The Tech Policy Press Podcast

At INFORMED 2024, a conference hosted by the Knight Foundation in January, one panel focused on the subject of information integrity, race, and US elections. The conversation was compelling, and the panelists agreed to reprise it for this podcast. So today we're turning over the mic to Spencer Overton , a Professor of Law at the George Washington University, and the director of the GW Law School's...

On Monday, Feb. 26, 2024, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments for  Moody v. NetChoice, LLC  and  NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton . The cases are on similar but distinct state laws in Florida and Texas that would restrict social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms. Justin Hendrix speaks with Tech Policy Press staff writer Gabby Miller and contributing edito...

This week, a public consultation period ended for a new Hong Kong national security law, known as Article 23. Article 23 ostensibly targets a wide array of crimes, including treason, theft of state secrets, espionage, sabotage, sedition, and "external interference" from foreign governments. The Hong Kong legislature, dominated by pro-Beijing lawmakers, is expected to approve it, even as its critic...

A new book that ships this week from Oxford University Press titled simply Media and January 6th assembles a varied collection of experts that aim to shed light on the interplay between the media and the bloody coup attempt that then President Donald Trump led to try to hang on to power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden . It delves into the reasons behind the occurrence of January 6th a...

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know we’ve spent countless hours together talking about the problems of mis- and disinformation, and what to do about them. And, we’ve tried to focus on the science, on empirical research that can inform efforts to design a better media and technology environment that helps rather than hurts democracy and social cohesion.  Today’s gues...

It's become trite to say there are a lot of elections taking place this year. But of course, technology is playing a role in them all. At Tech Policy Press, we're lucky to have a group of seven fellows this year who are based on four continents. They are paying close attention to elections in the nations they know best. To learn more about the recent election in Pakistan, its chaotic aftermath, an...

In May 2022, Alvaro Bedoya was sworn in as a Commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission following his nomination by President Joe Biden and confirmation in the Senate. In this conversation, Commissioner Bedoya discusses a recent settlement over the commercial use of facial recognition technologies and what it should signal to other businesses, voice cloning and the growing problem of imperson...

Today's guests are Jonathan Stray , a senior scientist at the Center for Human Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley, and Ravi Iyer , managing director of the Neely Center at the University of Southern California's Marshall School. Both are keenly interested in what happens when platforms optimize for variables other than engagement, and whether they can in fact optimize for proso...

Multiple past episodes of this podcast have focused on the topic of AI governance. But today’s guest, Blair Attard-Frost , has put forward a set of ideas they term "AI countergovernance." These are alternative mechanisms for community-led and worker-led governance that serve as means for resisting or contesting power, particularly as it manifests in AI systems and the companies and governments tha...

On Wednesday, January 31st, the US Senate Judiciary Committee hosted a hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis." The CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Discord and Snap were called to the Capitol to answer questions from lawmakers on their efforts to protect children from sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, dangerous content, and other online harms. Gabby Miller reported...

Last year, the World Privacy Forum , a nonprofit research organization, conducted an international review of AI governance tools . The organization analyzed various documents, frameworks, and technical material related to AI governance from around the world. Importantly, the review found that a significant percentage of the AI governance tools include faulty AI fixes that could ultimately undermin...

In October 2022, a group of researchers published a manifesto establishing a Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “Society needs trustworthy, independent research to relieve the harms of digital technologies and advance the common good,” they wrote. “Research can help us understand ourselves more clearly, identify problems, hold power accountable, imagine the world we want, and test idea...

Today’s guest is Robert Weissman , president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. He is the author of a letter addressed to the California Attorney General that raises significant concerns about OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The letter questions whether OpenAI has deviated from its nonprofit purposes, alleging that it may be acting under the control of its for-pro...

Today is the three month anniversary of the vicious Hamas attack and abduction of hostages that ignited the current war in Gaza. Just before the New Year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) published a report titled “ Distortion by Design: How Social Media Platforms Shaped Our Initial Understanding of the Israel-Hamas Conflict. ” This week, Justin Hendrix spoke to the re...

In a report released December 20, 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory said it had detected more than 1,000 instances of verified child sexual abuse imagery in a significant dataset utilized for training generative AI systems such as Stable Diffusion 1.5. This troubling discovery builds on prior research into the “ dubious curation ” of large-scale datasets used to train AI systems, and raises...

If you’ve listened to some of the dialogue in hearings on Capitol Hill about how to regulate AI, you’ve heard various folks suggest the need for a regulatory agency to govern, in particular, general purpose AI systems that can be deployed across a wide range of applications. One existing agency is often mentioned as a potential model: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But how would applying...

At the end of this year in which the hype around artificial intelligence seemed to increase in volume with each passing week, it’s worth stepping back and asking whether we need to slow down and put just as much effort into questions about what it is we are building and why. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear from two researchers at two different points in their careers who spend their days g...

In both the US and Europe, policymakers are making important decisions about the governance of the bulk collection of communications and data for intelligence purposes. In the US, some of these questions are at the fore as Congress considers how to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's Section 702 program, which is set to expire at the start of 2024. To get a sense of how the bro...

In April 2021, the European Commission introduced the first regulatory framework for AI within the EU. This Friday, after a marathon set of negotiations, EU policymakers reached a political consensus on the details of the legislation. This AI Act represents the most significant comprehensive effort in the world’s democracies to regulate a technology that promises major social and economic impact....

For the past two years, there has been a steady stream of news out of Kenya about the relationships between major tech firms – including Meta , TikTok and OpenAI – and outsourcing firms like Sama and Majorel that have employed content moderators on their behalf. In the spring of this year, more than 150 moderators announced the formation of the African Content Moderators Union, which advocates for...

To learn more about the recent leadership crisis at OpenAI and what lessons policymakers should take from it, Justin Hendrix spoke to Karen Hao , a contributing writer at The Atlantic who is currently working on a book about OpenAI. With staff writer Charlie Warzel , Hao wrote a piece for The Atlantic under the headline " Inside the Chaos at OpenAI ," drawing on conversations with current and form...

On November 15, the Open Markets Institute and the AI Now Institute hosted an event in Washington D.C. featuring discussion on how to understand the promise, threats, and practical regulatory challenges presented by artificial intelligence. Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion on harms to artists and creators, exploring questions around copyright and fair use, the ways in which AI is shaping the...

This episode explores Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose its Harmful Secrets , a new book by Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jeff Horwitz . His relentless coverage of Meta, including first reporting on the documents brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen in the fall of 2021, has been pivotal in shedding light on the complex interplay between social media platform...

Today's guest is Dr. Matthew Guariglia , a senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the new book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York , just out from Duke University Press. Guariglia says we're really living in a world of police surveillance built in the early 20th century, even as police departments wield powers that on...

Today’s guest is Wiebke Hutiri , a researcher with a particular expertise in design patterns for detecting and mitigating bias in AI systems. Her recent work has focused on voice biometrics, including work on an open source project called Fair EVA that gathers resources for researchers and developers to audit bias and discrimination in voice technology. Justin Hendrix spoke to Hutiri abo...