The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.