Tech Society

Welcome to weaponized information and the battle for the online narrative. We're joined this week by a panel of experts: Charlie Warzel from BuzzFeed, who reports on disinformation and internet culture, Jeff Giesea, an author on memetic warfare and the organizer of the Deploraball, and Renee DiResta, a leading computational propaganda researcher and Director of Policy at Data for Democracy.

Regulation is a taboo subject in tech, an industry that so far has avoided the kind of oversight that governs finance, energy, and other major industries. But companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have an enormous amount of influence over everything from how we shop to how we communicate. Concerns about this concentration of power have recently led to scathing op-ends with headlines like "Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend", and prompted some lawmakers to push for stronger regulation. The companies, on the other hand, insist that they can regulate themselves. We dig into it with five experts from media, government, and tech.