With Sam Woolley, Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Inga K. Trauthig are authors of a new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin titled "Covert Campaigns: Safeguarding Encrypted Messaging Platforms from Voter Manipulation." Justin Hendrix caught up with them to learn more about how political propagandists are exploiting the features of encrypted messaging platforms to manipulate voters, and what can be done about it without breaking the promise of encryption for all users.

A lot of folks frustrated with major social media platforms are migrating to alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, which operate on decentralized protocols. This summer, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi released a report on the governance on fediverse microblogging servers and the moderation practices of the people who run them. Justin Hendrix caught up with Erin Kissane about their findings, including the emerging forms of diplomacy between different server operators, the types of political and policy decisions moderators must make, and the need for more resources and tooling to enable better governance across the fediverse.

The results in this year’s installment of the Freedom House Freedom on the Net report generally follow the same distressing trajectory as prior reports, marking a 14th consecutive year in declines in internet freedom around the world. But in this year of elections, the Freedom House analysts also identified a set of concerning phenomena related to this most fundamental act of democracy and how governments are asserting themselves, for better or worse. Justin Hendrix spoke to report authors Allie Funk and Kian Vesteinsson about their findings.

In this episode, we're crashing a funeral... for CrowdTangle, a piece of software that allowed journalists and independent researchers to get insights into social media. Not our usual material, but this particular loss marks a huge blow in the ongoing fight for public access to data from the platforms, and underscores why we need to continue to fight for transparency. And the folks convened by the Knight-Georgetown Institute and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research refused to let it go unmarked.

Barry Lynn is the executive director of the Open Markets Institute in Washington DC and the author of this month's cover essay in Harper's titled "The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech." Justin Hendrix spoke to him about his essay, about the remedy framework proposed by the US Department of Justice following the ruling in the Google search antitrust trial, and about what to anticipate for the antitrust movement following the 2024 US presidential election.

Today’s guest is Sam Jeffers, cofounder and executive director of Who Targets Me. Jeffers has spent several yearshas spent several years building a suite of capabilities to make political advertising more transparent, including tools for individuals and data and support for academics, researchers and journalists. His organization also advocates for better policy from platforms, regulators and governments. (You can download the Who Targets Me browser extension to contribute your data to the project.)

One of the most significant concepts in Europe’s Digital Services Act is that of “systemic risk,” which relates to the spread of illegal content, or content that might have foreseeable negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights or on on civic discourse, electoral processes, public security and so forth. The DSA requires companies to carry out risk assessments to detail whether they are adequately addressing such risks on their platforms. What exactly amounts to systemic risk and how exactly to go about assessing it is still up in the air in these early days of the DSA’s implementation.

In today’s episode, Tech Policy Press Staff Writer Gabby Miller speaks with three experts involved in conversations to try and get to best practices:

• Jason Pielemeier, Executive Director of the Global Network Initiative;
• David Sullivan, Executive Director of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership; and
• Chantal Joris, Senior Legal Officer at Article 19

Last week, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz first reported on details of an unredacted version of a complaint against Snap brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke to Horwitz about its details, and questions it leaves unanswered.

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.