The Tech Policy Press Podcast

In today’s episode of the podcast, we’re going to hear from FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was appointed in June 2021, as well as FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who was appointed to a Democratic seat on the Commission in 2018. This isn’t a typical episode- what you’ll hear is audio of a special event hosted on Tuesday, July 19 by the Economic Security Project (ESP) and the Law and Political Economy Project (LPE). These organizations brought together scholars, advocates, and government officials to discuss how new thinking and research seeks to reframe dominant economic paradigms, and why it is so important to redefine and challenge monopolies. The event, Resourcing a New Paradigm: The Future of Antimonopoly Research, was introduced by Becky Chao, Director of Antimonopoly at the Economic Security Project, and it is her voice you’ll hear first. After remarks from Chair Khan and Commissioner Slaughter, you’ll hear a panel discussion moderated by the Open Markets Institute’s Legal Director, Sandeep Vaheesan. The full complement of speakers includes:Lina Khan, Chair, Federal Trade Commission Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission Elettra Bietti, Joint Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU School of Law and the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech in New YorkBrian Callaci, Chief Economist, Open Markets Institute Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political ScienceLenore Palladino, University of Massachusetts Amherst Assistant Professor of Economics and Public PolicyBecky Chao, Director of Antimonopoly, Economic Security ProjectAmy Kapczynski, Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Global Health Justice PartnershipModerated by Sandeep Vaheesan, Legal Director, Open Markets Institute By the end of this 90 minutes, you will be up to date on the key ideas, challenges and opportunities ahead for the intellectual project to redefine antimonopoly thinking and law to pursue not just economic but also social and racial justice.

On Wednesday, July 20, the United States House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee held a markup that included H.R. 8152, the "American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” which is touted as the first comprehensive national privacy legislation with bipartisan support. To discuss the bill and its prospects in detail, Tech Policy Press spoke with two experts on tech policy and civil rights issues: Nora Benavidez, Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press, and Justin Brookman, Director of Technology Policy for Consumer Reports. 

This episode features a conversation with the author of a new book that makes a compelling argument for the substantial deprivatization of the Internet. In Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Ben Tarnoff says to create a more democratic and equitable society we need to diminish the role of the market in the future of the internet, and reduce the power of profit motive to define our online experience.

For the second year running, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation- GLAAD- has released a Social Media Safety Index that finds that major tech platforms are failing to keep LGBTQ users safe. The report was released at a time when the broader social and political context is growing more dangerous- in the US, nearly 250+ anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in legislatures this year, even as we see a surge of online hate speech and disinformation about the LGBTQ community, as well as physical attacks. To learn more about the challenges this community faces in holding social media platforms to account, I spoke to two people who helped author the report and devise the index: Jenni Olsen, Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, and Andrea Hackl, a research analyst at Goodwin Simon Strategic Research.

India is the world’s most populous democracy, and also one that is facing challenges. This week we focus on the Indian government’s efforts to create a  bureaucratic apparatus to enforce what appears to be an ever more frequent number of requests for social media platforms to remove content deemed inappropriate for one reason or another. And for this week’s episode, I’m joined by the author of a recent piece on this subject, Angrej Singh, who is interning with Tech Policy Press this summer. Angrej helped to pull together the panel of experts-- all based in India-- that you’ll hear from today, including:Neeti Biyani, Policy and Advocacy Manager, Internet SocietyTejasi Panjiar, Associate Policy Counsel, Internet Freedom FoundationApar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation

At this year’s Collision, a tech conference that took place in June in Toronto, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to interview two editors about how they think about the problem of disinformation, and how they direct their publication’s coverage of it as an issue. This short podcast installment is audio of the live stage discussion with Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept, and Matt Kaminski, editor in chief of Politico. Many thanks to Stephen Twomey and the other organizers of the Collision conference for including this panel in a series of discussions on the role of the fourth estate. 

One of the areas where applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence are most fraught with ethical concerns is in law enforcement and criminal justice. To learn more about the opportunities and the concerns, Tech Policy Press spoke to Renée Cummings, who joined the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science in 2020 as the School’s first Data Activist in Residence. In addition to being an AI ethicist, she is also a Criminologist and Criminal Psychologist. 

In the age of social media and disinformation, journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and media watchdogs in democracies are figuring out how to band together to create a line of defense against those who seek to sow division and doubt in advance of elections. This week, a French coalition calling itself the Online Election Integrity Watch Group published a summary report on its activities ahead of this spring’s national election there. The group includes entities such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Check First, GEODE, the Institute of Complex Systems, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Tracking Exposed, and Reset Tech, an initiative run by the Luminate foundation. To learn more about what the Watch Group learned in this election cycle, Tech Policy Press spoke to the report’s lead authors, Théophile Lenoir and Iris Boyer.

This episode focuses on how best to create mechanisms for outside scrutiny of technology platforms. The first segment is with Brandon Silverman, the founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, an analytics toolset acquired by Facebook in 2016 that permitted academics, journalists and others to inspect how information spreads on the platform. And the second segment is a panel provided courtesy of the non-partisan policy organization the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On June 15, GMF hosted Opening the Black Box: Auditing Algorithms for Accountable Tech, featuring Anna Lenhart, Senior Technology Policy Advisor, Rep. Lori Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts; Deborah Raji, a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation and a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley; and Mona Sloane, a sociologist affiliated with NYU and the University of Tübingen AI center. The panel was moderated by Ellen P. Goodman, a Professor at Rutgers Law School and a Visiting Senior Fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States.

This week, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report on YouTube that Tech Policy Press Editor Justin Hendrix helped write with the Center’s Deputy Director, Paul Barrett. YouTube is generally understood to have avoided the scrutiny of journalists, researchers and lawmakers, at least relative to other social media platforms like Facebook. But there is a cost to flying under the radar. To address some of the key issues, this episode features two segments. The first is a conversation with Paul Barrett, and the second with two of the sources for the report, University of Washington associate professor and Center for an Informed Public cofounder Kate Starbird and Mnemonic Associate Director of Advocacy Dia Kayyali.