The Sunday Show

In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, Justin Hendrix invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including:Henry Farrell, a professor of the international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.Elizabeth Spiers, a writer and digital strategist and contributing writer for the New York Times, and co-host the Slate Money Podcast.Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs.

Experts discuss the aftermath of Murthy v Missouri in relation to COVID-19 misinformation. Topics include free expression, tech policy, combating influence operations, NRA v. Volo case, conspiracy theories, political funding, countering influence operations on social media, challenges in civil service communication roles, and implications on platform accountability and transparency.

David Carroll and Ravi Naik discuss data protection in the age of AI, focusing on the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the challenges of AI-generated text. They explore the legal boundaries of AI, the role of advocacy in upholding data rights, and the importance of human involvement in AI projects.

Experts discuss the ethical and societal risks of advanced AI assistants. Topics include anthropomorphism, appropriate relationships with AI, impact of AI on relationships, and ethical considerations in AI development.

Anya Schiffrin and Cory Doctorow discuss the battle between news organizations and tech companies, challenges in the media industry, funding models for journalism, Google's impact on news revenue, and the power dynamics between big tech and journalism for safeguarding democracy.

Author Angela Zhang discusses China's tech regulation landscape, covering government crackdowns on tech giants and the interplay of business, regulation, and politics. The podcast explores China's control of online speech, geopolitical impacts on US-China tech rivalry, and parallels in US tech policy. Zhang shares her future research plans on global tech regulation, focusing on AI dynamics between China, the US, and Europe.

In this episode, we explore a topic that sits at the heart of global digital policy: the contrasting visions of internet governance championed by the United States and its Western allies versus those promoted by China and nations in its orbit. This debate is playing out across various international venues and has profound implications for the future of digital rights, privacy, and the open internet. Justin Hendrix is joined by experts at the Atlantic Council that study these issues from a variety of angles and across multiple geographies, including:Rose Jackson, the director of the Democracy + Tech Initiative within the Atlantic Council Technology Programs;Konstantinos Komaitis, a nonresident fellow with the Democracy + Tech Initiative of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab;Kenton Thibaut, a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab; andIria Puyosa, a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

In October 2023, during the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China's leader Xi Jinping signaled a shift in focus from more grandiose physical infrastructure projects to 'small yet smart' initiatives. This shift underscores the need to understand China's ambitions to reshape global digital governance, moving away from an open and free internet towards a model rooted in government control and mass surveillance. The advocacy group Article 19 documents this shift in a recent report titled "The Digital Silk Road: China and the Rise of Digital Repression in the Indo-Pacific," examining China's influence on digital infrastructure and governance in Cambodia, Malaysia, Nepal, and Thailand. As the Indo-Pacific remains strategically significant for China in deploying next-generation technologies, the report argues that assessing China’s regional partnerships and their implications for digital repression is crucial for understanding its broader ambitions to reshape global digital norms. To discuss these issues in more depth, Justin Hendrix is joined by:Michael Caster, Asia Digital Program Manager at ARTICLE 19; andCatherine Tai, the deputy director for Asia and the Pacific team at Center for International Enterprise (CIPE).

A topic we returned to often in this podcast is the dire need for independent technology researchers to have access to platform data. Without it, we cannot understand the extent of the harms and effects of social media on people and on society, and we cannot understand the limits of those harms. This makes it difficult to respond in acute moments such as elections, and to understand issues such as the relationship between tech platforms and social cohesion, or mental health, or any number of the other issues policymakers care about. In this episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with two people on the front lines of the fight to secure access to data, including advocating for Meta to do better in light of the impending deprecation of CrowdTangle, a tool used by researchers study Meta's products, including Facebook and Instagram. They are:Brandi Guerkink, the executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, andClaire Pershan, EU advocacy lead at the Mozilla Foundation.

Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at the Financial Times, discusses the impact of AI in reshaping society, the role of the first AI editor at FT, AI in healthcare, challenges faced by data laborers in Kenya, and reflections on technology ethics at the Vatican Summit.