REGULATING BIG TECH: WAYS TO RESTORE TRUST IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Live on YouTube, a recording is below
April 7, 10:30am PT; 7:30pm CET
While digital media has experienced a fabulous boom in recent years, public trust in the United States and other countries has sunk to an all-time low. Investigations have shown that companies like Facebook put their own profit interests ahead of their responsibility to society and negligently put the health of their users at risk. But while the outcry of outrage against big tech companies has been around for years, it has hardly been followed by effective policy action. What are concrete policy solutions to regulate the actions of tech corporations and build public trust? What is the importance of competition law, transparency of ownership and protection against media concentration?
Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a lecturer who teaches on global media, innovation and human rights. She writes on journalism and development, investigative reporting in the global south and has published extensively over the last decade on media in Africa. She is the editor of Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press, 2014) and African Muckraking: 75 years of Investigative journalism from Africa (Jakana 2017). She is the editor of Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press 2021).
Paula Cipierre is an EU Privacy and Public Policy Lead at Palantir Technologies. She works at the intersection of privacy engineering, legal compliance, and public affairs. Paula holds a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in French, European Cultural Studies, and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and a Master of Arts in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. She is a certified Data Protection Officer and Information Security Auditor. Paula lives and works in Berlin.
Götz Hamann is a German business journalist. His journalistic career began with a traineeship at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Later he was one of the founding editors of the Financial Times Deutschland. Hamann has been the business editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit since 2000. He is in charge of the main areas of “media, internet and lobbying” and has been deputy head of the economic department since 2008. Hamann is one of the initiators of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union, which was published at the end of November 2016.