For the latest episode in her series of podcast discussions, Through to Thriving, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli spoke to Vaishnavi J, founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies (VYS), a trust and safety advisory firm focusing on youth safety, and a former safety leader at Meta, Twitter, and Google. Anika and Vaishnavi discussed a range of issues on the theme of how to center the views and needs of young people in trust and safety and tech policy development. They considered the importance of protecting the human rights of children, the debates around recent age assurance and age verification regulations, the trade-offs between safety and privacy, and the implications of what Vaishnavi called an “asymmetry” of knowledge across the tech policy community.

Today’s guest is Petter Törnberg, who with Justus Uitermark is one of the authors of a new book, titled Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, that sets out to address the “entanglement of epistemology, technology, and politics in digital modernity,” and what studying that entanglement can tell us about the workings of power. The book is part of a part of a series of research monographs that intend to encourage social scientists to embrace a “complex systems approach to studying the social world.”

Last year, Colorado signed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence measure into law. The Colorado AI Act would require developers of high-risk AI systems to take reasonable steps to prevent harms to consumers, such as algorithmic discrimination, including by conducting impact assessments on their tools.

But last week, the state kicked off a special session where lawmakers held frenzied negotiations over whether to expand or dilute its protections. The chapter unfolded amid fierce lobbying by industry groups and consumer advocates. Ultimately, the state legislature punted on amending the law but agreed to delay its implementation from February to June of next year. The move likely tees up another round of contentious talks over one of the nation’s most sprawling AI statues.

This week, Tech Policy Press associate editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to two local reporters who have been closely tracking the saga for the Colorado Sun: political reporter and editor Jesse Paul and politics and policy reporter Taylor Dolven.

On this podcast, we’ve come back again and again to questions around mis- and disinformation, propaganda, rumors, and the role that digital platforms play in anti-democratic phenomena. In a new book published this summer by Oxford University Press called Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy, a group of scholars from varied research traditions set out to find new ways to marry more traditional political science with computational social science approaches to understand the phenomenon of democratic backsliding and to bring some clarity to the present moment, particularly in the United States.

Justin Hendrix had the chance to speak to two of the volume’s editors and two of its authors:

• Steven Livingston,  a professor and founding director of the Institute for Data Democracy and Politics at the George Washington University;
• Michael Miller,  managing director of the Moynihan Center at the City College of New York;
• Kate Starbird,  a professor at the University of Washington and a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public; and
• Josephine Lukito,  assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and senior faculty research associate at the Center for Media Engagement.

In the latest installment in her series of podcasts called Through to Thriving, Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navoroli speaks with Dr. Jasmine McNealy, an attorney, critical public interest technologist, and professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology at the University of Florida;, and Naomi Nix, a staff writer for The Washington Post, where she reports on technology and social media companies.

They discuss how they found themselves on the path through journalism and into a focus on tech and tech policy, the distinctions between truth and facts and whether there has ever been such a thing as a singular truth, how communities of color have historically seen and filled the gaps in mainstream media coverage, the rise of news influencers, and how journalists can regain the trust of the public.

Today’s guest, journalist Rahul Bhatia, has written a book that is part journalistic account, part history, and part memoir titled The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy.

Reviewing the book in The Guardian, Salil Tripathi writes that “Bhatia’s remarkable book is an absorbing account of India’s transformation from the world’s largest democracy to something more like the world’s most populous country that regularly holds elections.” 

Bhatia considers the role of technology, including taking a close look at Aadhaar—India’s national biometric identification program—in order to consider the role it plays in the modern state and what the motivations behind it reveal.

On Thursday, Reuters tech reporter Jeff Horwitz, who broke the story of the Facebook Papers back in 2021 when he was at the Wall Street Journal, published two pieces, both detailing new revelations about Meta’s approach to AI chatbots.

In a Reuters special report, Horwitz tells the story of a man with a cognitive impairment who died while attempting to travel to meet a chatbot character he believed was real. And in a related article, Horwitz reports on an internal Meta policy document that appears to endorse its chatbots engaging with children “in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” as well as other concerning behaviors.

Earlier today, Justin Hendrix caught up with Horwitz about the reports and what they tell us about Silicon Valley’s no holds barred pursuit of AI, even at the expense of the safety of vulnerable people and children.

Daniel J. Solove is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. The project of his latest book, On Privacy and Technology, is to synthesize twenty five years of thinking about privacy into a “succinct and accessible” volume and to help the reader understand “the relationship between law, technology, and privacy” in rapidly changing world. Justin Hendrix spoke to him about the book and how recent events in the United States relate to his areas of concern.

Through To Thriving is a a special series of podcast episodes hosted by Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli. With her guests, Anika is imagining futures beyond our current moment. For this episode, she spoke with Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at the nonprofit Free Press. Anika and Nora discussed the past and present state of platform accountability advocacy, the steps of building a campaign, the possibility of forming a creative agency to support advocates, and what to make of so called “woke AI.”

This episode and conversation about advocating for change is dedicated to the memory and life of our former colleague and tech accountability researcher and advocate Brandi Collins-Dexter.

On Saturday, July 26, three days after the Trump administration published its AI action plan, China’s foreign ministry released that country’s action plan for global AI governance. As the US pursues “global dominance,” China is communicating a different posture. What should we know about China’s plan, and how does it contrast with the US plan? What's at stake in the competition between the two superpowers?

To answer these questions, Justin Hendrix reached out to a close observer of China's tech policy.  Graham Webster is a lecturer and research scholar at Stanford University in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and he is the Editor-in-Chief of the DigiChina Project, a "collaborative effort to analyze and understand Chinese technology policy developments through direct engagement with primary sources, providing analysis, context, translation, and expert opinion." Webster attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.