The Sunday Show: Platform Integrity, Platform Democracy

Subscribe to the Tech Policy Press podcast via your favorite podcast service.

In today's episode, we’ve got two separate but related conversations about social media and how it intersects with democracy and society.

In the first segment, we’re going to hear from Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi, two former Facebook employees who are the founders of the Integrity Institute, a new nonprofit organization. They believe one solution to the problems on social media is the development of a community of integrity professionals with experience at a variety of social media platforms that can come together to address problems and share best practices together.

Then, we’re going to look under the hood of some fresh ideas about how to democratize policymaking on social media platforms from Aviv Ovadya, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of a proposal titled "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure." To help evaluate Aviv's ideas, I'm also joined by Joe Bak-Coleman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, and Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.