The Tech Policy Press Podcast

A little more than a year ago, in the first article announcing the release of the Facebook Files, the documents brought out of the company by whistleblower Frances Haugen, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz reported on Cross Check, a Facebook system that “exempted high-profile users from some or all” of the platform’s rules. The program shields millions of elites from normal content moderation enforcement. While the existence of such a program was known, its scale was and perhaps still is shocking.Following the Journal’s reporting and subsequent concern in the public, Facebook (now Meta) President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg announced the company would request a policy advisory opinion from its independent Oversight Board. 14 months later, the Oversight Board has completed its review and published its opinion. To talk more about the opinion, the Cross Check system and the problem of content moderation more generally, I’m joined with one member of the Oversight Board, Nighat Dad, a lawyer from Pakistan and founder of the Digital Rights Foundation; and one outside observer who answered the board’s call for opinions about the Cross Check system, R Street Institute senior fellow and University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center distinguished research fellow Chris Riley.

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the second part, and it features a conversation with two individuals covering China for the New York Times, Paul Mozur and Muyi Xiao. In their collaborative coverage they have mixed open source visual investigations methods with traditional reporting to get a sense of the protests and the state’s response. 

Last week, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping took steps to finally move away from its zero-COVID policy, following two weeks of protests in multiple cities. The unrest and anti-government sentiment was perhaps the most pronounced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. And while these events gave Western observers an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of Chinese politics, generational and regional differences in the views of the population, and ultimately how the authoritarian government responds to public pressure, it also gave us a chance to see how the Chinese censorship and surveillance apparatus operates. This week’s Tech Policy Press podcast comes in two parts. In both, we’ll hear from reporters covering the intersection of China and technology. This is the first part, and it features a conversation with Liza Lin, a Reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She covers Asia technology news for the Journal from Singapore. Before that she was the paper’s China correspondent, based in Shanghai. She was part of a team at the Journal to named as Pulitzer Finalists for the International Reporting category in 2021 for coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and with other Journal reporters won the Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting in 2018 for a series of stories on China's Surveillance state. She’s co-author of a book on that subject titled Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, with Josh Chin. 

On Friday, Elon Musk announced via tweet that documents related to Twitter’s decision to intervene in the propagation of an October 2020 story in the New York Post about then candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, would be made public. The incident caused a furor at the time, with some Republicans and supporters of former President Donald Trump insinuating that it was proof that social media firms are biased against conservative interests. Some even maintain that the actions of Twitter and Facebook with regard to this particular New York Post story may have had some impact on the outcome of the election, as far-fetched as that might be. Today, we’ll hear two voices on the disclosures. The first is David Ingram, who covers tech for NBC News and will walk us through what happened. And the second is Mike Masnick, the editor of the influential site Tech Dirt, who offers his first thoughts on the disclosures, and what they portend for the future of Twitter under Elon Musk.

For this episode of the Tech Policy Press podcast, I had the chance to speak to Chris Anderson, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Milan who is leading a course on tech manifestos and their evolution, inviting his students to dissect the language for what it can tell us about politics and power. Documents such as A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and A Manifesto for Cyborgs have given way to more vacuous statements from billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook manifesto, Building Global Community. These days a lot of Silicon Valley’s leaders don’t have much in the way of ideas, but they do have a lot of money, so either way they can push whatever agenda they may have on the rest of us. From promises of abundance delivered by artificial intelligence, to a 'global community' convened on social media platforms, to reimagined economies or even a new world order built on the blockchain, tech manifestos remain important, since they often signify large amounts of capital are about to be deployed to try to manifest someone's new vision.

By all accounts, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not going well. And yet many have the real sense that something important may be lost if the platform collapses, or if there is a substantial migration away from it to alternatives like Mastodon, the open source, decentralized platform that has grown from three hundred thousand monthly active users to nearly two million since Musk bought Twitter. In this episode, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the chance to discuss Musk’s takeover with Dr. Johnathan Flowers, and to learn more about some of the exclusive norms he’s observed that may create obstacles to communities of color when contemplating the switch to Mastodon.

Today we’re going to hear from the editor of-- and two authors included in-- a book of essays about how particular bits of software have changed the world in different ways, the just-published "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World from Princeton University Press. The book is at once delightful and enlightening, revealing how technology interacts with people and society in both good and bad ways, and how important and long lasting the decisions we take when designing software and systems can be on the world. This episode features:Torie Bosch, the editor of Future Tense, a collaborative project of Slate magazine, New America, and Arizona State University, and the editor of the book;Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest TechnologyCharlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development at New York University and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Media reports suggest that large swathes of employees at Twitter have resigned after the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, issued a kind of ultimatum asking them to commit to "long hours at high intensity" to build “Twitter 2.0.” Last night, according to an internal Twitter email shared with CNN, employees who decided to stay at the company received an email that said the company's offices will be temporarily closed and badge access will be restricted through Monday. Whether the platform will remain functional with so many core engineering and other crucial teams decimated is an open question. To talk more about Twitter, Musk, and what is potentially lost, Justin Hendrix spoke to Dr. Meredith Clark, whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. She’s leading a project to archive Black Twitter, as part of a larger project to archive the Black web. And, she’s the author of a forthcoming book on Black Twitter.

According to the BBC, to date at least 348 Iranian protesters have been killed and nearly 16,000 arrested in women-led protests that erupted three months ago after the death Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being detained by morality police for allegedly breaking the strict rules on the wearing of hijabs.One way the regime has responded to these antigovernment protests is to block access to the internet, independent news sites and social media and communication platforms. To talk more about how these tactics are being applied in Iran and around the world, and what policymakers in democratic countries can do to help dissidents on the ground, I spoke to two experts on digital and human rights:Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw and author of a recent piece in Wired on Iran's internet blackoutsKian Vesteinsson, Senior Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House, one of the authors of the 12th annual Internet Freedom Report

Voting in the U.S. midterm elections closed on Tuesday, and as of Sunday morning, November 13, Democrats secured another majority in the Senate. But ballots are still being counted in key races that will determine which party controls the House.  It is clear, however, that the margins determining leadership in both chambers will be extremely small. In order to explore how the elections may impact the legislative debate over tech policy issues, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix spoke with three experts from civil society groups that regularly engage with lawmakers to find what scenarios and considerations are front of mind, even as we wait for the final tally:Emma Llansó, Director of the Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy and TechnologyYosef Getachew, Director of the Media and Democracy Program, Common CauseMatt Wood, Vice President of Policy and General Counsel, Free Press