gibberish, is there any there there? Should we pursue reforms and require greater transparency around the interaction between platforms and government? In this episode, we hear from three experts:Shoshana Weissmann, Digital Director and Fellow at the R Street InstituteDarren Linvill, Associate Professor, Clemson University Media Forensics Hub Mike Masnick, Founder of TechDirt and CEO of the Copia Institute

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 donations for transplants, with the goal of making the process fair and open. The book bears insights on how algorithmic systems that are often heavily freighted with moral and political complexity can and should be developed with care to avoid excluding the voices of non-technical stakeholders in the outcome, and is a guide for policymakers concerned with questions around transparency, safety and equity in such systems. Panelists included Robinson, as well as scholars Deborah Raji and J. Nathan Matias.

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 power— use such tactics. Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Age of Automation and Anonymity, just out this week from Yale University Press. He’s also the author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth; co-author, with Nick Monaco, of a book on Bots; and co-editor, with Dr. Philip N. Howard, of a book on Computational Propaganda.

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 data. Getty says Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images without a license, which the company says is to the detriment of the content’s creators. The notion at the heart of Getty’s assertion- that generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALLE-2 are in fact exploiting the creators of the images their models are trained on- could have significant implications for the field. Earlier this month I attended a symposium on Existing Law and Extended Reality, hosted at Stanford Law School. There, I met today’s guest, Michael Running Wolf, who brings a unique perspective to questions related to AI and ownership, as a former Amazon software engineer, a PhD student in computer science at McGill University, and as a Northern Cheyenne man intent on preserving the language and culture of native people.

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. Researchers have found that Facebook use is associated with multiple mental health issues, ranging from anxiety, insomnia, depression and addiction to body image and eating disorders, alcohol use, and more. But while much of the evidence collected is concerning, most such studies have not identified a solid causal connection between Facebook and negative mental health, and many skeptics remain. But in today’s episode, we’re going to discuss one study that does appear to draw a causal connection between the use of Facebook and poor mental health with two its authors: Luca Braghieri, an Assistant Professor in the department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University in Italy; and Alexey Makarin, an Assistant Professor in the Applied Economics group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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, affect voting preferences and political polarization in the United States? A new paper in the journal Nature Communications provides an answer to that specific question. Titled Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior, the paper matches Twitter data with survey data to study the impact of the IRA's tweets. To learn more about the paper, Justin Hendrix spoke with one of its authors, Joshua Tucker, a professor of politics at NYU, where he also serves as the director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). Hendrix and Tucker talked about the study, as well as what can and cannot be understood about the impact of the broader campaign of the IRA, or certainly the broader Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. election, from its results.

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 the possibility that the attacks may spur new regulations.

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 it doesn’t make money from guns that nevertheless does business with the maker of the AR-15, the weapon used in so many horrific mass killings, including the recent massacre of teachers and students in Uvalde, Texas. Is this some organized crime syndicate or shady offshore shell company? No, it’s Google, one of the biggest and most prominent technology companies on the planet. This episode features a conversation with Craig Silverman, a journalist who has spent years uncovering fraud in the opaque world of digital advertising and media manipulation. With his colleagues at ProPublica, in a recent series of articles Silverman employed a unique investigative approach to uncover just exactly how Google operates in a shadowy realm of deceit and disinformation.