The Tech Policy Press Podcast

In this special episode of the podcast, we’re going to consider questions related to disinformation and the information ecosystem, and the role of the tech platforms in this deadly moment. 

The first guest is Clint Watts, a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC and author of Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News. His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation, and he has testified before multiple Senate committees regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West. 

The second guest is Taylor Lorenz, a reporter covering tech culture and online creators who has worked for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and recently joined The Washington Post as a columnist. Taylor wrote this week for Input Magazine about meme scams capitalizing on the Ukraine conflict, and I spoke to her about what they say about our social media driven information ecosystem.

The final guest this hour is Patrick Coffee, a correspondent at Business Insider on the media and advertising team. He was formerly editor at large at Adweek, where he led the agencies team and managed the AgencySpy blog. I spoke to him about how platforms and the broader ad tech ecosystem are handling the conflict, and the ethical choices they face about how or whether to do business with Russian state media.

Facebook vaunts its multibillion dollar investment in content moderation in advertisements and every time a senior executive is asked to address the problems of mis- and disinformation, hate speech, abuse, bigotry and other violations on its platforms. But what does that investment look like at the last mile? Who does the work? What are the conditions they face? 

Today we hear from Billy Perrigo, a journalist at Time magazine, who tells us of the plight of outsourced content moderation workers in Kenya tasked with moderating the typical stream of gore and bigotry, as well as screening for hate speech and incitement to violence emanating out of war-torn Ethiopia.

When Peter Pomerantsev was working as a documentary producer in Russia, he observed how Vladimir Putin employed propaganda to spread such deep doubt and division that meaningful political debate became impossible. Since then, he has written two books on the subject– Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which chronicled Putin’s strategy and tactics; and This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which looked at similar phenomena employed by despots, ideologues and grifters around the world.

Now, Pomerantzev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of Arena, a research project that explores how media can reach polarized and antagonistic audiences, using insights from on-the-ground research in countries including Ukraine, Italy, Hungary, Germany and Sweden. Tech Police Press spoke to him on Tuesday, February 15th, 2022, about his observations on the role of the dynamics in the information ecosystem in the current conflict on the Ukraine-Russia border.

To discuss the Canadian trucker protests and the relationship between topics networked activism, social media manipulation, extremism and law enforcement- as well as the potential for Canadian convoys to inspire similar actions in the US, where right wing media personalities have embraced the idea- we speak with two experts:

• Joan Donovan, Ph.D., the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
• Amarnath Amarasingam, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

This interview was recorded on Monday, February 14th, 2022.

The first segment in this episode focuses on the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act, known as the EARN IT Act. Nathalie Maréchal, Ph.D., Senior Policy and Partnerships Manager at Ranking Digital Rights, wrote in Tech Policy Press about what motivates her opposition to the legislation, and she joined the podcast to share her perspective. 

The second segment takes on the idea of tech exceptionalism. Yaël Eisenstat, a Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute and Nils Gilman, vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute and the deputy editor of Noema Magazine, wrote in Noema about "How tech uses the promise of endless innovation to ward off regulating even its present-day harms."

Warning: this episode features discussion of sexual assault and rape.

This week’s podcast has two segments. We’re going to hear from Vice News reporter Carter Sherman about her story from last week titled “Woman Says She Was ‘Virtually Gang-Raped’ in Facebook's Metaverse,” detailing an incident that represents an early test of Facebook’s ability create a safe environment in its virtual world. Then, I speak with Dr. Carly Kocurek, a cultural historian specializing in the study of new media technologies and video gaming, about a story from 1993-A Rape in Cyberspace, written by Julian Dibbell- that presaged some of the questions we’re faced with when thinking about safety and abuse in virtual environments. 

Earlier this year, Matt Rivitz announced he planned to step aside from Sleeping Giants, an activist campaign launched five years ago to address the flow of advertising revenues to sites that promote hate speech and disinformation. The ad tech ecosystem is exceptionally complex- and the incentives in place lend themselves to waste and fraud, and to large sums of money flowing to sites that promote questionable content often without the knowledge of the people spending that money. In 2016, Rivitz and Nandini Jammi, now the cofounder of Check My Ads and a recent guest on this podcast, started building a community of concerned citizens to notify the brands often unwittingly propping up sites that feature bigoted or dangerous content. 

Scoring early wins- such as against Breitbart, which was starved of advertising by the Sleeping Giants campaign, losing thousands of programmatic advertisers- the effort ended up becoming a community of as many as a million concerned citizens with chapters all over the world, with chapters forming in France, Australia and Brazil to fight hate in their countries. Sleeping Giants played a role in a variety of campaigns, such as the DropFox campaign that urged media buyers not to buy advertisements on Fox News, and the recent Stop Hate For Profit boycott against Facebook, that saw hundreds of companies join a boycott of the social media site for its failure to address bigotry and violence on its platform.

We caught up with Matt about his decision to step aside, what he’s learned, what’s changed in the advertising ecosystem, and what’s necessary to achieve a lasting solution to the problems Sleeping Giants has addressed these last five years.

Ukraine has long been known as a "live fire" environment in cybersecurity circles, but with Russian aggression intensifying there are concerns that cyberattacks may signal the beginning of a broader conflict following a string of attacks in the last week that targeted Ukrainian government and private sector websites. 

The United States Department of Homeland Security has also warned that Russia may target "US networks—from low-level denials-of-service to destructive attacks targeting critical infrastructure," in retaliation for perceived threats against it, though the threshold for such action is believed to be high.

To learn more about cyber threats against Ukraine and how the country is preparing for it, Tech Policy Press spoke with Viktor Zhora, Deputy Head of the State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine, who is responsible for digital transformation and cybersecurity.

Last week, the European Parliament gave initial approval to the Digital Services Act, which contains a set of regulations that will have major implications for tech platforms, including on how they moderate content and on their business models. This spring, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union will debate the details of the legislation before voting on a final version.

To learn more about what is at stake and where the DSA is in the process, I spoke with Mathias Vermeulen, public policy director at the consultancy AWO, based in Brussels, Belgium.

This episode features two segments. First, we catch up with one reporter who has read every single one of the documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen: Shoshana Wodinsky, a staff reporter at Gizmodo covering consumer privacy and tech policy. Shoshana is part of a team that is preparing to release the papers to the public.

And then, we hear from three lawyers- including one former Massachusetts attorney general- that were involved in the legal actions that led to the Big Tobacco Master Settlement, one of the largest settlement of civil litigation claims in American history, about whether that effort to hold an industry to account might provide a roadmap for addressing the harms of tech firms. Scott Harshbarger is a Former Attorney General of Massachusetts who signed the settlement on behalf of his state; Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and Chief Assistant City Attorney in San Francisco who pursued the tobacco companies there; and Thomas Green served as the First Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts working with Scott on the tobacco lawsuits from 1992 to 1998.