The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Earlier this month in The Guardian newspaper, researcher and journalist Jane Lytvynenko wrote: 

Jane, who is presently a Senior Research Fellow on the Tech and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, grew up in Kyiv. She moved to Canada at age eleven, but traveled back to visit her family and friends nearly every year, sometimes spending entire summers in Ukraine. Now– like nearly every Ukrainian, no matter how far from the land that is under assault in a brutal, illegal Russian invasion– she is part of the "battle over what can be done," a battle of ideas, emotion and the way they are combined into political will.  

I caught up with Jane to get her take on what’s happening in the information component of this war, including the role of the social media platforms and the news media in confronting disinformation, the role of myth making and the transmission of cultural information in this moment, and the role of citizen diplomacy. 

Lawmakers around the world want to do something about social media, and in particular content moderation. But what if the interventions they are developing are based on a flawed conceptual framework about how content moderation works, or how it should work?

This week I had a chance to talk to one of the smartest legal minds on questions related to content moderation to explore some fresh thinking on the subject: evelyn douek, a Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. evelyn is the author of “Content Moderation as Administration,” forthcoming Harvard Law Review, a new paper that serves as the basis for our discussion.

The United States Congress has before it dozens of bills intended to rein in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. This raft of proposed legislation is in response to various harms that have come to light over the past few years, including dangers to democracy, harassment and hate speech, concerns over safety (especially for children), and various ways the platforms reinforce inequities and permit discrimination. 

One agency in the federal government arguably has the power to take action on these issues with its current authority- the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC. But there are a variety of legislative proposals that would clarify the FTC’s role with regard to social media, and even provide it with substantial new resources to police the harms these massive companies produce. 

The NYU Center for Business and Human Rights, with which I have collaborated in the past, last month produced a substantial report detailing principles and policy goals intended to clarify the debate in Congress and shape an agenda for the FTC, recommending that Congress direct the FTC to oversee the social media industry under the consumer protection authority that the agency already exercises in its regulation of other industries. 

To learn more about the report and its recommendations, I spoke to Paul Barrett, the Center’s Deputy Director. Paul joined the Center in September 2017 after working for more than three decades as a journalist and author focusing on the intersection of business, law, and society.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, governments and tech companies have taken swift action to limit the flow of propaganda out of Russia, and Russia has in turn taken draconian measures to limit the flow of information into Russia, including banning some Western social media platforms, crushing what remained of independent journalism in the country and cracking down on free expression generally.

How do these events fit in the broader scheme of things? The trajectory for global internet freedom and digital rights, just like the trajectory for democracy generally, has been going in the wrong direction for years. What do governments, organizations and the community of individuals concerned with these issues need to do to try to change that trajectory, and to support those working turn the tide?

To answer these questions and more, I invited three experts to join me for this week’s podcast

• Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation
• Allie Funk, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House
• Justin Sherman, a Fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at The Atlantic Council

Governments and tech platforms have moved quickly to take action against Russian state media since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. But what frameworks exist in international law that could inform our thinking about these complicated questions at the intersection of speech and human rights?

To answer that question, I spoke to Vivek Krishnamurthy, the Samuelson-Glushko Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). Vivek is currently a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Senior Associate of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The past couple of months has seen controversies over misinformation, anti-vaccine and racist material, and how best to moderate content on online publishing platforms such as Spotify and Substack.

To talk more about these issues of speech, editorial intervention, content moderation, and implications for democracy, I invited two expert commentators, Bridget Todd and Elizabeth Spiers, to the Tech Policy Press podcast. 

• Bridget Todd is the creator and host of the award-winning technology and culture podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet and communications director for UltraViolet, a gender justice advocacy organization working to build a feminist Internet. Bridget wrote a great piece for The Nation, titled It’s Not Just Joe Rogan. The Entire Digital Space Is Rotten. 
• Elizabeth Spiers is a writer, NYU journalism school professor, political commentator, and digital strategist. She is also the former editor in chief of The New York Observer and was the founding editor of Gawker.  Elizabeth wrote a trio of columns on Medium addressing the issues raised by the Rogan controversy and the Substack statements. 

Dr. Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law, is an expert on the intersection of civil rights and technology. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy and an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and author of an award-winning book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech from Stanford Press, published in 2019.

In addition to her academic responsibilities, she is President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization that combats online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted a model criminal statute on nonconsensual pornography- “revenge porn”- which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for proposed federal legislation to tackle the issue.

Dr. Franks holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law and at Harvard University as a lecturer in social studies and philosophy.

This month, Tech Policy Press had a chance to catch up with her about her ideas, her work, and her critics.

In this podcast, we’re going to listen in on a panel discussion hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center on State Media, Social Media, and the Conflict in Ukraine.

Convened by Nate Persily, Co-director of the Cyber Policy Center and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the panel considers the moves taken in recent days by governments and technology platforms, and the implications for the ways state-sponsored media and information will be regulated in the future. Guests include:

• Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Meta, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
• Yoel Roth, Head of Site Integrity at Twitter
• Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center and former Member of European Parliament
• Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory
• Alex Stamos, Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer of Facebook
• Alicia Wanless, Director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Mike McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, governments’ and private companies’ moves to limit or ban Russian state media have rapidly spread from the European Union, to the United States, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere.

The cascade of developments harkens back to the World War II period, when governments regarded German propaganda as a weapon of war and used tools such as short wave radio to reach citizens behind enemy lines to penetrate the Axis power’s internal information environment. (The BBC, as if to underscore this point, announced Thursday it would resurrect the use of shortwave radio to broadcast news into Ukraine and parts of Russia).

In order to put these new developments in historical context, we hear from two experts on the role of information and media in war: 

• Heidi Tworek, a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia and author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945, a book that details how the Nazis used news and information to advance their agenda; and
• Emerson Brooking, Resident Senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council and author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, which considers how social media is changing the nature of war and conflict.

Upstream from concerns about policy, we enter the realm of ethics- and that is the subject of today’s podcast. Our guest is Stephanie Hare, the author of Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics, published on February 22nd in London Publishing Partnership’s Perspectives series. The book was edited by Diane Coyle.

Stephanie Hare is a researcher and broadcaster with an expertise in technology, politics and history. As part of the BBC Expert Women programme, she often shares her insights on television and radio. She has been a technology consultant and an academic, earning a PhD in Theory and History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.