The Sunday Show

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are the authors of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, published September 24 by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix focuses in particular on the book's Chapter 6, "Why Can't AI Fix Social Media?"

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) recently assessed social media platforms’ policies, public commitments, and product interventions related to election integrity across six major issue areas: platform integrity, violent extremism and hate speech, internal and external resourcing, transparency, political advertising and state-affiliated media. Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the report's authors: ISD's Director of Technology & Society, Isabelle Frances-Wright, and its Senior US digital Policy Manager, Ellen Jacobs. ISD's assessment included Snap, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X.

Gary Marcus writes that the companies developing artificial intelligence systems want the citizens of democracies “to absorb all the negative externalities” that might arise from their products, “such as the damage to democracy from Generative AI–produced misinformation, or cybercrime and kidnapping schemes using deepfaked voice clones—without them paying a nickel.” And, he says, we need to fight back. His new book is called Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us, published by MIT Technology Press on September 17, 2024.

Marietje Schaake is the author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Dr. Alondra Nelson, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), calls Schaake “a twenty-first century Tocqueville” who “looks at Silicon Valley and its impact on democratic society with an outsider’s gimlet eye.” Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa says Schaake's new book “exposes the unchecked, corrosive power that is undermining democracy, human rights, and our global order.” And author and activist Cory Doctorow says the book offers “A thorough and necessary explanation of the parade of policy failures that enshittified the internet—and a sound prescription for its disenshittification.” Justin Hendrix spoke to Schaake just before the book's publication on September 24, 2024.

In 2019, Thierry Breton, a French business executive who became the France’s Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, was nominated by President Emmanuel Macron to become a member of the European Commission for the Internal Market. In that role his name and face were closely associated with Europe’s push to regulate digital markets and the passage of legislation such as the Digital Services Act and the EU’s AI Act. 

On Monday, September 16 - in a letter that called into question EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s governance - Breton resigned his post. While certain tech executives may be happy to see him go- Elon Musk posted “bon voyage” to the news - his departure spells change for Europe’s approach to tech going forward. To learn more, Justin Hendrix reached out to a European journalist who is covering these matters closely, and who has been kind enough to share his reporting on the EU AI Act with Tech Policy Press in the past: MLex Senior AI Correspondent Luca Bertuzzi.

At Tech Policy Press, we’re closely following the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Union law designed to regulate online platforms and services. One of the DSA’s key objectives is to identify and mitigate systemic risks.But how do we gauge what rises to the level of a systemic risk? How do we get the sort of information we need from platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risk, and how do we create the kinds of collaborations between regulators and the research community that are necessary to answer complex questions?

Ramsha Jahangir, a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press, recently discussed these questions with Dr. Oliver Marsh, who is head of tech research at Algorithm Watch, an NGO with offices in Berlin and Zurich that works on issues at the intersection of technology and society. Dr. Marsh has been leading research on systemic risks and the DSA’s approach, and just put out a detailed summary of his work. 

Paris Marx, a Canadian tech critic, recently authored a post under the headline "Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions: The actions against Telegram and Twitter/X are about sovereignty, not speech." Justin Hendrix spoke to Paris about his assessment of these matters, and why those making claims in defense of free speech in the wake of Brazil’s ban on X and Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France may in fact be undermining free expression and internet freedoms in the long run. 

Today is Monday, September 9th. Today Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is presiding over the start of a trial in which the United States Department of Justice accuses Google of violating antitrust law, abusing its power in the market for online advertising. Google contests the allegations against it.

To get a bit more detail on what to expect, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals covering the case closely who take a critical view of Google, the government’s allegations about its power in the online advertising market, and the company’s effect on journalism and the overall media and information ecosystem:

• Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy at Check My Ads, which is running a comprehensive tracker on the case;
• Karina Montoya, a senior reporter and policy analyst at the Center for Journalism and Liberty, a program of the Open Markets Institute, who has covered the case extensively for Tech Policy Press.

Thirty tech bills went through the law making sausage grinder in California this past session, and now Governor Gavin Newsom is about to decide the fate of 19 that passed the state legislature. The Governor now has until the end of September to sign or veto the bills, or to permit them to become law without his signature. 

To learn a little more about some of the key pieces of legislation and the overall atmosphere around tech regulation in California, Justin Hendrix spoke to two journalists who live and work in the state and cover these issues regularly:

• Jesús Alvarado, a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press and author of a recent post on SB 1047, a key piece of the California legislation;
• Khari Johnson, a technology reporter at CalMatters,a fellow in the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia, and the author of a recent article on the California legislation.

On August 26th, Justin Hendrix moderated a panel convened by the Social Science Research Council at its offices in Brooklyn, New York. The panel was titled “Platforms and Elections: the Global State of Play, and it featured:

• Dr. Shannon McGregor, associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator with the Center for Information Technology in Public Life (CITAP);
• Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, professor of global digital media. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, inaugural director of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab; and
• Dr. Chris Tenove, research associate and instructor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the University of British Columbia.

This episode features a lightly edited recording of the conversation, which touches on topics ranging from the role of civil society and independent researchers in engaging with efforts to protect the integrity of elections and mitigate the spread of misinformation to current questions about how generative AI may impact politics.