The Tech Policy Press Podcast

On October 7th, Tech Policy Press hosted a mini-conference called Reconciling Social Media and Democracy.

While various solutions to problems at the intersection of social media and democracy are under consideration, from regulation to antitrust action, some experts are enthusiastic about the opportunity to create a new social media ecosystem that relies less on centrally managed platforms like Facebook and more on decentralized, interoperable services and components. 

The first discussion at the event took on the notion of ‘middleware’ for content moderation, and featured:

Dr. Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy. 

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal, a writer, researcher and activist working at the intersection of internet policy and human rights advocacy who is Senior Policy & Partnerships Manager at Ranking Digital Rights, a non-profit research initiative housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute.

Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center and is a Lecturer at Stanford Law School;

And Richard Reisman, an entrepreneur, investor and writer, including at Tech Policy Press, where he has written about decentralizing social media.

The United Nations General Assembly just took place in New York. We get a report on it from Maya Plentz, who covers technology and innovation at the United Nations and its agencies, for The UN Brief, a subscription-based news platform.

Then, we’re going to hear from Ari Ezra Waldman, a lawyer and sociologist, and Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University. He’s the author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power.

The relationship between Facebook and political polarization is in the spotlight. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower that took documents to the Wall Street Journal, Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, appeared on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday night. “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world," she said.

Yet Facebook executives such as Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg take pains to disavow the connection between social media and polarization, and in particular to extreme events such as the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

To take a step back from the whistleblower news cycle, I spoke to one academic researcher who has looked at the available evidence in great detail. After conducting an analysis of nearly 100 social science studies that look at the connections between media, social media and political polarization, researcher Emily Kubin has some things to say on the subject- she joins the Tech Policy Press podcast to describe her work.

Most Tech Policy Press podcast listeners will by now be well familiar with the Facebook Files, a series of Wall Street Journal articles revealing internal research and information from Facebook that show the company aware of a variety of serious problems on its platforms that affect people’s lives and our politics. This week, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Safety, was brought before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security to discuss the revelations in the data about Instagram’s effects on children and teens, and in particular their mental health. Just before the hearing, the Wall Street Journal published the documents it reviewed, which details the relationship between the platform and body issues, teen depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts. 

We’ve got a two part show today where we’ll hear from two experts responding to the testimony yesterday, and talking about what can be done to make change. First, to put a critical lens on the testimony, I spoke to Amanda Lenhart, a quantitative and qualitative researcher at Data & Society who studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. She has spent many years examining how adolescents and families use and think about technology. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies. I recommend her report, The Unseen Teen: The Challenges of Building Healthy Tech for Young People, which takes the reader inside tech companies building products for young people, and exposes the challenges and contradictions of doing that work.

Then, to get a better sense of some of the legislative reforms that may help address the types of problems exposed in the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, I spoke to Ariel Fox Johnson, Senior Counsel for Global Policy at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates around issues at the intersection of media, technology, and the lives of children. Ariel’s work focuses on enhancing family privacy rights, strengthening students' educational privacy, and promoting robust consumer protections in the online world.

We’ve got a three part jumbo show today. First, we’ll dive in to the results of the annual Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House with Allie Funk, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House. Then, we’re going to look at one place where internet freedoms are at risk- Canada, where a new proposal to regulate online harms looms- with Michael Geist, Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. And then, we’re going to talk about the complexity of generating policies for content management on social media- and how a well-crafted multi-stakeholder approach can help- with Chris Riley, senior fellow of Internet Governance at the R Street Institute, a think thank in Washington D.C.

On Monday, September 13th, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published a report titled Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization – And What Can Be Done About It, written by the Center’s deputy director, Paul Barrett, research fellow Grant Sims, and Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix.

Then on Wednesday, September 15th, the Wall Street Journal published an article in a series of exclusives, based on leaked internal documents from Facebook, with the headline “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead: Internal memos show how a big 2018 change rewarded outrage and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes”.

Today, you’ll hear from Keach Hagey, one of the authors of that Wall Street Journal exclusive, followed by a conversation between Paul Barrett, Grant Sims and Justin Hendrix about the Center for Business and Human Rights report.

Today, I spoke with Representative Lori Trahan, the Congresswoman for the third district in Massachussetts, to get her reaction to a disturbing report in the Wall Street Journal about internal research at Instagram related to mental health impacts of that social media service, particularly on teens. 

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published its headline, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.” The Journal’s Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman wrote that the Instagram documents they obtained were part of a "trove of internal communications provided to them on areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking."

• “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” said a March 2020 slide presentation.
• “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from 2019.
• And, the Journal says that one presentation showed that "among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram."

I caught up with Representative Trahan earlier this afternoon. She put the Wall Street Journal’s report into the context of questions she asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a March 2021 hearing in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, and talked about what Congress might do next to hold the company accountable.

In August, researchers Bridget Barrett and Daniel Kreiss from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media joined with Katharine (Kate) Dommett of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics and International Relations to publish research in the journal Policy & Internet that took a hard look at how democratic values express themselves in technology policy documents in the UK and the US in a paper titled, The capricious relationship between technology and democracy: Analyzing public policy discussions in the UK and US.

We spoke to Kate and Daniel about the research, including their findings on the lack of clarity about what democratic ideals we are trying to protect, and why the policy making discourse on tech and democracy is “often out of step with the growing literature which suggests that political conflicts between social groups, right-wing extremism, and anti-democratic actions increasingly taken by elites and parties are at the root of growing democratic crises.”

Tomorrow is Labor Day. This week, we hear from someone who studies gig workers and the systems and companies that manage them. Diana Enriquez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies labor, technology, informal economies, and law, particularly in the US and Latin America. This interview with Diana is about two papers she helped author in recent months- Pre-Automation: Insourcing and Automating the Gig Economy, published in the journal Sociologica earlier this year and another, Managing Algorithms: partial automation of middle management and its implications for gig worker, published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Management this summer. 

This episode features two interviews. The first looks at the struggles of those in the sex and sextech industries to get access to capital and to create products and services that respect users and creators, and the second considers the state of privacy and its relationship to power.

OnlyFans, a UK-based site that built a billion dollar business enabling creators to post and get paid for sexually explicit material, announced this month that as of October 1st it would no longer permit anything much more salacious than nudity. This came as a surprise to its legion of creators and its many paying fans. But the reason is straightforward: financial firms will simply not support businesses that deal in sex and pornography. The company has since reversed its decision after outcry from its community.

When I read about OnlyFans’ predicament, I immediately thought about another venture that encountered many of the same issues when it got up and running a decade ago- MakeLoveNotPorn. Founded by Cindy Gallop, MakeLoveNotPorn bills itself as “the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex video-sharing platform.”

I caught up with Cindy to hear more about her experience with these issues, get perspective on the OnlyFans announcement, and talk about what it says about a fundamental predicament for the adult content and services industry. Along the way she also offered commentary on the broader tech culture and the way it approaches content moderation and regard for the safety of users that points to a vision of a different kind of internet that is lost in Big Tech’s current obsession with scale. And, we talked about whether (or when) cryptocurrencies might be the answer.

Next up, we turn to a discussion about a recently published book, Privacy is Power: Why And How you Should Take Back Control of Your Data, by Carissa Veliz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. 

Carissa works on digital ethics (with an emphasis on privacy and AI ethics), practical ethics more generally, political philosophy, and public policy and is interested in philosophy of mind. I caught up with Carissa about the book, and how it relates to some current issues in the world, from the pandemic to climate change.