The Tech Policy Press Podcast

There are two segments in this episode. First, we hear from Jay Van Bavel, an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, about social media, misinformation and collective behavior following a week in which he was brigaded by far right and anti-vaccine personalities for calling in to question the veracity of claims made in Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. And second, we catch up with Trooper Sanders, the CEO of Benefits Data Trust, about new broadband benefits intended to close the digital divide, and the coordination that is necessary among federal agencies to make sure the funds set aside by law reach the people that need them most. 

In the second of two episodes on extremism, media and tech one year after the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, we’re going to hear from two individuals who are working to deprive the racists and violent extremists who seek to radicalize Americans and attack our democracy. 

The Check My Ads Institute is an independent watchdog organization that seeks to reform the digital ad tech industry from inside. At its website, checkymads.org, it says "we're holding the surveillance ad tech industry accountable for abuses against advertisers and consumers, and spearheading the development of a transparent, efficient and privacy-focused digital advertising marketplace."

This week, Check My Ads launched a new campaign- Defund the Insurrectionists- that seeks to cut domestic extremists off from a key source of funding for their propaganda efforts. Check my ads wants to alert advertisers that are unwittingly funding the insurrectionists, and demand that ad tech companies that continue to send millions of dollars in ad revenues to extremist platforms, despite it being against their terms of service, cease their bad business practices.

To learn more about the new campaign, I caught up with Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, the team behind Check My Ads.

This week, the United States observed the first anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this episode, we’re going to look at the extremist movement in the United States and how the media and technology environment plays a role in it.

We’re going to hear first from Jared Holt, a resident fellow at Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), who will walk us through the findings of his latest report, After the Insurrection: How Domestic Extremists Adapted and Evolved After the January 6 US Capitol Attack, which chronicles how the far right has reorganized and adjusted strategically since January 6 to position itself to continue the assault on our democracy.

And then, we’ll hear from Candace Rondeaux and Ben Dalton, who just completed a report with an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) and staff at New America titled Parler and the Road to the Capitol Attack: Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6. The report looks closely at one social media platform that served as a 'hothouse' of activity leading up to and on January 6- and how the alternative social media ecosystem has evolved since that day. 

This first episode of 2022 features a discussion hosted by the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU (CSMaP) that gathered academic, policy, and tech experts to discuss ideas about how to make social media a safer and more civil place. 

The panel was expertly moderated by Jane Lytvynenko, a Senior Research Fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and included:

• Niousha Roshani, Deputy Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab at Stanford University’s Program on Democracy and the Internet; 
• Rebekah Tromble, Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University; 
• Joshua A. Tucker, Co-Director of CSMaP and a Professor of Politics at NYU; and 
• and Sahar Massachi, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Integrity Institute. 

Thanks to Erik Opsal at CSMaP for his assistance providing the audio, and to Zeve Sanderson, Founding Executive Director at CSMaP, whose voice you will hear in the closing. 

This episode focuses on the intersection of race, technology and policy. First, we hear from Carmen Scurato, Suher Adi and Jacquelyn Mason- members of the Disinfo Defense League, which calls itself a network of intersectional organizations fighting disinformation that affects communities of color- about the League’s new policy platform. And second, we speak with two researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life- Daniel Kreiss and Madhavi Reddi- about the need for social media platforms to adopt race-conscious policies. 

We’ve got two segments today. First up, Alexandra Reeve Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) discusses last week’s Summit for Democracy and what it accomplished. Second, we speak with Marshall Steinbaum, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah about market and monopoly power, tech platforms and antitrust.

In October, New York City launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy. A 116-page document, the strategy says "Like software itself, AI will touch virtually every area of life in the years ahead, including everything from basic scientific research to the operation of various products and services, and its impacts will be felt from a personal to a societal scale. For these reasons, the City of New York believes that an ecosystem approach grounded in digital rights is necessary to maximize benefits, minimize harms, and ensure the responsible application of AI."

To learn more, I spoke with Neal Parikh, Director of Artificial Intelligence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

Today, we’ve got two conversations about the problem of mis- and disinformation.

In the first segment, Courtney Radsch, a Tech Policy Press contributor and board member, speaks with Vivian Schiller, Executive Director of Aspen Digital, a part of the Aspen Institute that just released the final report of the Commission on Information Disorder.

And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Karen Hao, senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review about her year reporting on how the business model of social media platforms incentivizes the deterioration of information ecosystems. 

Today, we’ve got two separate but related conversations about social media and how it intersects with democracy and society.

In the first segment, we’re going to hear from Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi, two former Facebook employees who are the founders of the Integrity Institute, a new nonprofit organization. They believe one solution to the problems on social media is the development of a community of integrity professionals with experience at a variety of social media platforms that can come together to address problems and share best practices together.

Then, we’re going to look under the hood of some fresh ideas about how to democratize policymaking on social media platforms from Aviv Ovadya, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of a proposal titled "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure." To help evaluate Aviv's ideas, I'm also joined by Joe Bak-Coleman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, and Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

There are two segments in this week's show:

First- Ifeoma Ozoma is the Founder and Principal of Earthseed, a consulting firm advising individuals, organizations, and companies on tech accountability, public policy and health misinformation. A tech policy expert, Ifeoma is a co-sponsor of the Silenced No More Act. The legislation, authored by CA State Senator Connie Leyva and recently signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, allows everyone in California to share information about discrimination or harassment they have faced on the job, even after signing an NDA. Ifeoma led an initiative to provide tech whistleblowers with needed resources called the Tech Worker Handbook, and is now leading a project to scale the protections in the Silenced No More Act to more companies and workers via shareholder activism.

Second- this week, the Filter Bubble Transparency Act was unveiled in the House of Representatives. The proposed legislation would require “require that internet platforms give users the option to engage with a platform without being manipulated by algorithms driven by user-specific data.” To explore the ideas behind the proposed legislation, I spoke to two people: Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and an entrepreneur and writer; and Eli Pariser, Co-Director of New Public, an activist, an entrepreneur and author of the 2011 bestseller The Filter Bubble.