What does tech owe democracy?

On September 10, CITAP hosted Daniel Greene to discuss his book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope in conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Alice Marwick. They discuss how the problem of poverty became a problem of technology and the skills to use it, how philanthropic donations have changed how public institutions operate, and how 'learn to code' became the default response to the broken labor markets of the twenty-first century.

We've explored how disinformation plays on our biases, fuels our anger, and even nudges us to find only what we wanted to learn. The mess is daunting. Building a healthier, informed democracy is not an individual project, but it's one we begin imagining in this episode. Given what we know about the problem, how do we begin to fix things?

Technology platforms didn't create our political divides. They aren't blameless, either. Host Daniel Kreiss sits down with Katie Harbath & Tressie McMillan Cottom to understand the role of "efficiency machines" in social contexts and imagine the guardrails we need for social media and other tech companies to become stewards of a healthy democracy—because public life is far easier to destroy than rebuild.

Disinformation is social—it's designed for sharing, to draw bright lines between "us" and some other "them." To do that, disinformation campaigns mess with our emotions. These narratives can convert feelings of anxiety, fear, and powerlessness into bright, actionable anger, or sow doubt and uncertainty in the face of optimism. Host Shannon McGregor digs deep into all the feels and how to channel good anger in the face of these manipulations.

Online, information and disinformation cross huge physical distances easily. Applications like WeChat and YouTube keep Asian American communities more connected to far-flung friends and family than ever. By comparison, bridging the dinner table and its language and generational differences can prove much more daunting. Host Rachel Kuo explores how disinformation circulates in Asian American communities, from the workings of 'auntie information networks' to the role of history in shaping how communities access and evaluate information.

We like to think of ourselves as savvy searchers, but the truth is that most of us have no idea how search engines work—especially given how much we rely on them. For example, do you know whether different people get personalized results for the same searches? What are data voids, and how do they become gateways to disinformation? Search isn't magic, and in this episode, host Francesca Tripodi discusses the ins and outs of how search engine algorithms work, how media manipulation can game the results, and how our own perceptions and biases shape our results before we even open the search bar.

A lot of the time, when we talk about disinformation, it's like we're talking about garbage—not what's in the garbage, or who made the garbage, or why the garbage spreads, just that there is garbage and we have to get rid of it. That's a mistake. Host Alice Marwick explores the relationship between disinformation, extremism, and media manipulation. Who's behind white supremacist disinformation? What are their motivations? Why is this content so sticky, and how does it keep getting pushed into the mainstream?

What do conspiracy theories and racism have in common? More than you might think. Deen Freelon explores how white supremacy itself can be understood as a disinformation campaign and how a willingness to believe all sorts of terrible and false things about people of other races might open a door to believing falsehoods about science, medicine, politics and other topics. Even when Black communities and right-wing political groups express similar distrust of official government sources and embrace conspiracies, they do so via very different paths. We talk about conspiracies, racism, and recognizing when the government actually is out to get you.

On our first season of Does Not Compute, we'll be talking about identity and disinformation. How do our communities shape what we search for, share about, and even believe? And how do malicious actors manipulate our identities to promote their ideologies? What role do big tech platforms play in spreading disinformation, and how can they help address the problem? We won't quite answer all those questions and more in just one episode, but we'll begin digging into these topics and introducing our hosts.

Does Not Compute is a podcast about technology, people, and power brought to you by the Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life (CITAP). We'll pry into the black boxes and get to know the people behind the code to understand technology platforms in context.