The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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 violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.” In order to learn what came of this particular aspect of the Committee’s sprawling, 18 month investigation, in this episode I’m joined by four individuals who helped conduct it, including staffing the depositions of social media executives, message board operators, far-right online influencers, militia members, extremists and others that gave testimony to the Committee:Meghan Conroy is the U.S. Research Fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a co-founder of the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC), and was an Investigator with the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.Dean Jackson is Project Manager of the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and was formerly an Investigative Analyst with the Select Committee. Alex Newhouse is the Deputy Director at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism and the Director of Technical Research at the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC), and served as an Investigative Analyst for the Select Committee.Jacob Glick is Policy Counsel at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and served as an Investigative Counsel on the Select Committee.

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. 

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 Interactive, Riot Games, Epic Games, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox. The letters followed a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) earlier this month that found that 77 percent of adults and 66 percent of teens have reported experiences of harassment while playing online games over the past year, and identified a number of other concerns about social gaming environments. Today, I’m joined by one of the authors of that report, ADL Center for Technology and Society Director of Strategy and Operations Daniel Kelley; as well as by Queens University professor Amarnath Amarasingam, coauthor of a report commissioned by the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism on the intersection of gaming and violent extremism that was released in October. 

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 shocking.Following the Journal’s reporting and subsequent concern in the public, Facebook (now Meta) President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg announced the company would request a policy advisory opinion from its independent Oversight Board. 14 months later, the Oversight Board has completed its review and published its opinion. To talk more about the opinion, the Cross Check system and the problem of content moderation more generally, I’m joined with one member of the Oversight Board, Nighat Dad, a lawyer from Pakistan and founder of the Digital Rights Foundation; and one outside observer who answered the board’s call for opinions about the Cross Check system, R Street Institute senior fellow and University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center distinguished research fellow Chris Riley.

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the second part, and it features a conversation with two individuals covering China for the New York Times, Paul Mozur and Muyi Xiao. In their collaborative coverage they have mixed open source visual investigations methods with traditional reporting to get a sense of the protests and the state’s response. 

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the first part, and it features a conversation with Liza Lin, a Reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She covers Asia technology news for the Journal from Singapore. Before that she was the paper’s China correspondent, based in Shanghai. She was part of a team at the Journal to named as Pulitzer Finalists for the International Reporting category in 2021 for coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and with other Journal reporters won the Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting in 2018 for a series of stories on China's Surveillance state. She’s co-author of a book on that subject titled Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, with Josh Chin. 

On Friday, Elon Musk announced via tweet that documents related to Twitter’s decision to intervene in the propagation of an October 2020 story in the New York Post about then candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, would be made public. The incident caused a furor at the time, with some Republicans and supporters of former President Donald Trump insinuating that it was proof that social media firms are biased against conservative interests. Some even maintain that the actions of Twitter and Facebook with regard to this particular New York Post story may have had some impact on the outcome of the election, as far-fetched as that might be. Today, we’ll hear two voices on the disclosures. The first is David Ingram, who covers tech for NBC News and will walk us through what happened. And the second is Mike Masnick, the editor of the influential site Tech Dirt, who offers his first thoughts on the disclosures, and what they portend for the future of Twitter under Elon Musk.

For this episode of the Tech Policy Press podcast, I had the chance to speak to Chris Anderson, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Milan who is leading a course on tech manifestos and their evolution, inviting his students to dissect the language for what it can tell us about politics and power. Documents such as A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and A Manifesto for Cyborgs have given way to more vacuous statements from billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook manifesto, Building Global Community. These days a lot of Silicon Valley’s leaders don’t have much in the way of ideas, but they do have a lot of money, so either way they can push whatever agenda they may have on the rest of us. From promises of abundance delivered by artificial intelligence, to a 'global community' convened on social media platforms, to reimagined economies or even a new world order built on the blockchain, tech manifestos remain important, since they often signify large amounts of capital are about to be deployed to try to manifest someone's new vision.

By all accounts, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not going well. And yet many have the real sense that something important may be lost if the platform collapses, or if there is a substantial migration away from it to alternatives like Mastodon, the open source, decentralized platform that has grown from three hundred thousand monthly active users to nearly two million since Musk bought Twitter. In this episode, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the chance to discuss Musk’s takeover with Dr. Johnathan Flowers, and to learn more about some of the exclusive norms he’s observed that may create obstacles to communities of color when contemplating the switch to Mastodon.

Today we’re going to hear from the editor of-- and two authors included in-- a book of essays about how particular bits of software have changed the world in different ways, the just-published "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World from Princeton University Press. The book is at once delightful and enlightening, revealing how technology interacts with people and society in both good and bad ways, and how important and long lasting the decisions we take when designing software and systems can be on the world. This episode features:Torie Bosch, the editor of Future Tense, a collaborative project of Slate magazine, New America, and Arizona State University, and the editor of the book;Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest TechnologyCharlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development at New York University and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development