The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most hyped technology in the world. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear a discussion that invites the listener to think about how money, power and other troubling forces and ideas that shape our society are built into AI systems and the ways we think about deploying them.

In May, the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab and Center for an Informed Public cohosted a virtual book talk featuring Kate Crawford, a leading scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence and author of the recently published book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence published this spring by Yale University Press, in conversation with Ryan Calo, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public co-founder, founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and a UW School of Law professor.

There are three parts in this week's episode. The first two reflect on the Christchurch Call Summit, a meeting of world leaders and tech executives to discuss efforts to police hate speech and extremism on social media. Moderated by Courtney Radsch, a member of the Tech Policy Press masthead, our guests include Paul Ash, the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Cyber and Digital and the Coordinator of the Christchurch Call; and Dia Kayyali, Associate Director for Advocacy at Mnemonic, the umbrella organization for Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, and Sudanese Archive.

The third is an interview with New York State Senator Anna Kaplan on legislation she has introduced to contend with hate speech and misinformation. 

Today’s episode features two discussions on negative impacts of social media- including censorship of marginalized voices and dangers to kids.

First, we talk with Thusiyan Nandakumar, an editor at the Tamil Guardian and Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor and extremism researcher at Queen’s University, who tell the story of how social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are are censoring Tamil activists and other activists around the world who being targeted by governments.

And second, we focus on kids and social media, with reactions to hearing in a Senate Subcommittee titled “Protecting Kids Online: Internet Privacy and Manipulative Marketing”, from tech policy experts Sara Collins, Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge and previously a Policy Counsel on the Future of Privacy Forum’s Education & Youth Privacy team, as well as Joseph Jerome, Director, Platform Accountability and State Advocacy at Common Sense Media, where he focuses on legislative and policy solutions related to children and digital media. 

Today’s episode features a conversation hosted recently by the Digital Public Library of America, DPLA. The DPLA brings together many collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world on a shared platform. 

This DPLA Book Talk features a conversation on trust and the crisis faced by our institutions; the promise of the movements rising to challenge them; and the obstacles we must confront if we are to rebuild civic life and create meaningful change. 

It includes Ethan Zuckerman, Katherine Maher, and Alberto Ibargüen.

Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, a research group that is studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet. He’s the author of two books: Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection.

Mistrust, published in November 2020, looks at how and why Americans are losing faith in our institutions and how we can harness the methods of successful social movements to both transform and replace them, and serves as the basis for today’s discussion.

Katherine Maher was the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation until this spring, when she stepped down after a long and successful tenure. The foundation operates Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies, and has worked around the world leading the integration of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development. Katherine has worked with UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank, and Access Now on programs supporting technologies for democratic participation, civic engagement, and open government. 

Alberto Ibargüen, who moderates the discussion, is president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

He is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald and during his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

This episode features two segments focusing on the decision by the Facebook Oversight Board on Donald Trump’s account.

First we hear a panel discussion hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and moderated by Stanford Law professor Nathaniel Persily. The panel features two members of the Facebook Oversight board- Michael McConnell, director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, and Julie Owono, an international human rights lawyer. The others on the panel include Marietje Schaake, international director of policy at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence who previously served as a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands; Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory; Alex Stamos, director of the Observatory, a professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and former chief security officer at Facebook; and Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. 

Then, we hear reactions to the Oversight Board from Erin Shields, a National Field Organizer at MediaJustice, a grassroots movement for a more just and participatory media that fights for racial, economic, and gender justice in a digital age; and Katy Glenn Bass, the Research Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

First, we hear a couple of key exchanges from a Senate hearing last week that featured testimony on algorithms and amplification on social media from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter executives.

Second, Yaël Eisenstat brings us an interview with Eileen Donahoe, the Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University, Cyber Policy Center to discuss the final report of the Task Force on US Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism, a bipartisan group of leaders, experts, and former policy makers committed to addressing the worldwide decline in democratic freedom and the rise in authoritarianism that endanger US national security.

And third, we speak with Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, senior director on the campaigns team at Color Of Change, the nation’s largest racial justice organization with more than seven million members, about the tech policy priorities the organization published in April.

The first interview is with Ryan Calo, professor at the University of Washington School of Law, founding co-director of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and the UW Center for an Informed Public. The interview took place shortly after the European Commission announced new proposed regulations on artificial intelligence. 

The second conversation is with Kate Starbird and Renée Diresta. Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) and Director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory and a co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation, promoting an informed society, and strengthening democratic discourse. Renée DiResta is the Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

The two were part of a unique collaboration to address disinformation in the 2020 US election cycle. Ahead of the vote, The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and the disinformation detection firm Graphika teamed up to create the Election Integrity Partnership. With the aim of defending the 2020 election against voting-related mis- and disinformation, the partnership sought to bridge the gap between government and civil society, and strengthen platform standards for combating election-related misinformation.

First up is Julia Carrie Wong, Senior technology reporter for the Guardian based in Silicon Valley. This week, she published a series of articles based on interviews and documents from Sophie Zhang, a Facebook whistleblower who came forward to reveal how the social media company has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents.

The second interview is with Maria Ressa. She is co-founder Rappler, the top digital only news site that leads the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. She has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, and still has to fight to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts. Maria has a 35 year career in journalism. For her work on disinformation, Maria was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of the publication’s Most Influential Women of the Century.

In the first half, we talk with Lucy Suchman, a professor and expert on human computer interaction & warfare about a recent report commissioned by the United States Government about artificial intelligence and national security. We look at some of the unexamined premises for the report.

In the second half, we listen to a panel discussion hosted by Betalab on how to build a better social media future featuring David Ryan Polgar, a Responsible Tech advocate and founder of All Tech Is Human; Nicole Chi, a civic technologist and product manager who has worked at the intersection of product, policy, and public interest; Rana Sarkar, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Consul General of Canada in San Francisco & Silicon Valley in 2017; and moderator Yaël Eisenstat, Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab and now a Future of Democracy Fellow at Berggruen Institute.

Our first segment features an interview with Chris Bail, a researcher who runs the Polarization Lab at Duke University. This week, Chris’s new book will hit book shelves. It’s called Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing.

The second is a conversation with Vivian Chang, a civic engagement manager for the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO (APALA), about steps her organization is taking to confront disinformation and harassment in the communities it works with, including working with the Disinfo Defense League, a coalition that trains civic groups to tackle the growing problem of misinformation and disinformation.  

The last interview in this episode is with Kieran Leavitt, an Edmonton-based political reporter for the Toronto Star. Kieran has been covering Facebook’s relationship to the Canadian government. This week, Facebook executives testified in Parliament, and we got to catch up with Kieran about what happened.