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PODCAST

Scaling Laws

Lawfare & University of Texas Law School

Scaling Laws explores (and occasionally answers) the questions that keep OpenAI’s policy team up at night, the ones that motivate legislators to host hearings on AI and draft new AI bills, and the ones that are top of mind for tech-savvy law and policy students. Co-hosts Alan Rozenshtein, Professor at Minnesota Law and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas and Senior Editor at Lawfare, dive into the intersection of AI, innovation

government politics

All Episodes

59:46

How the Press and the Platforms Handled the Hunter...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/04/07

We’re taking a look back at one of the stranger stories about social media platforms and the role of the press in the last presidential election. In the weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published an “October Surprise”: a set of stories on the business and personal life of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, based on emails contained on a mysterious laptop. A great deal was questionable about the Post’s reporting, including to what extent the emails

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57:05

What’s in the U.K. Online Safety Bill?

Scaling Laws ·

2022/03/31

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re turning our attention to the United Kingdom, where the government has just introduced into Parliament a broad proposal for regulating the internet: the Online Safety Bill. The U.K. government has proclaimed that the Bill represents new “world-first online safety laws” and includes “tougher and quicker criminal sanctions for tech bosses.” So … what would it actually do?To answer this question, Evelyn Douek and

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59:42

Getting Information Into Russia

Scaling Laws ·

2022/03/24

Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the war in Ukraine on this series—how the Russian, Ukrainian and American governments are leveraging information as part of the conflict; how tech platforms are navigating the flood of information coming out of Ukraine and the crackdown from the Kremlin; and how open-source investigators are documenting the war.This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re going to talk about getting information into Russia

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52:38

How Open-Source Investigators are Documenting the War...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/03/17

Open-source investigations—sometimes referred to as OSINT, or open-source intelligence—have been crucial to public understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An enormous number of researchers have devoted their time to sifting through social media posts, satellite images, and even Google Maps to track what’s happening in Ukraine and debunk false claims about the conflict.This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we devoted the show to understanding how

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59:54

How Tech Platforms are Navigating the War in Ukraine

Scaling Laws ·

2022/03/10

As Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine continues, tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been key geopolitical players in the conflict. The Kremlin has banned those platforms and others as part of a sharp clampdown on freedoms within Russia. Meanwhile, these companies must decide what to do with state-funded Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik that have accounts on their platforms—and how best to moderate the flood of information, some of it gruesome or untrue, that’s appearing as users

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58:36

You Can’t Handle the Truth (Social)

Scaling Laws ·

2022/03/03

Almost immediately since he was banned from Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, Donald Trump has been promising the launch of a new, Trump-run platform to share his thoughts with the world. In February 2022, that network—Truth Social—finally launched. But it’s been a debacle from start to finish, with a lengthy waitlist and a glitchy website that awaits users who finally make it online.Drew Harwell, who covers technology at the Washington Post, has been reporting on the less-than-smooth launch of

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58:59

The Information War in Ukraine

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/24

Over the last several weeks, Russian aggression toward Ukraine has escalated dramatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Russia would recognize the sovereignty of two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, Donetsk and Luhansk, whose years-long effort to secede from Ukraine has been engineered by Russia. Russian troops have entered eastern Ukraine as supposed “peacekeepers,” and the Russian military has taken up positions along a broad stretch of Ukraine’s border.Along with

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56:37

The Nuts and Bolts of Social Media Transparency

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/17

Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company acquired CrowdTangle, a startup designed to provide insight into what content is performing well on Facebook and Instagram, and he left in October 2021, in the midst of a debate over how much information the company should make public about its platform. As the New York Times described it, CrowdTangle “had increasingly become an irritant” to

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50:19

Spotify Faces the Content Moderation Music

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/10

The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the mostpopular podcast in the world—and it’s been at the center of a weeks-long controversy over COVID misinformation and content moderation. After Rogan invited on a guest who told falsehoods about the safety of COVID vaccines, outrage mounted toward Spotify, the podcasting and music streaming company that recently signed an exclusive deal with Rogan to distribute his show. Spotify came under pressure to intervene, as nearly 300 experts sent the company a letter

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54:48

Is Block Party the Future of Content Moderation?

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

We talk a lot on this show about the responsibility of major tech platforms when it comes to content moderation.But what about problems the platforms can’t—or won’t—fix? Tracy Chou’s solution involves going around platforms entirely and creating tools that give power back to users to control their own experience. She’s the engineer behindBlock Party, an app that allows Twitter users to protect themselves against online harassment and abuse. It’s a fine-tuned solution to a problem that a lot of

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55:37

Defunding the Insurrectionists

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened.This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke

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1:01:51

Why the Online Advertising Market is Broken

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

In December 2020, ten state attorneys generalsued Google, alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The lawsuit is ongoing, and just this January, new allegations in the states’ complaint were freshly unsealed: the states haveaccusedGoogle of tinkering with its ad auctions to mislead publishers and advertisers and expand its own power in the marketplace. (Googletold the Wall Street Journalthat the complaint was “full of inaccuracies and lacks legal

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1:01:06

Podcasts Are the Laboratories of Misinformation

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published ananalysisof how popular podcasters on the American right used their shows to spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. These are the same issues that led tech platforms to crack down on misinformation in the runup to the election—and yet, the question of whether podcast apps have a responsibility to moderate audio content on their platforms has largely flown under

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58:36

Content Moderation After January 6

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

One year ago, a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power as the president of the United States. The internet played a central role in the insurrection: Trump used Twitter to broadcast his falsehoods about the integrity of the election and gin up excitement over January 6, and rioters coordinated ahead of time on social media and posted pictures afterwards of the violence. In the wake

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57:09

Working Toward Transparency and Accountability in...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with theSanta Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation—a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential, earning the endorsement of a number of major technology companies like Facebook.Three years later, asecond,

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56:48

Free the Data!

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. ThePlatform Accountability and Transparency Act, sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process through which academic researchers could gain access to information about the operation of these

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54:39

Content Moderation’s Original ‘Decider’

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day,someonehas to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with“The Decider”—Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-cheek nickname during her time at Google in the 2000s. As the company’s deputy general counsel, Nicole was in charge of

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1:00:20

How Zoom Thinks About Content Moderation

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with some of the people behind the app that, by this point in the pandemic, you’re probably sick of: Zoom. Quinta and Evelyn sat down with Josh Kallmer, Zoom’s head of global public policy and government relations, and Josh Parecki, Zoom’s associate general counsel and head of trust and safety.Most of us have used Zoom regularly over the last few years thanks to COVID-19, but while

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1:06:45

Rational Security's The 'Nothing To Be Thankful For'...

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

For Thanksgiving, we’re bringing you something a little different—an episode of Rational Security, our light, conversational show about national security and related topics. This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest, Quinta's co-host of the Arbiters of Truth series on theLawfarepodcast feedEvelyn Douek! They sat down to discuss:—“Getting Rittenhoused”: A jury recentlyacquitted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of murder chargesfor shooting two men in what he claimed was self-defense

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57:49

The Facebook Oversight Board, One Year On

Scaling Laws ·

2022/02/04

It’s been roughly a year since the Facebook Oversight Board opened its doors for business—and while you may mostly remember the Board from its decision on Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, but there’s been a lot going on since then. So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment in platform governance is faring. In October, the Board released itsfirst transparency report, and Facebook—now Meta—has publishedits own updateon how it’s been responding to the Board’s decisions

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