The Tech Policy Press Podcast

When it comes to visions of the way that technology will intersect with society in the future, Silicon Valley has a near monopoly. It’s been nearly 30 years since Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published the essay The Californian Ideology, which they say naturalized and gave a “technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures,” a “faith” that is “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.”Now, the economic power of Silicon Valley has left its billionaire class fairly certain it is above reproach, unchecked and unchallenged, even as some of the biggest firms spawned there are locked in a staring contest with governments in Washington, Brussels and beyond. To talk more about the ways in which Silicon Valley elites have captured so much of what people define as “progress” and the pronouncements of some individuals who make wild promises about the abundant future that technology will supposedly deliver, Tech Policy Press spoke to Dave Karpf, who has been thinking about these issues for some time. He is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, published in May 2012 by Oxford University Press, and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy published in December 2016 by Oxford University Press.

On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it.  There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect. A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Nanfu Wang, In the Same Breath (HBO) is a riveting account of how the pandemic unfolded, how governments tried desperately to control the message as it did, and the ways in which citizens in two very different cultures and systems reacted, even as they themselves participated in shaping of the discourse on social media. This episode of the podcast features a discussion with Nanfu Wang, who directed and produced the film.

The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not mince words. They say that “climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people.”  The quality of the public discourse on climate issues plays a role. A report released by the IPCC in February says that the “[r]hetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent.” An April installment describes how “opposition from status quo interests” and “the propagation of scientifically misleading information” are “barriers” to climate action and have “negative implications for climate policy.” This week, a coalition of groups published a report titled Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond that outlines prominent discourses that seek to pervert and prevent efforts to address climate change. The report makes recommendations for governments, social media platforms platforms and the media on what to do to address the the issue.Tech Policy Press spoke to two individuals involved in the effort to produce the report to learn more:Jennie King, the head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)Michael Khoo, the Climate Change Coalition co-chair at Friends of the Earth

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, there is a good amount of science emerging about the relationship between the information environment and vaccine uptake. Today we’ll hear from two researchers from different disciplines about their work on social media and vaccine misinformation. First up is John Alexander Bryden, Executive Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, with whom I discuss the results of some recent research his team had conducted on the problem. And second, I speak with Kolina Koltai, who when I interviewed her at the end of April was transitioning from her position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at The University of Washington to a role at Twitter. 

When it comes to content moderation and the regulation of harmful content on social media, there are various metaphors at play for how to think about doing it. One that we’ve explored on this podcast in the past is to see it as a form of administration, or what legal scholar evelyn douek calls the “rough online analogue of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bureaucracy of moderators.” But some scholars, like douek, see limitations in this way of thinking. That includes Rachel Griffin, a PhD candidate and lecturer at Sciences Po Law School who recently published a new paper in the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law titled The Sanitised Platform. The paper employs thinking from feminist legal scholar Vicki Schultz about US law on sexual harassment in the workplace as a framework to critique approaches to content moderation and social media regulation.

This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines. To learn more about the role of social media in the rehabilitation of the Marcos brand and to dig a little deeper into the conditions that drive disinformation, I spoke to Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, and the author of a recent piece in Time magazine, The World Should Be Worried About a Dictator’s Son's Apparent Win in the Philippines. Jonathan is also the cohost, with Kat Ventura, of a podcast on the world of troll farms and propaganda in the Philippines called Catch Me If You Can. Check it out.

For the past six years, an independent research program at New America called Ranking Digital Rights has evaluated the policies and practices of some of the world’s largest technology and telecom firms, producing a dataset that reveals their shortcomings with respect to human rights obligations. Ranking Digital Rights evaluates more than 300 aspects of each company it ranks that fall broadly into three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy.Following the release of this year’s report, which we covered at Tech Policy Press, Ranking Digital Rights hosted a session on Charting the Future of Big Tech Accountability. Nathalie Maréchal, Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights and a past guest on this podcast, moderated the panel, which included:Sarah Couturier-Tanoh, Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE)Jesse Lehrich, Co-Founder, Accountable Tech Chris Lewis, President and CEO, Public KnowledgeKatarzyna Szymielewicz, President, Panoptykon FoundationSophie Zhang, activist and Facebook whistleblower

The June cover story for Wired magazine is on a movement in tech that many see as having the potential to rewire not just the internet, but to produce a fundamentally more democratic and equitable society.  The story is titled “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution,” and I had the chance to speak to its author, Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman.

UN human rights experts that chronicled Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar concluded that it played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook’s own investigation into the situation also found fault with the company’s practices, and made various recommendations for how it should develop a human rights strategy to protect against such things from happening again. Today, we’re going to hear from a refugee from the violence, who is with other Rohingya refugees in a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, as well as three human rights advocates. And we’ll learn about another complaint filed by sixteen Rohingya youth to Ireland’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, that argues that Facebook violated the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by allowing its platform to be used to incite violence against them and their community. The remedy sought by these refugees is for Facebook to divest from a portion of its 2017 profits and provide remediation for their community in the form of educational activities and facilities in Cox’s Bazar.Please note that the connection to Cox’s Bazar was not perfect- if you have any trouble making out a word here or there, you can refer to the transcript at the Tech Policy Press website. 

Researchers Alice Marwick, Benjamin Clancy, and Katherine Furl this week released Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature, an analysis of "cross-disciplinary work on radicalization to better understand the present concerns around online radicalization and far-right extremist and fringe movements." In order to learn more about the issues explored in the review, I spoke to Marwick, who is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP).