The Tech Policy Press Podcast

This week, we have two segments. The first is a conversation with Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, about the fall of Kabul and the rise of the Taliban, and the role that digital and social media have and will continue to play there.

And second, we turn to a discussion I had with Emerson’s Atlantic Council college, Rose Jackson, and the Institute for Security Technology’s Vera Zakem, about the nascent pro-democracy effort around tech issues and tech policy around the world, and the challenges it faces.

First, to Afghanistan, where the fall of the Taliban was broadcast around the world by Taliban fighters themselves, sharing photos and selfies as they walked in to official residences and government offices, announcing their victory in the war in Afghanistan. To talk more about the role of social media in their return to power and what to expect in the future, we spoke with DFRLab’s Emerson T. Brooking. Emerson is the coauthor of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, and is an expert in the fields of disinformation, terrorist communication, and internet policy, and recently led an initiative to secure the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election. I caught up with on Thursday of this week.

Second, on to a conversation hosted before Afghanistan took over the headlines, about the future of democracy and its relationship with technology.

My two guests are experts on these subjects. Rose Jackson is an entrepreneur and former diplomat with 15+ years of experience strengthening democracy and defending human rights, leveraging technology for social impact, and building institutions to support democratic activists around the world. Jackson is currently the director of the Democracy & Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. She previously founded and served as CEO of Beacon, a platform leveraging data and marketing technology to make it easier for people to take meaningful civic and political action. Prior to founding her company, Jackson served as a senior policy adviser at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) where she led a presidential transition initiative focused on reforming U.S. support to foreign military and police. During the Obama Administration, Jackson served as the Chief of Staff to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department, and before that as an advisor to Senator Chris Coons on foreign policy and national security issues as a Galloway Fellow.

Vera Zakem is currently a Senior Technology and Policy Advisor at the Institute for Security and Technology and a founder of a mission-driven agency, Zakem Global Strategies. Previously, she led strategy and research at Twitter. She has also worked for a number of national security policy and research organizations, including the CNA Corporation, where she spearheaded initiatives to understand and develop policies to counter disinformation and global malign influence. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tech Advisory Council for Atlas Corps. 

This episode features an interview with Roger McNamee. His official bio at Elevation Partners, an investment firm, says that since 2017 he has been involved in ”a campaign to trigger a national conversation about the dark side of social media“. He is the author of a book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, published by HarperCollins in 2019, that has an account of his role as an investor and advisor to the company and his ultimate recognition of the harms it causes at scale.

To many listeners, his voice on these issues is well known- he is a frequent commentator on technology on shows such as “Squawk Alley” CNBC and on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC, and he is a regular at conferences that delve into topics at the intersection of tech and democracy. He knows the tech bro culture well enough to have served as a technical advisor for multiple seasons of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, a show that lampoons the people and industry there.

Roger also a philanthropist and a musician- he plays in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System, on bass and guitar. If you follow him on Twitter @moonalice, you will get to hear his frequent livestreams, sometimes solo, and sometimes with the band.

We caught up with Roger to get his sense of where the movement to regulate and hold technology firms to account is at the moment, particularly in the U.S. 

This week, we have two interviews. First we hear from two researchers in Britain- Chico Carmargo and Felix Simon- who recently published a paper that takes a critical look at a term that has been often used in recent months to describe a stew of problems in the information ecosystem- the term “infodemic”.

Then, our feature interview this week is with the authors of the bestselling book AN UGLY TRUTH: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination- New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. I got to speak with Sheera and Cecilia about the reception to the book, and whether the type of change it suggests is necessary at Facebook is possible under its current management and structure.

This week's show features two interviews. The first is with Albert Fox Cahn, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project's (S.T.O.P.) founder and executive director, about a column he wrote in Wired magazine about problems with the twitter verification process that disadvantage activists. And second, I talk with Jonathan Stray, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley about whether social media can help depolarize society.

In May, Twitter relaunched its verification program and offered more clarification about how the process works following criticism and missteps, such as verifying fake accounts. I spoke to Albert Fox Cahn about the holes in the program, and how they affect journalists and activists.

There is an active debate the conditions in which and the extent to which social media plays a role in contributing to polarization and division in society. I spoke to Jonathan Stray about his new paper, Designing Recommender Systems to Depolarize, which turns that debate on its head- asking whether social media platforms could play a role in reducing division. Jonathan’s paper “examines algorithmic depolarization interventions with the goal of conflict transformation: not suppressing or eliminating conflict but moving towards more constructive conflict.”

This week's episode features two segments. The first conversation is a conversation focused on the rise of the global surveillance industry with Marietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. We consider what the revelations of the Pegasus Project about the Israeli firm NSO group means for democracies.

The second segment considers Chinese tech in the world, looking at how the Chinese Communist Party uses technology to facilitate political authoritarianism at home while exporting its interests abroad, the role of private sector firms in the Chinese public sphere, and what it means for the global debate over the Internet and digital technologies. The panel took place at the end of June at The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) hosted its 360/Open Summit: The World in Motion. The panel is moderated by Isaac Stone Fish, Chief Executive Officer of Strategy Risks, and also features Josh Chin, Deputy China Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal; Lotus Ruan, a Research Fellow at The Citizen Lab in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto; Puma Shen, Chairman of DoubleThink Lab; and Alexandria Williams a Nairobi-based Tech Journalist.

This episode features two interviews. The first focuses on extremism, law enforcement and social media monitoring, and the second on what news that an AI voice clone was used to generate segments of a new Anthony Bourdain documentary tells us about the future of synthetic media. 

The January 6 insurrection was preceded by weeks of online promotion and planning- including from former President Donald Trump, who told his supporters the event would be wild. What should the FBI have known in advance, and how does social media monitoring play out in the FBI in practice? 

First, to get an expert opinion on these issues and what they mean for the effort to curb domestic extremism, I spoke to Clint Watts, a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and author of the book Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News. Previously, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent, as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point , as a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division and National Security Branch, and as an analyst supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command.

Second, to contemplate the future of synthetic media and the safeguards that need to be in place in a world of voice clones and deep fakes we speak with Sam Gregory, Program Director of WITNESS, a nonprofit that helps people use video and technology to protect human rights. Sam is an expert on synthetic media and ethics, and recently wrote a piece in Wired arguing the world needs more such experts to address the looming problems posed by these new technologies, which offer enormous creative potential along with frightening epistemic implications.

Social media, message apps and other digital communications technologies restructure the ways in which information flows, and thus how humans interact with one another, how they make sense of the world and how they come to consensus on how to deal with problems.

Now, more than a dozen researchers at multiple universities who study technology, behavior and complex systems believe questions about the impact of communications technology on collective behavior should be regarded as a “crisis discipline,” noting that “the vulnerability of these systems to misinformation and disinformation poses a dire threat to health, peace, global climate and more.” In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they call on researchers and social media executives to take a Hippocratic oath and pledge first to do no harm to humanity.

To hear more, we caught up with three of the authors- Joseph B. Bak-Coleman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the lead author the paper; Carl T. Bergstrom, a UW professor of biology and member of the Center for an Informed Public; and Rachel Moran, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public who studies disinformation and trust in information environments.

This episode focuses on issues of identity, extremism, and violence, and the role that technology plays in societies in conflict.

First up, we speak to Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University. Jefferson describes the underlying grievance driving the right in the United States- white supremacy- and how it combined with demagoguery, disinformation, and the ability to organize at scale on social media to produce the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6th.

Then, we speak to Fadi Quran, campaigns director at Avaaz, a social movement that empowers people to take action on issues from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. He describes the role of social media in the recent flare up of violence between Israel and Palestine, and what social platforms and governments should do to protect democracy. 

This episode is in two parts. Both get at hard problems in how to deal with technology companies- first, around the regulation of algorithmic amplification on social media, and second, around competition.

On algorithms, we hear from Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. Daphne recently published an essay, Amplification and Its Discontents: Why regulating the reach of online content is hard, on the website of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

On competition, we take a tour of five new bills to rein in the big tech companies that were just put forward in Congress with Hal Singer, a PhD economist and Managing Director of the firm Econ One. Hal is an expert in antitrust, consumer protection, and regulation. Hal has researched, published, and testified on competition-related issues, providing expert economic and policy advice to regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada, as well as before congressional committees.

This episode features two segments that focus on reimagining our relationship to technology, and the ways in which it contributes to our reality.

First up, we speak with JAZSALYN, an anti-disciplinary artist, curator and creative director and a graduate student in an MFA student in Parsons' Design + Technology program and one of the creators of black beyond , a platform making space for artists and activists to speculate alternate realities for Blackness. black beyond is hosting a virtual new media festival titled black beyond _origins, to reimagine Black Femme Futures, starting June 17th, 2021. I caught up with Jazsalyn about the festival, and about her vision for how a world that repositions and centers communities that are often left out of discussions on technology, or what is the future.

Then, we look at another set of ideas for reimagining our relationship to technology and the world around us. Last month the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech released Rebooting NYC: An Urban Tech Agenda for the Next Administration, a set of strategic recommendations for how the next New York City government can leverage new technologies to improve the lives of all New Yorkers. I spoke to Rohit "Rit" Aggarwala, formerly an executive at Sidewalk Labs and now the Hub’s Senior Urban Tech Fellow, and Matt Stempeck, who is currently at Cornell University as Technologist in Residence, about the report.