Anchor Change with Katie Harbath – Détails, épisodes et analyse

I’ve got another special episode of the Summer Spectacular podcast for you with my good friend Emi Kolawole. Emi has 10 years of experience in communications, design, and tech. In our conversation, she shares her insights from attending the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Socrates program.

She highlights the importance of including diverse voices, particularly women and minorities, in the conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) and technology. Emi also discusses the need for more intentional and inclusive panels and events in the tech industry. She expresses optimism about the future of technology and the emergence of new voices and perspectives.

Emi and I also discuss our interest in tarot as a tool for self-investigation and personal growth. We both gush about Rebecca Auman, who has helped us on our journeys. Check out her podcast, Voices in the River, on which Emi and I were guests. She encourages women to believe in themselves and follow their talents when entering the tech industry.

Enjoy!

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Ahead of TrustCon next week, I wanted to bring you a conversation I’ve been trying to set up since Duco released the Trust and Safety Market Research Report in March.

Guests, investors Lauren Wagner and Shu Dar Yao, join me to discuss their involvement in the report and the reasons behind it. They highlight key takeaways from the report, such as the unbundling of the tech stack in trust and safety and the impact of regulations and talent outflow. The conversation also touched on the trends in the trust and safety field, the challenges faced by startups, and the different perspectives on trust and safety among investors. They share advice for trust and safety professionals and discuss the future of the field and the need for more research and tools to support startups and investors.

Enjoy!

Lauren Wagner and Shu Dar Yao

I’m trying something different for this week’s podcast. I originally hoped I would have a webinar to repurpose, but we ended up rescheduling it, so rather than not doing a podcast this week, I thought I would record the answers to questions I get quite often.

In this discussion, I go into seven different areas of interest. Topics and time stamps are below. 

I hope you enjoy it! 

* 2:04 - My career path & how I mapped out my post-Facebook journey

* Lessons from Striking Out on My Own

* Mapping Out My Post Facebook Career

* Lori Brewer Collins: On Leading: Transformative Conversations

* 26:13 - Who I am outside of work

* Reclaim the Fairy Tale

* The Things We Whisper

* 32:16 - What I do and a typical day looks like for me

* 34:41 - How to get a job in tech

* 40:54 - My reading/news consumption habits

* 48:10 - Why I started my Substack and how I put it together each week

* 57:25 - What’s next

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube!

This week, I welcome Professor Kate Klonick to the podcast. The name of this episode comes from some amazing swag Kate made for a conference she put on last year on the history of the Trust and Safety profession. (You know how much I love swag.)

Kate is among the foremost experts on many things, including platform governance of speech. In 2018, she wrote a paper at Harvard titled “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” which was a first-of-its-kind behind-the-scenes look at how platforms handle content moderation.

In 2021, she wrote a piece for the New Yorker about how then-Facebook set up the Oversight Board titled, “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court.”

Recently, she has been writing on these topics at her Substack The Klonickles. One of her pieces I cite all the time is about the end of the golden age of tech accountability where in 2023 she makes the point:

[F]or all the of the complaining we’ve done about Big Tech’s lack of cooperation with accountability, transparency, and research efforts, I unfortunately think we’ll look back on the last five years as a Golden Age of Tech Company access and cooperation.

We talk about all of this and more. Enjoy!

Kate Klonick teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick's research focuses on law and technology, most recently on private platform governance of online speech. 

Klonick's scholarly work has appeared in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review, and The Southern California Law Review. Her popular press writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications.

Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit. She is an affiliated fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is on leave for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University.

Don’t forget you can watch all of these on YouTube!

This week, we are discussing all things online influence operations with one of the foremost experts - Olga Belogolva. We’re talking about Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and other actors who want to influence the online information environment. The title of this episode comes from one of her classes she used to teach at Georgetown.

Olga is the Director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She also a lecturer at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at SAIS, where she teaches a course on disinformation and influence in the digital age.

At Facebook/Meta, she led policy for countering influence operations, leading execution and development of policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior, state media capture, and hack-and-leaks within the Trust and Safety team. Prior to that, she led threat intelligence work on Russia and Eastern Europe at Facebook, identifying, tracking, and disrupting coordinated IO campaigns, and in particular, the Internet Research Agency investigations between 2017-2019.

Olga previously worked as a journalist, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Journal, Inside Defense, and The Globe and Mail, among others. She is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project and serves on the review board for CYBERWARCON.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget you can also watch this on YouTube!

This week, we are talking to Michael Bąk. Michael brings more than two decades of experience across international development, peacebuilding, diplomacy, and tech policy. Throughout his career, he has sustained a strong commitment to democratic governance, human rights, and information integrity.

He is currently the Executive Director of the Forum on Information and Democracy and a former colleague of mine at Facebook, where he was the head of public policy for Thailand.

We dig into the relationship between technology companies and civil society, how he’s thinking about our information environment and how we protect democracy in the age of social media and artificial intelligence.

Show Links:

* Global Call for Research to Expand Literature on Crucial Research Questions, with Emphasis on Global South Regions

* Policy brief - Tech firms, governments urged to combat digital election threats (I forgot to mention that we did this with International IDEA and Democracy Reporting International)

* Policy Brief - Information Integrity in Times of Conflict

* AI as a Public Good: Ensuring Democratic Control of AI in the Information Space framework

* Why Do We Need to Discuss So-called "Information Integrity"?

* Euroviews. 'Regulation stifles innovation' is a misguided myth 

* Der Demokratieschützer Michael Bak über KI. - SZ.de 

* Fair Trade AI: https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung/plaedoyer-fuer-eine-fairtrade-ki 

* Forum on Information and Democracy: www.informationdemocracy.org

Don’t forget you can also watch these on YouTube!

This week we welcome Stanford Law Professor Nate Persily to the podcast. I’ve known Nate since 2013/2014 when he held a gathering at Stanford with folks in the tech/digital industry and the Federal Elections Commission. Nate has been a thought leader his entire career with experiences across technology, academia and election administration. We get into all of that in this conversation. Some links from what we talked about:

* Nate’s bio

* Stanford Cyber Policy Center

* Social Science One research partnership with Facebook

* Facebook 2020 election research

* Senate Testimony on Platform Transparency

Don’t forget you can now also watch these conversations on YouTube!

This week, we are diving deep into elections and specifically where people go to get information on the election. Rachel Orey is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Senior Associate Director where they are responsible for the organization’s election administration policy development, state and federal advocacy efforts, and the BPC Task Force on Elections. Their research focuses on evidence-based and data-driven reforms that meaningfully improve our elections ecosystem.

As many of you know, I was a fellow on Rachel’s team for nearly three years and one of my last acts as both a BPC and Integrity Institute fellow was to help get this survey off the ground. We did a similar one in 2022 as well.

Some of the findings include:Most Americans have confidence in the 2024 presidential election. They are more confident that votes in their community and state will be counted accurately than votes across the country.

* A majority of respondents (69%) are confident their votes will be counted accurately in the 2024 election. This includes majorities of Republicans (60% very or somewhat confident), Independents (59%), and Democrats (85%).

* Across all groups, Americans are most confident about an accurate count of votes in their community (74%). Just 64% are confident in an accurate count across the country.

* This difference is most pronounced among Republicans. Only 50% of Republicans express confidence that votes will be counted accurately at the national level compared with 66% at the local level—a gap of 16 percentage points.

* The confidence gap between local and national counting is an opportunity for voter education about how the counting and certification process works at all levels of our election system. While election officials may be doing a good job building confidence in their community, this gap shows the need for national and state media outlets, candidates, and political elites to help voters understand the robust processes and security measures that are present in every state.

Rachel digs into that and more in this week’s podcast.

Here’s the link to the security and integrity protections that make American elections strong, resilient, and trustworthy in every jurisdiction.

This week on the podcast, we are taking you to SXSW and discussing a conversation I had with Sasha Issenberg about his new book, Lie Detectives: How Political Campaigns Fight Disinformation. You might remember him from his popular book Victory Lab, which was published after Obama won.

Sasha’s book looks at people in the U.S. and Brazil who were at the forefront of helping campaigns figure out how to combat disinformation—including when to ignore it. He also touches on how many on the Right view this work, and it’s something we talk about as well. You can read an excerpt on Politico.

We interview each other in this conversation given our various experiences.

A huge thank you to SXSW for the audio after my recorder ran out of batteries halfway through. 😬

Please enjoy!

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We’re back! I didn’t intend to take two full months off from the podcast, but as many of you know, I started a new job in January as the Chief Global Affairs Officer of Duco Experts - a technology consulting firm. It has been overwhelming, in a good way, but it took me a bit to get started again with the podcast.

I’ve got some exciting guests lined up. I figure we’ll do this season through the end of May, and then I’ll re-evaluate for the rest of the year.

To kick things off, I’m excited to have Luis Lozada, the CEO of Democracy Works. You may not have heard of Democracy Works, but you likely have encountered their work. They do the painstaking work of gathering all the information about where, when, and how to vote from the thousands of election officials across the country to put it in a readable format that companies like Google, TikTok, and Anthropic currently use.

I started working with them when I was at Facebook, and we used them to power many of our U.S.-based Election Day reminders. I was invited to join the board while I was at Facebook and have now been a board member for five years.

With the explosion of AI, Democracy Works is now helping companies think through the next generation of people getting election information. Luis and I cover that and more in our conversation.

Enjoy!

PS: If you are looking for the poll by the Bipartisan Policy Center, Integrity Institute and States United that we reference you can find it here.

PS: We’re now on video, too! With Season 2, I’ve launched an Impossible Tradeoffs YouTube channel if you'd like to watch our conversation rather than listen.