Description
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. The Sunday Show is its podcast.
You can find us at https://techpolicy.press/, where you can join the newsletter.
Episodes
- 2024 / 4 / 28What's Next for TikTok, and US Tech PolicyLast week President Joe Biden signed into law a measure that would force the Chinese firm ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok, or risk the app being banned in the US. The measure also included...
- 2024 / 4 / 21Securing Privacy Rights to Advance Civil RightsSubcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing: “Legislative Solutions to Protect Kids Online and Ensure Americans’ Data Privacy Rights.” Between the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the...
- 2024 / 4 / 14The Societal Impacts of Foundation Models, and Access to Data for ResearchersThis episode features two conversations. Both relate to efforts to better understand the impact of technology on society. In the first, we’ll hear from Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at the Department of...
- 2024 / 4 / 7Elon Musk's X Loses in Court: Why It Matters for Independent Technology ResearchLast week, a federal judge granted a motion to dismiss and strike a lawsuit brought by X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, against a nonprofit research outfit called The Center for Countering Digital Hate...
- 2024 / 4 / 6Nathan Schneider on Democratic Design for Online LifeOn this show, when we talk about technology and democracy, guests are often talking about the relationship between technology and existing democratic systems. Today's guest wants us to think more expansively...
- 2024 / 3 / 31Reforming Tech Amidst a Global Backlash Against Women's RightsLast year, researchers at Human Rights Watch wrote about the global backlash against women’s rights. In multiple countries, they say, hard-won progress has been reversed amidst a wave of anti-feminist...
- 2024 / 3 / 24Unpacking the Oral Argument in Murthy v MissouriOn Monday, March 18, the US Supreme Court heard oral argument in Murthy v Missouri. In this episode, Tech Policy Press reporting fellow Dean Jackson is joined by two experts- St. John's University School of...
- 2024 / 3 / 17What's at Stake in Murthy v Missouri?On March 18, the US Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Murthy v Missouri, a case that asks the justices to consider whether the government coerced or “significantly encouraged” social media executives...
- 2024 / 3 / 10Exploring the Intersection of Information Integrity, Race, and US ElectionsAt 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...
- 2024 / 3 / 3US Supreme Court Considers Florida and Texas Social Media LawsOn 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...
- 2024 / 2 / 29What Leverage Remains to Preserve Free Expression in Hong Kong?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,...
- 2024 / 2 / 25Evaluating the Role of Media in the January 6 Attack on the US CapitolA 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...
- 2024 / 2 / 25How to Counter Disinformation Based on ScienceIf 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...
- 2024 / 2 / 24Pakistan and the Intersection of Tech & ElectionsIt'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...
- 2024 / 2 / 18Ranking Content On Signals Other Than User EngagementToday'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...
- 2024 / 2 / 18FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya on Algorithmic Fairness, Voice Cloning, and the FutureIn 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...
- 2024 / 2 / 11Imagining AI CountergovernanceMultiple 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...
- 2024 / 2 / 4Tech CEOs Face the US Senate on Child SafetyOn 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...
- 2024 / 1 / 28How to Assess AI Governance ToolsLast 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...
- 2024 / 1 / 21How to Defend Independent Technology Research from Corporate and Political OppositionIn 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...
- 2024 / 1 / 14Questioning OpenAI's Nonprofit StatusToday’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...
- 2024 / 1 / 7Evaluating Social Media's Role in the Israel-Hamas WarToday 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...
- 2023 / 12 / 31Exposing the Rotten Reality of AI Training DataIn 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...
- 2023 / 12 / 24An FDA for AI?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...
- 2023 / 12 / 17What Are We Building, and Why?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...
- 2023 / 12 / 10Tracking Oversight of Surveillance in the US and EUIn 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...
- 2023 / 12 / 10Europe Advances Its AI ActIn 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...
- 2023 / 12 / 3Checking on the Progress of Content Moderators in AfricaFor 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...
- 2023 / 11 / 26The Saga at OpenAI: Lessons for PolicymakersTo 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...
- 2023 / 11 / 19AI and Harms to Artists and CreatorsOn 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...
- 2023 / 11 / 14Broken Code: A Conversation with Jeff HorwitzThis 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...
- 2023 / 11 / 12Policing the City: A Conversation with Matthew GuarigliaToday'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...
- 2023 / 11 / 5Artificial Intelligence and Your VoiceToday’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,...
- 2023 / 10 / 29A Design Code for Big TechToday’s guest is Ravi Iyer, a data scientist and moral psychologist at the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for...
- 2023 / 10 / 22Unpacking the Bangalore IdeologyAt the September G20 summit in Delhi, the government of prime minister Narendra Modi promoted the country’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) as a model for the world for how to develop digital systems that...
- 2023 / 10 / 15How to Control Our Appetite for MisinformationA lot is written about the supply side of mis- and disinformation, including how propagandists and political leaders are using messages and platforms to impact public opinion. But less is written about the...
- 2023 / 10 / 8Digital Empires: A Conversation with Anu BradfordThere is a term you've likely heard on the Tech Policy Press podcast in the past: the Brussels Effect. The term is meant to describe the European Union’s outsized...
- 2023 / 10 / 4Artificial Intelligence as a Tool of RepressionThe 13th installment of the Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House finds that "while advances in artificial intelligence offer benefits for society, they have also been used to increase the scale and...
- 2023 / 10 / 1The EU AI Act Enters Final NegotiationsWhile US Senators are busy holding hearings and forums and posing for pictures with the CEOs of AI companies, the European Union is just months away from passing sweeping regulation of artificial...
- 2023 / 9 / 27The Luddites and Lessons for the Next RebellionIn Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has written a new history of perhaps one of the most famous movements for worker...
- 2023 / 9 / 24Graphic Content, Trauma and Meaning: A Conversation with Alexa Koenig and Andrea LamprosThe ubiquity of cameras in our phones and our environment, coupled with massive social media networks that can share images and video in an instant, means we see often graphic and disturbing images with great...
- 2023 / 9 / 24Your Face Belongs to Us: A Conversation with Kashmir HillIn 2019, journalist Kashmir Hill had just joined The New York Times when she got a tip about the existence of a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone with a photo. But the...
- 2023 / 9 / 17The Problem with the "Big" in Big TechToday’s episode features two segments, both of which consider the scale of technology platforms and their power over markets and people. In the first, Rebecca Rand delivers a conversation with University of...
- 2023 / 9 / 10Assessing the Problem of DisinformationThis episode features two segments on the subject of disinformation. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Dr. Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, on recent...
- 2023 / 9 / 3Paul Gowder on The Networked LeviathanOne of the problems we come back to again and again on the Tech Policy Press podcast is the problem of how to govern social media platforms. Today’s guest is Paul Gowder, Professor of Law and Associate...
- 2023 / 8 / 27Choosing Our Words CarefullyThis episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand speaks with Alina Leidinger, a researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam about her research-...
- 2023 / 8 / 20Containing Big TechThis episode features two segments. In the first, Rebecca Rand considers the social consequences of "machine allocation behavior" with Cornell researchers Houston Claure and Malte Jung, authors of a recent...
- 2023 / 8 / 13Assessing India's Digital Personal Data Protection BillThis week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to...
- 2023 / 8 / 6The State of State AI LawsLots of voices are calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the US, at present it seems there is no federal legislation close to becoming law. But in 2023 legislative sessions in states...
- 2023 / 8 / 2Examining the Meta 2020 US Election Research PartnershipA unique collaboration between social scientists and Meta to conduct research on Facebook and Instagram during the height of the 2020 US election has at long last produced its first work products. The release...