The Tech Policy Press Podcast

For the second year running, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation- GLAAD- has released a Social Media Safety Index that finds that major tech platforms are failing to keep LGBTQ users safe. The report was released at a time when the broader social and political context is growing more dangerous- in the US, nearly 250+ anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in legislatures this year, even as we see a surge of online hate speech and disinformation about the LGBTQ community, as well as physical attacks. 

To learn more about the challenges this community faces in holding social media platforms to account, I spoke to two people who helped author the report and devise the index: Jenni Olsen, Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, and Andrea Hackl, a research analyst at Goodwin Simon Strategic Research.

India is the world’s most populous democracy, and also one that is facing challenges. This week we focus on the Indian government’s efforts to create a  bureaucratic apparatus to enforce what appears to be an ever more frequent number of requests for social media platforms to remove content deemed inappropriate for one reason or another.

And for this week’s episode, I’m joined by the author of a recent piece on this subject, Angrej Singh, who is interning with Tech Policy Press this summer. Angrej helped to pull together the panel of experts-- all based in India-- that you’ll hear from today, including:

• Neeti Biyani, Policy and Advocacy Manager, Internet Society
• Tejasi Panjiar, Associate Policy Counsel, Internet Freedom Foundation
• Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation

At this year’s Collision, a tech conference that took place in June in Toronto, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to interview two editors about how they think about the problem of disinformation, and how they direct their publication’s coverage of it as an issue. This short podcast installment is audio of the live stage discussion with Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept, and Matt Kaminski, editor in chief of Politico.

Many thanks to Stephen Twomey and the other organizers of the Collision conference for including this panel in a series of discussions on the role of the fourth estate. 

One of the areas where applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence are most fraught with ethical concerns is in law enforcement and criminal justice. To learn more about the opportunities and the concerns, Tech Policy Press spoke to Renée Cummings, who joined the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science in 2020 as the School’s first Data Activist in Residence. In addition to being an AI ethicist, she is also a Criminologist and Criminal Psychologist. 

In the age of social media and disinformation, journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and media watchdogs in democracies are figuring out how to band together to create a line of defense against those who seek to sow division and doubt in advance of elections. 

This week, a French coalition calling itself the Online Election Integrity Watch Group published a summary report on its activities ahead of this spring’s national election there. The group includes entities such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Check First, GEODE, the Institute of Complex Systems, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Tracking Exposed, and Reset Tech, an initiative run by the Luminate foundation. To learn more about what the Watch Group learned in this election cycle, Tech Policy Press spoke to the report’s lead authors, Théophile Lenoir and Iris Boyer.

This episode focuses on how best to create mechanisms for outside scrutiny of technology platforms.

The first segment is with Brandon Silverman, the founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, an analytics toolset acquired by Facebook in 2016 that permitted academics, journalists and others to inspect how information spreads on the platform. 

And the second segment is a panel provided courtesy of the non-partisan policy organization the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On June 15, GMF hosted Opening the Black Box: Auditing Algorithms for Accountable Tech, featuring Anna Lenhart, Senior Technology Policy Advisor, Rep. Lori Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts; Deborah Raji, a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation and a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley; and Mona Sloane, a sociologist affiliated with NYU and the University of Tübingen AI center. The panel was moderated by Ellen P. Goodman, a Professor at Rutgers Law School and a Visiting Senior Fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States.

This week, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report on YouTube that Tech Policy Press Editor Justin Hendrix helped write with the Center’s Deputy Director, Paul Barrett. YouTube is generally understood to have avoided the scrutiny of journalists, researchers and lawmakers, at least relative to other social media platforms like Facebook. But there is a cost to flying under the radar. 

To address some of the key issues, this episode features two segments. The first is a conversation with Paul Barrett, and the second with two of the sources for the report, University of Washington associate professor and Center for an Informed Public cofounder Kate Starbird and Mnemonic Associate Director of Advocacy Dia Kayyali. 

When it comes to visions of the way that technology will intersect with society in the future, Silicon Valley has a near monopoly. It’s been nearly 30 years since Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published the essay The Californian Ideology, which they say naturalized and gave a “technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures,” a “faith” that is “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.”

Now, the economic power of Silicon Valley has left its billionaire class fairly certain it is above reproach, unchecked and unchallenged, even as some of the biggest firms spawned there are locked in a staring contest with governments in Washington, Brussels and beyond. 

To talk more about the ways in which Silicon Valley elites have captured so much of what people define as “progress” and the pronouncements of some individuals who make wild promises about the abundant future that technology will supposedly deliver, Tech Policy Press spoke to Dave Karpf, who has been thinking about these issues for some time. He is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, published in May 2012 by Oxford University Press, and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy published in December 2016 by Oxford University Press.

On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it.  There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect.

A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Nanfu Wang, In the Same Breath (HBO) is a riveting account of how the pandemic unfolded, how governments tried desperately to control the message as it did, and the ways in which citizens in two very different cultures and systems reacted, even as they themselves participated in shaping of the discourse on social media. 

This episode of the podcast features a discussion with Nanfu Wang, who directed and produced the film.

The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not mince words. They say that “climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people.” 

The quality of the public discourse on climate issues plays a role. A report released by the IPCC in February says that the “[r]hetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent.” An April installment describes how “opposition from status quo interests” and “the propagation of scientifically misleading information” are “barriers” to climate action and have “negative implications for climate policy.” 

This week, a coalition of groups published a report titled Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 & Beyond that outlines prominent discourses that seek to pervert and prevent efforts to address climate change. The report makes recommendations for governments, social media platforms platforms and the media on what to do to address the the issue.

Tech Policy Press spoke to two individuals involved in the effort to produce the report to learn more:

• Jennie King, the head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)
• Michael Khoo, the Climate Change Coalition co-chair at Friends of the Earth