The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Over the past year of publishing this podcast, we’ve looked again and again at the issue of the power of tech platforms in society. Now, there is a book titled The Power of the Platforms: Shaping Media and Society, by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter, just published at the end of last month by Oxford University Press.Justin Hendrix had the chance to catch up with one of the authors about what they learned in writing the book, and the complexities of the subject.

If you take the time to look at the SEC filings for Meta Platforms, Inc. - the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - you will find various disclosures about its ongoing legal battles. Taken together they reveal patterns, particularly in how the company is led. To get an update on some of the key cases under consideration, from Cambridge Analytica to competition, I spoke with one particularly keen observer of Meta: Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next.

Last week at Stanford University, former President Barack Obama gave a keynote address at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm." This week, many of the issues Obama discussed were brought into sharp relief when it was announced that billionaire Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars.For reactions to Obama's speech- and to Musk’s antics- I spoke withDavid Kaye, Professor of Law at UC Irvine and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression;Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; and Jameel Jaffer, Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In the opening, you'll also hear just under the last five minutes of Obama's speech, which will give you a sense of it.

There is a growing literature and practice around how to equitably collaborate with traditionally marginalized communities to build better technology. A pair of investigative reports into Worldcoin’s launch may well serve as the basis for an instructive case study in what not to do. The first report, by Richard Nieva and Aman Sethi at BuzzFeed News, was published April 5th. It’s titled Inside Worldcoin’s Globe-Spanning, Eyeball-Scanning, Free Crypto Giveaway: The Sam Altman–founded company Worldcoin says it aims to alleviate global poverty, but so far it has angered the very people it claims to be helping.The second report, by Eileen Guo & Adi Renaldi at MIT Technology Review, was published April 6th. It’s titled Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users: The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.Tech Policy Press had the chance to talk to both pairs of journalists separately last week. 

In the opening to her book, How to Be A Woman Online, Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back, Nina Jankowicz crafts an allegory of a woman going about her day, encountering creepy and increasingly threatening men in public. It recounts a morning commute on a cloudless morning, but things quickly get dark. The woman endures various encounters: at a coffee shop, on the metro, ultimately at her office. It gets ugly. And yet the point of the story is, this kind of behavior is perpetual on social media, where women endure a tragic volume of misogyny and threats. This book is intended to be a guide for women who face this material, and yet wish to have a voice in the quasi-public sphere of social media. To learn more about its themes, Tech Policy Press spoke Nina just before it hit the shelves- both physical and virtual- on April 21st.

Privacy is one of the fundamental issues in tech policy. And yet, in the United States progress on this issue has been elusive at the federal level, even as Europe has forged ahead with its General Data Protection Regulation or (GDPR) and now the Digital Markets Act, which will reinforce the privacy protections afforded EU citizens under GPDR with new provisions. And yet there are bills before Congress that could change things in the U.S.- such as the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Democrats. At the time, Senator Corey Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, said that “The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence.” To talk more about the history of how we ended up with an internet bought and paid for by surveillance advertising and what might drive reform, I spoke to two experts in the field, Dr. Nathalie Maréchal & Dr. Matthew Crain.

In this episode we hear an account of the prominent role that one Facebook executive has played in US and global politics, making many key decisions that, over the years, have literally been engineered into Facebook and its polices. Our guest is Benjamin Wofford, the author of a WIRED cover story titled The Infinite Reach of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Man in Washington: How one man came to rule political speech on Facebook, command one of the largest lobbies in DC, and guide Zuck through disaster—and straight into it. 

Social media tools developed in Silicon Valley can be used for illiberal purposes, often putting the most vulnerable groups at risk. Afsaneh Rigot is a researcher and advocate concerned with issues of law, technology, LGBTQ, refugee and human rights. A senior researcher at ARTICLE 19 with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center and an advisor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard, Afsaneh is the author of the recently published report, Digital Crime Scenes: The Role of Digital Evidence in the Persecution of LGTBQ People In Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia. The report uncovers how police use technology to target, harass and arrest those in the LGBTQ community. Meticulously researched, the report also includes recommendations to tech firms on what they can do to help the community, and Afsaneh is now working on a set of design principles that could help the developers of technology applications and platforms think through potential harms and avoid creating tools for authoritarians.

It might appear that many political and government leaders have come to regard AI as a kind of panacea, right at the moment when the world needs one most. The third and final installment of the sixth UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was published Monday: UN Secretary General António Guterres called the report "a litany of broken promises" and "a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world." Some leaders appear to be betting that somehow, AI will help us optimize our way out of this crisis. But what if that bet turns out to be wrong? And what if the bets we’re making within AI today, such as on technologies like deep learning, themselves turn out to be less fruitful than the hype might suggest?  To learn more about these issues, I spoke to Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist, an entrepreneur and a writer. He’s written five books, including the 2019 book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, which Forbes said was one of the seven must-read books in AI. And, he founded the firm Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company that sold to Uber.Last month, Gary wrote a piece in the publication Nautilus titled Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall: What would it take for artificial intelligence to make real progress? In it, he wrote that quote “because general artificial intelligence will have such vast responsibility resting on it, it must be like stainless steel, stronger and more reliable and, for that matter, easier to work with than any of its constituent parts. No single AI approach will ever be enough on its own; we must master the art of putting diverse approaches together, if we are to have any hope at all.”I spoke to Gary about how his criticism of where AI researchers are placing their bets connects with the larger wager elites seem to be making on the promise of Artificial Intelligence.

Last year, the Journal of Social Computing published a Special Issue on the subject of Technology Ethics in Action. The special issue was the product of the Ethical Tech Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, which was cofounded by Mary Gray and Kathy Pham. The ideas in the special issue span a range of critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, with essay titles ranging from “Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit” to “Connecting Race to Ethics Related to Technology” to “The Promise and Limits of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, and the Techlash.” To learn more about the ideas in it, I spoke to its editor, Ben Green. Ben is a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His Harvard PhD is in applied mathematics, with a secondary field in science, technology, and society. He studies the social and political impacts of government algorithms, focusing on algorithmic fairness, smart cities, and the criminal justice system. In 2019 MIT Press published his book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future. Ben is also an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.