From Russian election interference, to scandals over privacy and invasive ad targeting, to presidential tweets: it’s all happening in online spaces governed by private social media companies. These conflicts are only going to grow in importance. In this series, also available in the Lawfare Podcast feed, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic will be talking to experts and practitioners about the major challenges our new information ecosystem poses for elections and democracy in general, and the dangers of finding cures that are worse than the disease.
The podcast takes its name from a comment by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg right after the 2016 election, when Facebook was still reeling from accusations that it hadn’t done enough to clamp down on disinformation during the presidential campaign. Zuckerberg wrote that social media platforms “must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
So if they don’t want to be the arbiters of truth ... who should be?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
From Russian election interference, to scandals over privacy and invasive ad targeting, to presidential tweets: it’s all happening in online spaces governed by private social media companies. These conflicts are only going to grow in importance. In this series, also available in the Lawfare Podcast feed, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic will be talking to experts and practitioners about the major challenges our new information ecosystem poses for elections and democracy in general, and the dangers of finding cures that are worse than the disease.
The podcast takes its name from a comment by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg right after the 2016 election, when Facebook was still reeling from accusations that it hadn’t done enough to clamp down on disinformation during the presidential campaign. Zuckerberg wrote that social media platforms “must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
So if they don’t want to be the arbiters of truth ... who should be?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the platform or face TikTok being banned in the United States. Although prospects for the bill in the Senate remain uncertain, President Biden has said he will sign the bill if it comes to his desk, and this is the most serious attempt yet to ban the controversial social media app.
Today's podcast is the latest in a series of conversations we've had about TikTok. Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led a conversation with Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, and Ramya Krishnan, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. They talked about the First Amendment implications of a TikTok ban, whether it's a good idea as a policy matter, and how we should think about foreign ownership of platforms more generally.
Disclaimer: Matt's center receives funding from foundations and tech companies, including funding from TikTok.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
