The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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

Media reports suggest that large swathes of employees at Twitter have resigned after the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, issued a kind of ultimatum asking them to commit to "long hours at high intensity" to build “Twitter 2.0.” Last night, according to an internal Twitter email shared with CNN, employees who decided to stay at the company received an email that said the company's offices will be temporarily closed and badge access will be restricted through Monday. Whether the platform will remain functional with so many core engineering and other crucial teams decimated is an open question. To talk more about Twitter, Musk, and what is potentially lost, Justin Hendrix spoke to Dr. Meredith Clark, whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. She’s leading a project to archive Black Twitter, as part of a larger project to archive the Black web. And, she’s the author of a forthcoming book on Black Twitter.

According to the BBC, to date at least 348 Iranian protesters have been killed and nearly 16,000 arrested in women-led protests that erupted three months ago after the death Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being detained by morality police for allegedly breaking the strict rules on the wearing of hijabs.One way the regime has responded to these antigovernment protests is to block access to the internet, independent news sites and social media and communication platforms. To talk more about how these tactics are being applied in Iran and around the world, and what policymakers in democratic countries can do to help dissidents on the ground, I spoke to two experts on digital and human rights:Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw and author of a recent piece in Wired on Iran's internet blackoutsKian Vesteinsson, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House, one of the authors of the 12th annual Internet Freedom Report

Voting in the U.S. midterm elections closed on Tuesday, and as of Sunday morning, November 13, Democrats secured another majority in the Senate. But ballots are still being counted in key races that will determine which party controls the House.  It is clear, however, that the margins determining leadership in both chambers will be extremely small. In order to explore how the elections may impact the legislative debate over tech policy issues, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke with three experts from civil society groups that regularly engage with lawmakers to find what scenarios and considerations are front of mind, even as we wait for the final tally:Emma Llansó, Director of the Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy and TechnologyYosef Getachew, Director of the Media and Democracy Program, Common CauseMatt Wood, Vice President of Policy and General Counsel, Free Press

This episode features a discussion with Brandi Collins-Dexter, the author of the new book BLACK SKINHEAD: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future. Brandi is both an academic and a civil rights activist in the fight for media and tech justice, and her book is a rollercoaster ride through those issues through culture and music and politics. Part media and cultural criticism, part memoir, and part warning, the book takes us to the fringes of Black communities and tries to make sense of our political moment.

As the U.S. midterm elections approach next week, there is a renewed focus on understanding the spending on and claims made in political advertising in digital channels, particularly on social media. But what is going on across the web, beyond the social media platforms? A recent report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center on Technology Policy found that as a result of restrictions on political ads instituted by major platforms ahead of the 2020 elections, political advertisers are increasingly turning to political advertising on other platforms. Programmatic advertising accounts for a substantial and increasing share of political advertising, they say, and more attention needs to be paid to this complex and confusing ecosystem of companies- large and small- that serve up ads on websites, apps, streaming services, and other digitally connected devices. This episode features a discussion with the report's authors, J. Scott Babwah Brennen & Matt Perault.

Danielle Citron is the inaugural Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she teaches and writes about information privacy, free expression and civil rights. She is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age, and in 2019 she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. Her latest book, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age, published by W.W. Norton and Penguin Vintage UK, was released this month.

In this episode of the podcast, we present two segments that explore how the combination of media, platforms, politics and people play out in Latino communities in the U.S., particularly at crucial moments for democracy, such as at election time. The first segment is with individuals who are leading efforts to understand and confront mis- and disinformation targeting Latino communities:Roberta Braga, Director of Counter-Disinformation Strategies at EquisJaime Longoria, Manager of Research and Training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund.And the second segment is a discussion with two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who spent the summer talking specifically to Latino users of WhatsApp about how the political discourse plays out in their communities on that widely used messaging app, and wrote about it for Tech Policy Press as part of a special series of essays on race, ethnicity, technology and elections:Inga Kristina Trauthig, Ph.D., Research Manager of the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at AustinKayo Mimizuka, Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Media Engagement and a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin.