Government pressures tech behind the scenes, says former Facebook employee. It’s called jawboning.
Listen now
Description
It’s something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do: pressuring tech platforms to bend to their will, aka jawboning. But the line between persuasion and coercion, or even censorship, can get murky. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from two states alleging that the Joe Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content. Matt Perault, now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center on Technology Policy, says that in his former job working in policy at Facebook, jawboning happened all the time.
More Episodes
There was a time when pollsters went door to door to figure out what people were thinking. Gallup did that for almost 50 years, before switching mostly to telephones by the mid-’80s. Phone polling was cheaper but still reliable. That is, until the cellphone came along. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali...
Published 05/21/24
Published 05/21/24
If you drive 45 miles north of Little Rock, Arkansas, you’ll come across a facility packed with thousands of computers trying to “mine” the next bitcoin. The popular cryptocurrency’s value recently shot past $60,000 per bitcoin. Mining those bitcoins is a lucrative operation, and several crypto...
Published 05/20/24