Unpacking the Rise of 'Smart Authoritarianism' in China

This week marks the second DSA and Platform Regulation conference in Amsterdam, where experts will convene to consider the Digital Services Act (DSA) two years after it entered full effect across the European Union. Over that period, the law has been tested by national elections, geopolitical tensions, high-profile enforcement actions, and the rapid rise of generative AI. It has become both a benchmark for platform accountability and a political lightning rod.Ahead of the conference, Tech Policy Press senior editor Ramsha Jahangir spoke with members of the DSA Observatory, which is organizing the conference, to take stock. What have these first years of enforcement clarified? Where does opacity remain? And what does it mean to conduct DSA research in today’s political climate? Guests include:John Albert, associate researcher, DSA Observatory.Paddy Leerssen, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and part of the DSA Observatory.Magdelena Jozwiak, associate researcher at the DSA Observatory.

A wave of lawsuits in the Unites States is targeting tech firms for their product design decisions. Lawyer Carrie Goldberg has played a role in establishing the product liability theory that underlies them. As the founder of C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, in 2017, her firm brought a lawsuit that sought to apply product liability theory to a tech platform — Herrick v. Grindr — arguing that a dangerous app design, not just user behavior, was the source of harm. In 2022, Goldberg was appointed to the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in the federal social media multidistrict litigation. She’s led cases against Amazon, Meta, and Omegle, has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on child safety issues, and is the author of Nobody's Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls. Justin Hendrix spoke to her from her offices in Brooklyn about what she's learned over the last decade, and about some ongoing litigation that remains in dispute.

"Operation Metro Surge" — the massive immigration enforcement operation playing out right now in Minnesota — was billed as a targeted effort to apprehend undocumented immigrants. But what it has exposed goes far beyond immigration enforcement. It has pulled back the curtain on a sprawling surveillance apparatus that incorporates artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other novel tools — not just to enable the raids that have turned violent and, in some cases, deadly; but also to silence dissent, to intimidate entire communities, and to discourage people from even watching what masked federal agents are doing in their own neighborhoods.To discuss these events and the prospects for reform, Justin Hendrix spoke to Irna Landrum, a senior campaigner at Kairos Fellowship and author of a recent piece on Tech Policy Press, "How ICE Uses AI to Automate Authoritarianism," and Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president for the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has called for reforms at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies.

In his forthcoming book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You, George Washington University Law School professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson explores how the rise of sensor-driven technologies, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches—these devices track our most private activities, and that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking for incriminating clues. What should legislatures, courts, and individuals do to protect civil liberties?

The killing of 37-year old nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis was filmed from multiple angles by residents of the city, and local government officials have implored the public to share evidence of immigration enforcement agents committing acts of violence with investigators. But what are the challenges of using such artifacts in the pursuit of accountability? And what is there to learn from other efforts to use video, including from social media platforms, as evidence when seeking justice for crimes by state actors? Inequality.org managing editor and Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo joins Justin Hendrix to discuss these questions and more.

Today's guest is Jennifer Lind,  an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, a fellow at Chatham House London, and the author of the new book Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny, just out from Cornell Press. The book introduces the concept of 'smart authoritarianism,' a strategy that seeks to preserve political dominance while minimizing the economic damage of repression. It’s a sharp and unsettling argument—and one that is worth considering as a wave of autocratization continues to sweep across the globe, increasingly enabled by new technologies.

In a forthcoming paper, George Washington University Law School scholar Spencer Overton argues that the Trump administration's AI policy is consistent with its broader efforts to advance ethnonationalism. By eliminating policies intended to ensure safeguards against algorithmic bias—and recasting work on such problems as ideological threats to innovation—Trump's policies embed exclusion into the technological infrastructure of the future. As a growing body of research suggests, when AI systems operate without regulation, they default to dominant patterns that reproduce racial inequality and suppress cultural pluralism.

A new book titled Governing Digital China offers crucial insights into China's governance ecosystem. Written by Daniela Stockmann, a professor at the Hertie School in Berlin and director of the Center for Digital Governance, and Ting Luo, an associate professor in artificial intelligence and government at the University of Birmingham, the book reveals a more complex reality than simple top-down control.The authors show how massive tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba have become essential partners to the Chinese state, blending corporate and government power. At the same time, citizens exercise bottom-up influence, shaping how both platforms and the state respond to their needs. The result is what the authors call "popular corporatism"—a form of digital authoritarianism that operates quite differently than you might expect.

2026 is poised to be another landmark year for the child online safety debate in the United States.In recent years, states have passed dozens of bills aimed at expanding protections for kids as they navigate risks on social media platforms, AI chatbots and other pools, with more likely on the way. Lawmakers in Washington, meanwhile, are considering a flurry of proposals that could set a national standard on the issue. But many of these efforts are facing legal limbo as industry and some digital rights groups allege they violate constitutional rights and trample on privacy.Tech Policy Press senior editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to three experts tracking the issue to assess the current policy landscape in the United States and how it may shift in 2026, particularly as state legislators continue to take up the cause:Amina Fazlullah is head of tech policy advocacy at Common Sense Media, a group that advocates for child online safety measures. She previously served as a tech policy fellow for Mozilla and as director of policy at the Benton Foundation.Joel Thayer is president of the Digital Progress Institute, a think tank that advocates for age verification policies. He previously clerked for Federal Trade Commission official Maureen Ohlhausen and served as policy counsel for the tech trade group The App Association.Kate Ruane is the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights. She previously served as lead public policy specialist for the Wikimedia Foundation and as senior legislative counsel for the ACLU.

In what Reuters called a "mass digital undressing spree," Elon Musk is provoking outrage after his Grok chatbot responded to user prompts to remove the clothing from images of women and pose them in bikinis and to create "sexualized images of children" and post them on X. To discuss the controversy and the broader policy implications of generative AI with regard to child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual intimate imagery, Justin Hendrix spoke to Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and author of numerous reports and articles on these subjects, including for Tech Policy Press.