The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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.

Renée DiResta, who serves on the board of Tech Policy Press and has been an occasional contributor, is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, published by Hachette Book Group in June. Justin Hendrix had a chance to catch up with DiResta last week to discuss some of the key ideas in the book, and how she sees them playing out in current moment headed into the 2024 US election.

The billionaire owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk, has been in a prolonged dispute with a Supreme Court Judge in Brazil regarding X’s content moderation practices. Earlier this year, Judge Alexandre de Moraes launched an investigation into X after Musk defied a court order to block accounts that supported former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and were accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech.

On Friday afternoon, August 30, following a standoff over an order requiring X to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil, the Judge issued an order to suspend X in the country.

Justin Hendrix spoke to three people following the situation closely in Brazil: Laís Martins, a journalist at the The Intercept in Brazil; Sérgio Spagnuolo, executive director & founder of the data-driven tech news organization Nucleo Journalism; and Dr. Ivar Alberto Hartmann, an associate professor at the Insper Institute of Education and Research in Brazil.

Justin Hendrix speaks with Mark Surman, President of Mozilla, about Mozilla’s work promoting open source AI, the importance of competition in the tech sector, and the regulatory challenges facing the industry. Surman discusses Mozilla's initiatives in AI investment and development, and reflects on what the recent ruling the Google search cases might mean for the future of Mozilla and the tech economy. And, Surman shares his hopes for the future- that we can arrive at a tech economy that is not purely extractive, but rather one that respects people’s values and dignity. 

On Friday, August 16, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in NetChoice v. Bonta, partially upholding and partially vacating a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. The court affirmed that certain provisions of the law are likely to violate the First Amendment by compelling online businesses to assess and mitigate potential harms to children, but it vacated the broader injunction, remanding the case to the district court for further consideration of other parts of the statute, including restrictions on the collection and use of children's data. 

In this episode, Justin Hendrix recounts the basics of the Ninth Circuit ruling. And in a second segment that was recorded just days before Friday's ruling, Tech Policy Press fellow Dean Jackson is joined by Tech Justice Law Project executive director Meetali Jain and USC Marshall School Neely Center managing director Ravi Iyer for a discussion on key questions that were before the Ninth Circuit and their implications for future efforts at tech regulation.

Raúl Torrez was sworn in as New Mexico’s 32nd Attorney General in January 2023. Last December, Attorney General Torrez filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly failing to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking. The outcome of this case could have broader implications for how online platforms are regulated and held accountable for user safety in the future, including through litigation.

Justin Hendrix spoke to Attorney General Torrez in advance of a panel discussion he participated in alongside the Attorney General of Virginia at the 2024 Coalition to End Exploitation Global Summit on Wednesday, August 7, 2024 in Washington DC.

In May, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion with David Rand, who is a professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. David's work cuts across fields such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, and with his collaborators he's done a substantial amount of work on the psychological underpinnings of belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories.

David is one of the authors, with Thomas Costello and Gordon Pennycook, of a paper published this spring titled "Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI." The paper considers the potential for people to enter into dialogues with LLMs and whether such exchanges can change the minds of conspiracy theory believers. According to the study, dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo reduced belief in various conspiracy theories, with effects lasting many months. Even more intriguingly, these dialogues seemed to have a spillover effect, reducing belief in unrelated conspiracies and influencing conspiracy-related behaviors.

While these findings are certainly promising, the experiment raises a variety of questions. Some are specific under the premise of the experiment- such as how compelling and tailored does the counter-evidence need to be, and how well do the LLMs perform? What happens if and when they make mistakes or hallucinate? And some of the questions are bigger picture- are there ethical implications in using AI in this manner? Can these results be replicated and scaled in real-world applications, such as on social media platforms, and is that a good idea? Is an internet where various AI agents and systems are poking and prodding us and trying to shape or change our beliefs a good thing? This episode contains an edited recording of the discussion, which was hosted at Betaworks.

The Distributed AI Research Institute, or DAIR—which seeks to conduct community-rooted AI research that is independent from the technology industry—has launched a new project called the Data Workers' Inquiry to invite data workers to create their own research and recount their experiences. The project is supported by DAIR, the Weizenbaum Institute, and TU Berlin. For this episode, journalist and audio producer Rebecca Rand parsed some of the ideas and experiences discussed at a virtual launch event for the inquiry that took place earlier this month. 

In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, Justin Hendrix invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including:

• Henry Farrell, a professor of the international affairs and democracy at Johns Hopkins University and the recent co-author with Abraham Newman of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
• Elizabeth Spiers, a writer and digital strategist and contributing writer for the New York Times, and co-host the Slate Money Podcast.
• Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs.