The Tech Policy Press Podcast

One of the most significant concepts in Europe’s Digital Services Act is that of “systemic risk,” which relates to the spread of illegal content, or content that might have foreseeable negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights or on on civic discourse, electoral processes, public security and so forth. The DSA requires companies to carry out risk assessments to detail whether they are...

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are the authors of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference , published September 24 by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, Justin Hendrix focuses in particular on the book's Chapter 6, "Why Can't AI Fix Social Media?"

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) recently assessed social media platforms’ policies, public commitments, and product interventions related to election integrity across six major issue areas: platform integrity, violent extremism and hate speech, internal and external resourcing, transparency, political advertising and state-affiliated media.  Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the repor...

Marietje Schaake is the author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley . Dr. Alondra Nelson, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), calls Schaake “a twenty-first century Tocqueville” who “looks at Si...

Gary Marcus writes that the companies developing artificial intelligence systems want the citizens of democracies “to absorb all the negative externalities ” that might arise from their products, “such as the damage to democracy from Generative AI–produced misinformation, or cybercrime and kidnapping schemes using deepfaked voice clones—without them paying a nickel.” And, he says, we need to...

In 2019, Thierry Breton , a French business executive who became the France’s Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, was nominated by President  Emmanuel Macron  to become a member of the European Commission for the Internal Market. In that role his name and face were closely associated with Europe’s push to regulate digital markets and the passage of legislation such...

At Tech Policy Press, we’re closely following the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Union law designed to regulate online platforms and services. One of the DSA’s key objectives is to identify and mitigate systemic risks. But how do we gauge what rises to the level of a systemic risk? How do we get the sort of information we need from platforms to identify and mitigate syste...

Paris Marx , a Canadian tech critic, recently authored a post under the headline "Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions: The actions against Telegram and Twitter/X are about sovereignty, not speech." Justin Hendrix spoke to Paris about his assessment of these matters, and why those making claims in defense of free speech in the wake of Brazil’s ban on X and Telegram founder and C...

Today is Monday, September 9th. Today Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is presiding over the start of a trial in which the United States Department of Justice accuses Google of violating antitrust law, abusing its power in the market for online advertising. Google contests the allegations against it. To get a bit more detail on what to expect, Jus...

On August 26th, Justin Hendrix moderated a panel convened by the Social Science Research Council at its offices in Brooklyn, New York. The panel was titled “Platforms and Elections: the Global State of Play, and it featured: Dr. Shannon McGregor , associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator with the Center for Information Technology in Public...

Thirty tech bills went through the law making sausage grinder in California this past session, and now Governor Gavin Newsom is about to decide the fate of 19 that passed the state legislature. The Governor now has until the end of September to sign or veto the bills, or to permit them to become law without his signature.  To learn a little more about some of the key pieces of legislation and...

Renée DiResta , who serves on the board of Tech Policy Press and has been an occasional contributor, is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality , published by Hachette Book Group in June. Justin Hendrix had a chance to catch up with DiResta last week to discuss some of the key ideas in the book, and how she sees them playing out in current moment headed into the 2024...

The billionaire owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk , has been in a prolonged dispute with a Supreme Court Judge in Brazil regarding X’s content moderation practices. Earlier this year, Judge Alexandre de Moraes launched an investigation into X after Musk defied a court order to block accounts that supported former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and were accused of spreading misin...

Justin Hendrix speaks with Mark Surman , President of Mozilla, about Mozilla’s work promoting open source AI, the importance of competition in the tech sector, and the regulatory challenges facing the industry. Surman discusses Mozilla's initiatives in AI investment and development, and reflects on what the recent ruling the Google search cases might mean for the future of Mozilla and the tech eco...

On Friday, August 16, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals  issued a ruling  in  NetChoice v. Bonta , partially upholding and partially vacating a preliminary injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. The court affirmed that certain provisions of the law are likely to violate the First Amendment by compelling online businesses to assess and mitigat...

Raúl Torrez was sworn in as New Mexico’s 32nd Attorney General in January 2023. Last December, Attorney General Torrez filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly failing to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking. The outcome of this case could have broader implications for how online platforms are regulated and held accountable for user safety in the future,...

In May, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion with David Rand , who is a professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. David's work cuts across fields such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social...

The Distributed AI Research Institute, or DAIR—which seeks to conduct community-rooted AI research that is independent from the technology industry—has launched a new project called the Data Workers' Inquiry to invite data workers to create their own research and recount their experiences. The project is supported by DAIR, the Weizenbaum Institute, and TU Berlin. For this episode, journalist...

It goes without saying that privacy and the creation of laws and regulations around it are fundamental to determining how we will live and work with technology, and whether technology operates in service of democratic societies or only in service of governments and corporations. A couple of weeks ago, Justin Hendrix had a chance to speak with two leaders from the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF)- Jul...

In the past week, multiple Silicon Valley billionaires announced endorsements of former President and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump. To dig a bit deeper into their motivations to support Trump and his new running mate, Ohio Senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance, Justin Hendrix invited on three sharp observers of politics and technology, including: Henry Farrell , a professor of t...

In this episode, David Carroll , an associate professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design at The New School, speaks to Ravi Naik , legal director at AWO, a consultancy with offices in London, Brussels, and Paris that works on a range of data protection and tech policy issues. Their discussio...

On June 26, the US Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v Missouri , a cased that considered whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in its efforts to address COVID-19 mis- and disinformation on social media. Tech Policy press fellow Dean Jackson , who studied the case closely , discussed the outcome and what it means for the future with three experts: Olga Belogolova...

In April, Google DeepMind published a paper that boasts 57 authors, including experts from a range of disciplines in different parts of Google, including DeepMind, Jigsaw, and Google Research, as well as researchers from academic institutions such as Oxford, University College London, Delft University of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and a think tank at Georgetown, the Center for Security a...

News and journalism organizations and dominant tech companies are in a years-long battle over content, clicks and revenue, and the tech companies are winning. What are policy options that encourage both the sustainability and quality of news content on popular online platforms? In this episode, Rebecca Rand explores perspectives on the subject, drawing on a conversation hosted by Justin Hendrix wi...

Angela Zhang is the author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy , published this year by Oxford University Press. With a career in the practice of law and in teaching it, Zhang has held roles King’s College London and at New York University School of Law, and most recently served as Director of Philip K. H. Wong Center for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Ko...