Welcome to Tech Talk by

Thank you. Thank you.

Of course. So the markup is a news nonprofit that investigates the various ways that powerful actors use technology to reshape our society. And that means we're investigating the big tech companies that you have heard about, know about, and probably use just statistically, but also the tech that you've never heard about. The mortgage screening algorithms that decide what your mortgage rate's gonna be or the tenant screening algorithms that decide where you can live or EdTech that's recording and collecting all kinds of data when you think you're just sitting down for an exam. And what we really believe is that, people have a right to know how these systems organize their lives in ways that may not be visible. Right? We understand the process behind the democratic process and government and local government. We don't really understand what a lot of these institutions are doing, and so we want to cast light on that. What makes us a little different is that we started in 2019. And to start a news organization in 2019 in the midst of, you know, journalists are the enemy of the state and fake news is a sort of a wild endeavor. And what that required of us is that we had to put trust at the center. Right? We thought no one trusts media right now, and they don't know who we are. Right? There's just some random new place, entering the field, talking about often beloved or at least highly used frequently used brands like Facebook or Amazon. We have to show why we're different. We have to show why we're reliable and trustworthy. And so we do a variety of things to really be quite transparent in our news gathering method to give people a reason to trust us. And that includes things like our markup method, the way we republish, the way we publish methodologies and methods about how we do our work, which I'm happy to get into. Yeah. So, actually, you touched on my next question.

to journalism different than others? Absolutely. So, you know, in 2019, I was sitting down with Julia Angwin, who is our fearless founder, who'd been doing tech reporting for, I mean, decades, really. Okay. So the moment we're in requires us to construct journalism that is trustworthy from the start. And often trust is allocated to people who look like you, organizations you've seen for a long time. You know, you trust things that you've heard about, that people you trust trust, and we don't necessarily have any of that. So the other way people can trust something is if they have transparency into the process. And so we thought, what if we create a method that's built on the scientific method that really starts off in its first step by saying, you know, there's a lot of things that people say, so let's build a hypothesis and let's test it. Right? So for example, how many times have we heard that, you know, people who vote for Democrats see one type of news and people who vote for Republicans see another type of news, and we live in these totally different filter bubbles. Let's build a hypothesis to test just how true that is. The next step in the markup method is building a dataset to actually test the hypothesis. So that could be getting data that is already available somewhere on the Internet. Someone like ProPublica or another news organizations already collected it, and we work through a collaboration. Sometimes you file some public records requests or even litigate public records requests to get access to that kind of data. And sometimes you have to build your own tool to collect it. So building on sort of that filter bubble news idea, we built a tool called citizen browser as one example that would help us collect data on a statistically representative sample of the American public and would let us see what news they were being served on Facebook. And we're collecting the data of if you are a Trump voter, what are you seeing? If you're a Biden voter, what are you seeing? If you're a man, you're a woman, you're white, you're black, in these different groups that are so important in our society, what's your news ecosystem look like? And so that second step is doing the hard work to collect the data. We then move on to the next step where we bulletproof that data. We test our hypothesis. We come up with some conclusions, and critically, we reach out to experts to say, hey. This is how we put this together. Does this seem right to you, professor statistician? Right? Well, let's talk to, like, you know, six or seven different statisticians, get their input on our method, on our analysis, and what that helps us do is something very important. It helps us identify our limitations. I think the most important thing in building trust is having humility and saying, this is what I know. This is what I don't know. I'm not trying to create a grand theory of the universe, but I'm telling you this is what we can see right now. And I think that humility really helps. And so we get to that by speaking to experts who will point out the gaps, and you'll see it in our in our, investigative articles where we'll say, you know, we can weigh in on this piece, but we don't know everything. So feel free to give us more information or chime in if you know more to help flush out the picture. And then we publish in our sort of last step, but our approach to publishing is very much framed by philosophy of show your work. Right? Show your math on this one. We publish a methodology. We'll do trainings for people to say, hey. If you wanna recreate what we did, here's how you can do it. We'll share our data and our tools with other news partners. So for Citizen Browser, the Facebook tool I just explained, we actually shared it with a German investigative outlet in advance of their own elections. And so that method, right, of really being meticulous, deliberative, data oriented, humble, and then collaborative, that's the method.

It's a great question. And so the first thing is by saying, look, when you call us fake news, often that's saying you have a political bias. There's some hidden mechanism or hidden influence that's making you draw one conclusion over another. And so the method really is an antidote to that to say, no. We're actually telling you where we're coming from on this. We've collected what we know. We've had experts test it, and we're publishing our limitations. And we think that humility can be really helpful in countering that narrative because we're saying we're not trying to hide the ball, and we're not, we're not influenced by a philosophy that you're not seeing here. Now here's what I will say. In 2019, I could not have imagined the sort of full frontal assault on science generally that we've seen in the last two years. Right? Here we're sitting in 2019. You know, the world seems normal, and we're like, well, you know what people trust? Science. People trust science. And as we sit here in 2022, we're like, do people trust science? Unclear. But, you know, at some point, you gotta realize that nothing is a silver bullet, and and trust is a thing that's slow. And so there's never gonna be a silver bullet for solving misinformation because there never has been. There's always been conspiracy theories. There's always been your cousin who believes that the moon landing didn't happen. Like, that's always been the case. But what we can do is try to chip away at that by providing trustworthy, deeply reported, transparent news to try and say another way is possible, and we're doing it.

We have a great gift by virtue of being a nonprofit, which is that we're not really tied to the profit making obligations that a public media company or another for profit media company might have. And so if we're not driven by profit, we're driven by our mission. And so much of our mission is about making sure that people have information in their hands to do something about it. Right? And that could mean we write an article that a regulator introduces into a senate hearing, which we've been fortunate enough to have happen. That also means that we can publish something that ends up being the basis of a color of change campaign and petition, which we've also had happen, or that we publish something that gets a, company to change its practices right away, like we've seen with Life three sixty and some of the EdTech work that we've done, we prime it for people to do something with it. Because they're having that impact at the end of the day, you know, I'm a media litigator by training. I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I like having impact in the world. That's why we do what we do. And and we realized pretty quickly that, you know, we're a new small footprint, modest footprint, nonprofit, and having other people republish our work is a way to get the work into other audience's hands so they can go on and do the good work of making change happen. And, we've been incredibly successful, I have to say, more than I thought, with this republication strategy. We've been published in countries around the world. We've translated our work more frequently. We have our stories republished by really different outlets. Our EdTech work ends up in the education sphere. Our data privacy work ends up republished by different people. Our Facebook and Google and Amazon work republished in different places. And what's really amazing about that kind of republication is that the work reaches people where they are already, and that's powerful.

That's awesome. More knowledge more knowledge is a good thing. We could all do with a little bit more knowledge these days. Yeah. I'll I'll even push a little further a lot more knowledge.

Oh, it's a wild experiment rooted in the same twenty nineteen considerations of what does it take to build trust in a moment where we have a huge trust deficit. We thought, you know, one kind of funny conundrum is that we're if we're gonna run around saying, these places are collecting your data and this this is happening and you don't know about it. We're positioning ourselves as people who are uncovering, right, the hidden architecture of the world. If we're participating in that, if we're playing into that, then we're hypocrites, and that feels uncomfortable. So we thought, could we build a modern news organization that collect as little data as possible. And, again, you gotta, like, think about how wild this experiment is now when people talk about, like, data is the new oil. Companies are being acquired, for the data that they collect. It really is a source of tremendous value. We thought, well, let's play around in the sandbox and see what's possible here. Right? Will we be able to select vendors internally, right, like a newsletter platform that is sufficiently privacy protective? Will we be able to reach our audiences if we're not using a variety of, like, audience tracking methodologies? And the answer so far is yes, because we have readers who we get, donations all the time with little notes that people are like, thank you. Thank you for being a place that I know I can go to and not worry about how my data is being taken because as one reader mentioned in a note to me, like, I just click accept all cookies every time I go to a website. Like, I don't know what's happening here. I'm not interested. And that's that is a very important recognition of human behavior. Right? Like, how many of us have just been like, I just want to read this. I don't know. I'm moving forward. And, like, that's where people are. Right? People want convenience. We're all struggling with too much. And so this sort of notice and consent regime of how we talk about privacy has limitations because people are busy. Okay? And they're not sitting there and reading full on privacy policies. So we thought, let's be on one end of the spectrum. I'm happy to say, right, what we're seeing a lot of in this industry with the move away from third party data collection to first party data collection Mhmm. Is that there's a lot of interest and intrigue in, like, how we've done what we've done so far. Our audience director, Rachel Berkey, gets a lot of inbounds from people throughout the industry who are like, wait. How do you know who your audience is if you if you're not collecting all this data? And we, joke with them that we're like, you know, the nineteen nineties existed. Right? Like, we go back through the old school way. We reach out. We have focus groups. We have surveys. And we find that to be incredibly effective.

I saw, I saw a woman with Tamagotchi earrings the other day, and I was like, first of all, I live in Brooklyn, so that's a dumbest assumption.

Same.

What I'm so thrilled to see is that, you know, 2018 to 2019, we saw a lot of tech journalism coverage that was almost like political horse race coverage, or it was geared towards advocates. Right? Or, sorry, not advocates, investors. It's like this company raised this series a. This, you know, this change is happening inside this company. Occasionally, sure, there were amazing accountability journalism pieces about big tech companies, but the overall, tone and tenor was much more celebratory or investor friendly. Right? Like, you should put your money into these companies. What's happened I mean, I think what's truly remarkable is in 2020 with the onset of the lingering pandemic, so many of our lives jumped onto screens. Right? Things that we would always do in person were now remote. Your doctor's appointments, your schooling, the way you talk to your loved ones, all was mediated by these tech platforms that we didn't truly deeply understand. So I really think that there was this sort of interesting shift of curiosity and appetite into, like, wait a minute. What is going on here? Right? Who are we trusting and with what? Especially as some of those companies were, you know, doing quite well economically despite the lived experience of so many people. Right? There was a desire to explain the gap sort of explain that gap. And so I think we've seen a real growth in tech accountability journalism, which I love and celebrate. There are such amazing reporters out there who are holding the big tech companies and the tech you've never heard of all to account, and we see them as, you know, like celebrated colleagues and peers. We do a lot of collaboration at the markup. We've co published with the New York Times, with consumer reports, with the AP. And our our view here is, again, as a mission driven organization, like, more in the tent is better because that's more opportunities for more people to see what's going on to really ask tough questions about the architecture of how their world is run. And some people will conclude they're fine with it, and some people will not.

Oh, so many things, but I'm gonna zoom out and answer in a real galaxy brain way, so forgive me for this. And I'm gonna as part of that galaxy brain journey, I'm gonna ask you to time travel with me. So if you go back to the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties Wow. You know? Okay. Yeah. Banks crash. Everyone is in dire straits. And there was sort of a cultural and social realization of, like, hey. Banks are really powerful. We should probably have some check on their power. Yeah. And then you see the development of the fed, the development of generally accepted accounting principles, standardizations, and accountability, and checks and and balances for these huge banks that control a lot of our industry. We're not gonna talk about 2008 right now. We're just talking about the nineteen thirties. But there was there was a realization in that moment that there needed to be some oversight. Right? Mhmm. Fast forward another, you know, thirty ish years, we've we see in the mid nineteen hundreds the growth of the administrative state. Post new deal, we see all kinds of government decisions being made in bureaucracies in a way that isn't clearly accountable to the public in the democratic process that we previously have understood. Right? If you think about sort of people's conception of democracy, it's like you elect a local person, they do or do not do what you want, and then if they don't do what you want, you get rid of them. Or that's not really true of, you know, an administrative bureaucracy, which has really grow, which really grew in in the mid century. So there was like, how are we gonna hold them accountable? Let's create the Freedom of Information Act and a variety of other rooted in the First Amendment access law principles. Are they perfect? No. Is the philosophy relevant? Yes. Because it was the it was a real a conclusion that the government is extremely powerful over our lives, and there should probably be some checks and balances over what they're doing in this new form. Right? You also, around that time, see the heyday of a particular type of investigative journalism with Watergate and what have you of saying, wow. There are these forces that are holding the government accountable. So we see an accountability structure for banks and and a transparency and disclosure regime for banks. We see it for the government. And now let's fast forward a little longer than we should have, done, but here we are in 2022. This realization that we have tech companies, big and small, that wield an outsized amount of power over our lives in all kinds of nooks and crannies that we are just learning about, and there isn't really a clear check on their power. Right? Yeah. There's the FTC and there's regulators and and there's, you know, there's a there's litigation and there's state regulators. I don't wanna undercut their work. But all of that's shaking out in real time. Right? We're all waiting to see. Are there gonna be fines that are big enough to change this behavior? What, like, what are the incentive structures that we're creating to have true transparency and accountability to these powerful actors in our society? And that is the big question of our moment. Right? Are we willing to seed a tremendous amount of power to these institutions and just trust it's all gonna be fine? Or are we willing to fight for and demand an accountability structure? And that could be anything from, you know, a method of requesting information from private companies, kind of like a public records act, but for private companies. It could be much more sort of toothsome, that's not the right word, with teeth, like, regulations with teeth, like we're seeing in The EU around big companies. It could take a lot of forms, and I think what makes me excited about this moment is that we're in a moment of regulatory imagination. Everyone's like, what we have is not working. Let's figure out how to fix it. None of these fixes are gonna be easy fixes. And I think that so I have the optimism around sort of imagination of the moment where I have a little bit of pessimism, maybe more of a little, is, every fix yields its own need for future solutions. Yes. Every fix you make, you're like, I didn't realize this an unanticipated problem. And so what we really need smart people to be thinking about right now is not just what's the fix, but what problem is that gonna create that we need to think about in ten years' time? Because we're not gonna wait another hundred or ninety for for that set of accountability questions.

Up. Totally. And, like, such is the nature of human life. Right? Like, you fix one thing. Like, I was talking to someone about, you know, GMO foods fix a hunger problem, and then they create other health problems. You know? Who knows? But, but I think that the interlocking pieces aspect of tech policy is what makes it so exciting, but also uniquely challenging.

Where do you see bright spots? Sorry. I there's so many bright spots. Right? There's so many people who are experimenting with really thoughtful ways of engaging with these big tech behemoths. You have people like Casey Newton who writes platformer who's, you know, from a in a very human, accessible, super smart way, asking tough questions about, like, what's going on here? Right? Charlie Warzel is in that same vein. You see the rise of data journalism, the type of which that we do, as a program, that's growing in all of these journalism schools across the country. You know, Lam Vaux, who's a professor at CUNY, talks about how when she started teaching journalism data journalism, you know, the classes were modest in size, and now they're oversubscribed. Right? Like, people are like, I wanna learn how to do this kind of data journalism. I wanna move beyond. I interviewed three people who work at big tech company x, and here's what they said. Right? And here's what their comms person said. There it's moving to something that is much more rich and nuanced. Another development that I see that I just love, it brings me so much joy, is that there is this constant question of we're building these technologies. We're building a tech future, and you see this in conversations around web three a lot. Who has a seat at the table and who doesn't? Right? Who is this for and who is this not for? Who is it not working for? Is a set of questions that are so front of mind in the conversations I'm in in a way that, like, web two point o, didn't always have or at least fell by the wayside as we centralized through, you know, a couple of juggernauts. That's really optimistic. And then I will say in our own org, it's, I'll give you actually an example just from a couple weeks ago. You know, we had been doing this really great reporting on EdTech platforms that are collecting data on students when they're, you know, filling out applications for different things or when they're sitting down for a test. So we decided to hold an event where we would teach students how they could do this kind of work about their own lives, right, about things that they were seeing in the world. And we had hundreds of people RSVP. That's amazing. Right? To think that there's that much appetite to say I deserve to, and I want to know what is happening in my world. And these aren't necessarily all people who are gonna turn into journalists, by the way. Right? The acts of journalism are being carried forth by people who have all kinds of different degrees and backgrounds and professions is actually a win for journalism because it's really a mode of being. It's it's a mode of saying we deserve to know more, and it's great for more people to believe that than others because I think that is really the only way we get a better world. And, you know, we need that. We we need that.

Sure. I think it's very easy and so understandable these days to fall into sort of doom and gloom or a belief that, well, you know, here's a class action lawsuit being brought by someone, but it's not gonna go anywhere. Here's this thing, and nothing's gonna happen. People have always been exploited. It's not gonna work. And I just I want to channel all of our inner mister Rogers to say, like, there are people doing good. Like, look for the helpers. There's so much experimentation. There's so much enthusiasm. And, yeah, some of the things we're trying aren't gonna work. But so long as there's a spirit to improve, right, to not just hold tech accountable because it's powerful, but to hold tech accountable because we love it. We need it. We understand the capacity it has to connect us as people and to improve all of our lives. That is a huge a beautiful motivating force, and I think there is so much reason to stay optimistic. I know I am.

Sounds great. Well, I am, again, a huge fan of everything that CDT does. This is such an important force in the experimentation of how do we build a better future for all of us, and so it's a real honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And for all of our listeners, if you would like to learn more about the markup, please visit the markup.org.