Matt Perault, Ramya Krishnan, and Alan Rozenshtein Talk About the TikTok Divestment and Ban Bill
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.
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50:32
Jawboning at the Supreme Court
Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, concerning the potential First Amendment implications of government outreach to social media platforms—what’s sometimes known as jawboning. The case arrived at the Supreme Court with a somewhat shaky evidentiary record, but the legal questions raised by government requests or demands to remove online content are real. To make sense of it all, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, called up Alex Abdo, the Litigation Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. While the law is unsettled, the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of the plaintiffs’ claims of government censorship. But what is the best way to determine what contacts and government requests are and aren't permissible?If you’re interested in more, you can read the Knight Institute’s amicus brief in Murthy here and Knight’s series on jawboning—including Perault’s reflections—here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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51:38
How Are the TikTok Bans Holding Up in Court?
In May 2023, Montana passed a new law that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more limited ban against the use of TikTok on state-owned devices. What should we make of these rulings, and how should we understand the legal status of efforts to ban TikTok?We’ve discussed the question of TikTok bans and the First Amendment before on the Lawfare Podcast, when Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, sat down with Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Mary-Rose Papandrea, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. In light of the Montana and Texas rulings, Matt and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic decided to bring the gang back together and talk about where the TikTok bans stand with Ramya and Mary-Rose, on this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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49:27
Jeff Horwitz on Broken Code and Reporting on Facebook
In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “Broken Code”—which dives even deeper into the documents he uncovered from within the company. He’s one of the most rigorous reporters covering Facebook, now known as Meta.On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Jeff along with Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill—and also someone with close knowledge of Meta from his own time working at the company. They discussed Jeff’s reporting and debated what his findings tell us about how Meta functions as a company and how best to understand its responsibilities for harms traced back to its products. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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53:58
Will Generative AI Reshape Elections?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a great deal over the last year about generative AI and how it’s going to reshape various aspects of our society. That includes elections. With one year until the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we thought it would be a good time to step back and take a look at how generative AI might and might not make a difference when it comes to the political landscape. Luckily, Matt Perault and Scott Babwah Brennen of the UNC Center on Technology Policy have a new report out on just that subject, examining generative AI and political ads.On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sat down with Matt and Scott to talk through the potential risks and benefits of generative AI when it comes to political advertising. Which concerns are overstated, and which are worth closer attention as we move toward 2024? How should policymakers respond to new uses of this technology in the context of elections? 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.
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