The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Proponents and opponents of measures to reform Big Tech are busy this spring on Capitol Hill, and the fight over proposed antitrust regulation, in particular, is heating up in the US Capitol. In this episode we’ll hear two short interviews that provide a window into the effort to influence lawmakers. The first segment is with Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for The Washington Post who shared the byline on a story last week on a campaign by Meta, the company that operates Facebook and Instagram, to besmirch its rival, TikTok, in part as a way to bolster Meta’s arguments against antitrust reforms.And in the second, we’ll hear from Charlotte Slaiman, Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that works on tech policy issues. Prior to joining Public Knowledge, Charlotte was a lawyer in the Anticompetitive Practices Division at the Federal Trade Commission. She shares details on Antitrust Day, a day of action proclaimed by more than 100 civil society groups and businesses advocated for the passage of two proposed bills: American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act.

If there is to be any accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it will requires carefully gathered evidence. The collection and preservation of digital media and other evidentiary material in Ukraine is a massive undertaking. It is being met by brave Ukrainian officials and local civil society groups operating in besieged cities and towns, as well as by an international coalition of human rights, open source intelligence and digital forensics researchers. This loose coalition is drawing strength from relationships formed with one another and lessons learned while investigating past conflicts, including in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and elsewhere. The ongoing effort in Ukraine, then, can be seen as part of an evolution – or a maturation – of an expanding community of volunteers and professionals gathering user-generated evidence and open source intelligence. It may also represent a crucial test of whether the evidence produced by these methods can play a substantial role in securing convictions. What follows is a snapshot of the effort in progress, based on interviews with more than a dozen individuals representing a sample of organizations. It reveals some of the key challenges facing this growing field: the reliance on volunteers working in the midst of a conflict; security threats and coordination problems flowing from the over-collection of material; and the centrality of social media platforms that were never designed with atrocity documentation in mind. Still, the reality that prosecutions cannot succeed without evidence drives those doing the work.See the essay on which this podcast is based here.

Earlier this year, a nonprofit organization called the TechEquity Collaborative released the results of its Contract Worker Disparity Project, an investigation into the “shadow workforce” that powers many tech firms. The culmination of a year of research into the disparities in contract work, the report features survey data and first-hand accounts from contract workers in tech who describe range of challenging conditions and inequities, particularly relative to the lavish pay and perks that are offered to full time employees of companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.To learn more about the key findings of the report, to hear more about what it's like to make your living in one of these roles, and to get a sense of the types of policy solutions that would address these inequities, we spoke with:Samantha (Sam) Gordon, Senior Vice President of Programs TechEquity CollaborativeShannon Wait, Campaign Assistant with Alphabet Workers Union, part of the Communications Workers of America Local 1400

Earlier this month in The Guardian newspaper, researcher and journalist Jane Lytvynenko wrote: I report on internet disinformation. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it became very personal. There is more than one struggle. There is the war of bombs, the war that’s taking lives. And then there’s the battle over what can be done.Jane, who is presently a Senior Research Fellow on the Tech and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, grew up in Kyiv. She moved to Canada at age eleven, but traveled back to visit her family and friends nearly every year, sometimes spending entire summers in Ukraine. Now– like nearly every Ukrainian, no matter how far from the land that is under assault in a brutal, illegal Russian invasion– she is part of the "battle over what can be done," a battle of ideas, emotion and the way they are combined into political will.  I caught up with Jane to get her take on what’s happening in the information component of this war, including the role of the social media platforms and the news media in confronting disinformation, the role of myth making and the transmission of cultural information in this moment, and the role of citizen diplomacy. 

Lawmakers around the world want to do something about social media, and in particular content moderation. But what if the interventions they are developing are based on a flawed conceptual framework about how content moderation works, or how it should work?This week I had a chance to talk to one of the smartest legal minds on questions related to content moderation to explore some fresh thinking on the subject: evelyn douek, a Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. evelyn is the author of “Content Moderation as Administration,” forthcoming Harvard Law Review, a new paper that serves as the basis for our discussion.

The United States Congress has before it dozens of bills intended to rein in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. This raft of proposed legislation is in response to various harms that have come to light over the past few years, including dangers to democracy, harassment and hate speech, concerns over safety (especially for children), and various ways the platforms reinforce inequities and permit discrimination. One agency in the federal government arguably has the power to take action on these issues with its current authority- the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC. But there are a variety of legislative proposals that would clarify the FTC’s role with regard to social media, and even provide it with substantial new resources to police the harms these massive companies produce. The NYU Center for Business and Human Rights, with which I have collaborated in the past, last month produced a substantial report detailing principles and policy goals intended to clarify the debate in Congress and shape an agenda for the FTC, recommending that Congress direct the FTC to oversee the social media industry under the consumer protection authority that the agency already exercises in its regulation of other industries. To learn more about the report and its recommendations, I spoke to Paul Barrett, the Center’s Deputy Director. Paul joined the Center in September 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist and author focusing on the intersection of business, law, and society.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, governments and tech companies have taken swift action to limit the flow of propaganda out of Russia, and Russia has in turn taken draconian measures to limit the flow of information into Russia, including banning some Western social media platforms, crushing what remained of independent journalism in the country and cracking down on free expression generally. How do these events fit in the broader scheme of things? The trajectory for global internet freedom and digital rights, just like the trajectory for democracy generally, has been going in the wrong direction for years. What do governments, organizations and the community of individuals concerned with these issues need to do to try to change that trajectory, and to support those working turn the tide?To answer these questions and more, I invited three experts to join me for this week’s podcastRebecca MacKinnon, Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia FoundationAllie Funk, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom HouseJustin Sherman, a Fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at The Atlantic Council

Governments and tech platforms have moved quickly to take action against Russian state media since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. But what frameworks exist in international law that could inform our thinking about these complicated questions at the intersection of speech and human rights?To answer that question, I spoke to Vivek Krishnamurthy, the Samuelson-Glushko Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). Vivek is currently a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Senior Associate of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The past couple of months has seen controversies over misinformation, anti-vaccine and racist material, and how best to moderate content on online publishing platforms such as Spotify and Substack.To talk more about these issues of speech, editorial intervention, content moderation, and implications for democracy, I invited two expert commentators, Bridget Todd and Elizabeth Spiers, to the Tech Policy Press podcast. Bridget Todd is the creator and host of the award-winning technology and culture podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet and communications director for UltraViolet, a gender justice advocacy organization working to build a feminist Internet. Bridget wrote a great piece for The Nation, titled It’s Not Just Joe Rogan. The Entire Digital Space Is Rotten. Elizabeth Spiers is a writer, NYU journalism school professor, political commentator, and digital strategist. She is also the former editor in chief of The New York Observer and was the founding editor of Gawker.  Elizabeth wrote a trio of columns on Medium addressing the issues raised by the Rogan controversy and the Substack statements. 

Dr. Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law, is an expert on the intersection of civil rights and technology. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy and an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and author of an award-winning book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech from Stanford Press, published in 2019. In addition to her academic responsibilities, she is President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that combats online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted a model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography- “revenge porn”- which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for proposed federal legislation to tackle the issue.Dr. Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law and at Harvard University as a lecturer in social studies and philosophy.This month, Tech Policy Press had a chance to catch up with her about her ideas, her work, and her critics.