Marketplace Tech

The financial tech firm Plaid announced this week that it’s doubling its workforce in Europe. That is largely because its planned $5.3 billion merger with Visa fell apart earlier this month, after the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit. Plaid is a platform that lets you, a customer, link your bank account to a fintech app like Venmo or Robinhood. You log in using Plaid’s interface, but the bank itself is cut out of the loop. The banks hate that. Visa could have used Plaid to expand beyond payments and maybe be legitimized in the eyes of banks. Molly speaks with Lisa Ellis, who researches payments at the firm MoffettNathanson. She said the DOJ also worried Visa might be trying to kill the competition.

The app Parler is offline, and Facebook and Twitter are tamping down extremist speech on their platforms. More people are migrating to apps like Signal, which encrypts messages between parties, and Telegram, which can. That blunts the power of extremist messages, but it also makes it harder for law enforcement to see what they might be up to, reigniting a yearslong debate about encryption itself. Molly speaks with Alexandra Givens, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

On the show recently, we talked about tech companies and social media platforms regulating speech, banning President Donald Trump and other accounts, removing groups and topics and even booting Parler off of app stores and Amazon web hosting. And of course, there’s been a lot of backlash and claims of censorship and questions about whether speech on social media should be regulated by the government. All of that gets us to a topic that’s worth revisiting right now, which is the First Amendment. Molly speaks with Berin Szóka, the president of the nonprofit TechFreedom. He says, first of all, we’ve got to get our vocabulary right.

Back in March 2019, a gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and streamed the whole thing on YouTube. After that event we took a weeklong look at how social media radicalized people to violence, and how a troll becomes a terrorist. Now, nearly two years later and after a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, there still seems to be some surprise that online speech leads to offline consequences, so I wanted to revisit some of what I heard that week.

Pro-Trump Republicans are furious that Twitter, Facebook and Amazon Web Services have taken President Donald Trump’s accounts and the app Parler offline. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, as well as other Republicans, called it “cancel culture.” Last March, Molly spoke with futurist Amy Webb, who predicted that cancel culture and the backlash to it would become an even bigger deal in the year ahead. She said that’s proving true in more ways than she expected.

Since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was filmed and photographed extensively, there’s been a scramble to find and archive all those images. Law enforcement and researchers are collecting them for clues and also to understand what happened. The research and investigative journalism site Bellingcat collects open-source intelligence and publishes reports on news and global events with a small staff of researchers and digital forensics experts and a big crew of volunteers. Molly speaks with Giancarlo Fiorella, an investigator at Bellingcat. He said the site just published a sort of forensics report on the movements of the San Diego protester Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the riot.

As we examine the fallout from the attack on the U.S. Capitol last week, what are the cybersecurity implications? Maybe not the top thing on your mind. But consider that for hours rioters had almost unimpeded access to offices, networks and computers on desks. A laptop was even stolen, and security experts say there’s the potential for all kinds of hacking and intrusions. And the cybersecurity threat is made worse by a unique feature of Congress: Everyone is in charge of their own IT. Molly speaks with Bruce Schneier, a security technologist. He lists some of the things intruders could have done.

The insurrection at the Capitol last week was inspired by social media, organized on social media and finally, recorded on social media. We saw images of extremists breaking windows and sitting at Nancy Pelosi’s desk. In some ways, those images were one of the goals of the insurrection: for extremists to prove they were there and to inspire others to take part in the movement. But Wendy Schiller, professor of political science at Brown, says they could soon be replaced by other images of, for example, mugshots. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with her.

The federal government, along with state and local governments, spends billions of dollars every year on security and surveillance technology. In theory, to prevent things like the attack on the U.S. Capitol that happened last week. It’s sophisticated, comprehensive and creates a whole lot of privacy concerns, but also might not be accomplishing the right things. Molly speaks with Alvaro Bedoya, director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown.

Facebook and several other platforms have banned President Donald Trump indefinitely. Twitter banned Lin Wood, Trump’s conspiracy theory-spouting lawyer, but new conspiracies theories are spreading, for instance that antifa was actually  behind Wednesday’s deadly events at the U.S. Capitol. And all of it is fueling the question of how to deal with hate speech and online radicalization. Molly speaks with Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She said historically in the U.S., hate speech has been treated like any other speech.

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