The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, there is a good amount of science emerging about the relationship between the information environment and vaccine uptake. Today we’ll hear from two researchers from different disciplines about their work on social media and vaccine misinformation.

First up is John Alexander Bryden, Executive Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, with whom I discuss the results of some recent research his team had conducted on the problem. And second, I speak with Kolina Koltai, who when I interviewed her at the end of April was transitioning from her position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at The University of Washington to a role at Twitter. 

When it comes to content moderation and the regulation of harmful content on social media, there are various metaphors at play for how to think about doing it. One that we’ve explored on this podcast in the past is to see it as a form of administration, or what legal scholar evelyn douek calls the “rough online analogue of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bureaucracy of moderators.” 

But some scholars, like douek, see limitations in this way of thinking. That includes Rachel Griffin, a PhD candidate and lecturer at Sciences Po Law School who recently published a new paper in the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law titled The Sanitised Platform. The paper employs thinking from feminist legal scholar Vicki Schultz about US law on sexual harassment in the workplace as a framework to critique approaches to content moderation and social media regulation.

This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines. 

To learn more about the role of social media in the rehabilitation of the Marcos brand and to dig a little deeper into the conditions that drive disinformation, I spoke to Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, and the author of a recent piece in Time magazine, The World Should Be Worried About a Dictator’s Son's Apparent Win in the Philippines. 

Jonathan is also the cohost, with Kat Ventura, of a podcast on the world of troll farms and propaganda in the Philippines called Catch Me If You Can. Check it out.

For the past six years, an independent research program at New America called Ranking Digital Rights has evaluated the policies and practices of some of the world’s largest technology and telecom firms, producing a dataset that reveals their shortcomings with respect to human rights obligations. Ranking Digital Rights evaluates more than 300 aspects of each company it ranks that fall broadly into three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy.

Following the release of this year’s report, which we covered at Tech Policy Press, Ranking Digital Rights hosted a session on Charting the Future of Big Tech Accountability. Nathalie Maréchal, Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights and a past guest on this podcast, moderated the panel, which included:

• Sarah Couturier-Tanoh, Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE)
• Jesse Lehrich, Co-Founder, Accountable Tech 
• Chris Lewis, President and CEO, Public Knowledge
• Katarzyna Szymielewicz, President, Panoptykon Foundation
• Sophie Zhang, activist and Facebook whistleblower

The June cover story for Wired magazine is on a movement in tech that many see as having the potential to rewire not just the internet, but to produce a fundamentally more democratic and equitable society.  

The story is titled “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution,” and I had the chance to speak to its author, Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman.

UN human rights experts that chronicled Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar concluded that it played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook’s own investigation into the situation also found fault with the company’s practices, and made various recommendations for how it should develop a human rights strategy to protect against such things from happening again. 

Today, we’re going to hear from a refugee from the violence, who is with other Rohingya refugees in a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, as well as three human rights advocates. And we’ll learn about another complaint filed by sixteen Rohingya youth to Ireland’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, that argues that Facebook violated the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by allowing its platform to be used to incite violence against them and their community. The remedy sought by these refugees is for Facebook to divest from a portion of its 2017 profits and provide remediation for their community in the form of educational activities and facilities in Cox’s Bazar.

Please note that the connection to Cox’s Bazar was not perfect- if you have any trouble making out a word here or there, you can refer to the transcript at the Tech Policy Press website. 

Researchers Alice Marwick, Benjamin Clancy, and Katherine Furl this week released Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature, an analysis of "cross-disciplinary work on radicalization to better understand the present concerns around online radicalization and far-right extremist and fringe movements."

In order to learn more about the issues explored in the review, I spoke to Marwick, who is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP).

Over the past year of publishing this podcast, we’ve looked again and again at the issue of the power of tech platforms in society. Now, there is a book titled The Power of the Platforms: Shaping Media and Society, by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter, just published at the end of last month by Oxford University Press.

Justin Hendrix had the chance to catch up with one of the authors about what they learned in writing the book, and the complexities of the subject.

If you take the time to look at the SEC filings for Meta Platforms, Inc. - the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - you will find various disclosures about its ongoing legal battles. Taken together they reveal patterns, particularly in how the company is led. To get an update on some of the key cases under consideration, from Cambridge Analytica to competition, I spoke with one particularly keen observer of Meta: Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next.

Last week at Stanford University, former President Barack Obama gave a keynote address at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm." This week, many of the issues Obama discussed were brought into sharp relief when it was announced that billionaire Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars.

For reactions to Obama's speech- and to Musk’s antics- I spoke with

• David Kaye, Professor of Law at UC Irvine and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
• Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; and
• Jameel Jaffer, Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. 

In the opening, you'll also hear just under the last five minutes of Obama's speech, which will give you a sense of it.