Alexis Wichowski on Net States

03/03/20 • 27 min

Big Tech companies have grown beyond their core products and services — influencing not only our digital lives, but our physical lives, and working in territory that used to be government turf : counterterrorism, space exploration, electricity, agriculture. Alexis Wichowski, deputy chief technology officer for the City of New York, warns that we should not accept lightly that these new giants provide our electricity or other essential services. Even if they are more efficient than governments.

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Yaël Eisenstat on Facebook and Political Ads

Last October, Facebook announced that it would not fact-check political ads. And that decision angered a lot of people: outside, but also inside the company. To talk about Facebook's policy, and the potential risks of such a decision ahead of the 2020 presidential election, we sit down with Yaël Eisenstat. She's a former CIA officer and national security advisor to Vice-President Joe Biden. And in 2018, she served as Facebook's Head of Global Elections Integrity Operations for six months.

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Camille Francois on Disinformation Campaigns

How do foreign actors spread disinformation online? What have we learned from the campaign of Russian meddling into the 2016 US Presidential elections, and are we ready for what’s coming in 2020? Our guest this week is Camille Francois, Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, a network analysis company that studies the spread of disinformation online. She explains how Russian trolls have been trying to sow chaos in the US since 2014, and she details the new threats she's seen emerge in recent years.