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Chuck Schumer’s light-touch plan for AI
Over the past year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has led the so-called AI Gang, a group of senators eager to study the effects of artificial intelligence on society and curb the threats it poses through regulation. But calling this group a gang implies a certain level of toughness that was nowhere to be found in the roadmap it unveiled on May 15.
Announcing the 31-page roadmap, a bipartisan set of policy priorities for Congress, Schumer bragged of “months of discussion,” “hundreds of meetings,” and “nine first-of-their-kind AI Insight Forums,” including sessions with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
What he delivered, however, was more of a spending plan than a vision for real regulation – the policy proposals were limited, and the approach was hands-off. The roadmap called for $32 billion over the next three years for artificial intelligence-related spending for research and innovation. It offered suggestions, such as a federal data privacy law, legislation to curb deepfakes in elections, and a ban on “social scoring” like the social credit system that China has tested.
Civil society groups aren’t pleased
The long list of proposals is “no substitute for enforceable law – and these companies certainly know the difference, especially when the window to see anything into legislation is swiftly closing,” the AI Now Institute’s Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West wrote in a statement. Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, wrote that “the framework’s focus on promoting innovation and industry overshadows the real-world harms that could result from AI systems.”
Ronan Murphy of the Center for European Policy Analysis wrote that the gap between the US and EU approaches to AI could not be more stark. “US lawmakers believe it is premature to restrain fast-moving AI innovation,” he wrote. “In contrast, the EU’s AI Act bans facial recognition applications and tools that exhibit racial or other discrimination.”
Former White House technology advisor Suresh Venkatasubramaniantweeted that the proposal felt so unoriginal and recycled that it might have been written by ChatGPT.
An AI law is unlikely this year
Adam Conner, vice president of tech policy at the Center for American Progress, said that while the roadmap has some areas of substance, such as urging a federal data privacy law, “most sections are light on details.” He called the $32 billion spending proposal a “detailed wish list” for upcoming funding bills.
It was a thin result for something that took so long to cook up, he said, and “leaves little time on the calendar this year for substantive AI legislation, except for the funding bills Congress must pass this year and possibly the recently introduced bipartisan bicameral American Privacy Rights Act data privacy bill.” This means any other AI legislation will likely have to wait until next year. “Whether that was the plan all along is an open question,” Conner added.
Danny Hague, assistant director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, agreed that it’s unlikely anything comprehensive gets passed this year. But he doesn’t necessarily see the report as a sign that the US will be hands-off with legislation. He said the Senate Working Group likely realizes that “time is limited,” and there are already “structures in place — regulatory agencies and the congressional committees that oversee them — to act on AI quickly.”
Jon Lieber, managing director for the United States for Eurasia Group, said he didn’t understand why an AI Gang was necessary at all. “I’m confused why Schumer felt the need to do something here,” he said. “This process should have been handled by a senate committee, not the leaders office.
Such a soft line from Congress means that until further notice, President Joe Biden — who has issued an executive order, export controls, and CHIPS Act funding to create jobs, secure tech infrastructure, and directed his agencies to get up to speed on AI — might just be the AI regulator in chief.
Threads, Twitter, & the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Hi, I'm Jon Lieber, and this is US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta last week announced the launch of Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter that reportedly already has reached a hundred million signups, a huge number in just a week. This long-awaited move by. One of the kings of social media could dramatically alter the media environment heading into the 2024 election.
Twitter is enormously popular and important in the political and media world in the US, but has increasingly become a source of consternation and stress for highly engaged political users, particularly those on the left, after the takeover of the platform by Elon Musk, who has pursued what has looked at times like a bizarre and at least partially ideological strategy to upend Twitter's content moderation rules, and in his personal feed, highlighted tweets that troll liberals and promote conspiracy theories. Other competitors to Twitter, like Mastodon or Bluesky, have not achieved mass reach necessary to pose a serious threat to Twitter's dominance of the online media ecosystem, while others like Truth Social remain niche corners of the Internet.
Other outlets like Telegram have grown in importance, but do not provide the open platform of the more dominant social media apps. All of these trends point to the increased atomization of the media landscape globally. In the last 50 years, the US has moved from three dominant national broadcast news networks to a patchwork of increasingly fragmented social media sites with very little gatekeeping and strong, and in some cases partisan, ideological communities.
The launch of a viable competitor to Twitter will accelerate this trend. Meta's content moderation will build off what is learned from managing Instagram and Facebook. This could make it more than just a convening site for people interested in talking about sports and politics, and instead give it a unique appeal for political liberals in the US who don't like where Twitter is going.
That's not to say that conservatives won't be found there too. Even in the height of their concerns about Twitter censoring conservative speech, major conservative figures and writers did quite well on the platform, expanding their reach even as they said they were being stifled. A more fractured online information environment will be even more difficult to moderate than a unified one and provides more avenues for echo chambers and allow politicians to more aggressively micro-target their messages and could render it much more difficult to restrict the spread of disinformation in the 2024 election, especially if Twitter and Threads become the domains of the political right and left, respectively, and if their corporate owners pursue different content moderation policies.
We'd also expect campaigns to start taking advantage of this fractured media landscape, as they have already, targeting different messages to the different audiences on their different channels, making it much more difficult to see what's actually happening on these campaigns as their messages go to increasingly smaller corners of the Internet.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta delivers blows to Trudeau’s news law
On June 22, the day Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s government passed a law forcing revenue-sharing on tech giants, Meta announced it was getting ready to block Canada’s news outlets from Facebook and Instagram.
This was merely the latest bad news for a media industry in crisis.
A week earlier, Bell Media announced it was cutting 1,300 jobs in radio and TV newsrooms across Canada. Bell runs CTV, which has the top-rated national news broadcast, but it says it is losing $40 million a year on broadcasting. It closed its bureaus in London and Los Angeles, got rid of many of its best-known journalists, and has applied to the regulator, seeking to cut local news broadcasts.
These cuts look familiar to colleagues in print newsrooms. Postmedia News, Canada’s biggest newspaper chain, laid off 11% of staff at its papers in January, further slashing newsroom budgets that long ago looked cut to the bone. The company is taking extraordinary efforts to cut costs, closing its newsrooms in Vancouver, asking suppliers to reduce prices, and even shutting down the opinion section of its Montreal paper over the summer to save money.
This week, news broke that the Toronto Star and Postmedia may merge days after Postmedia’s executive chair left the company – signs that the chain is not on a sustainable track.
Trudeau’s revenue-sharing law was intended to be the government’s answer to the collapse of journalistic models, but instead it looks as though it may make things worse.
In Canada, as in the United States and the rest of the world, traditional news organizations have lost advertising revenue to the tech giants, undercutting the business model that supports journalism. From 2008-2020, revenue for Canadian TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines fell by nearly CA$6 billion, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs and the closure of hundreds of outlets.
To try to preserve a functioning news ecosystem in Canada, Trudeau’s government in 2019 brought in a payroll tax credit that has funded jobs at many outlets, but it has not stopped the decline. This spring, his government passed Bill C-18, modeled on a similar law in Australia, aimed at forcing Google and Meta to share about CA$330 million a year with news outlets whose stories they link to.
Meta said “no,” and it has begun testing news-blocking measures on the platform, promising to shut off its users from news content rather than pay. After the bill passed, it canceled at least one of its royalty-sharing deals with a Quebec media consortium.
Google sounded more conciliatory at first, but on Thursday it, too, rejected the scheme and promised to stop linking to Canadian news sites.
The platforms may want to send a message to legislators in the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa, and California, who are all considering similar measures, while also warning the US Senate, where there is bipartisan support for a similar measure.
The platforms’ intransigence in Canada has some critics of the law declaring it a failure already. University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who opposed the law during the legislative process, warned that it “could cause enormous harm to the media sector and may lead to a serious case of buyer’s remorse.”
It may turn out that publishers need the platforms more than the platforms need them. On the other hand, they could still back down, which is, more or less, what happened in Australia. Meta and Google are now paying Australian news outlets about AUS$240 million a year.
Taylor Owen, a media expert and McGill University professor, thinks Meta may back down and pay up. “I can’t imagine a world in which Facebook blocks news in eight to 10 jurisdictions, including in California, which has a market the size of Canada, in which the company is based,” he said on a recent podcast. “What does that look like, realistically? You create a list of thousands of news organizations and they are just blanket blocked from being seen on what is ostensibly an open platform? Maybe that’s worth it to them. I have my doubts.”
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg used to talk about the ways that Facebook could help strengthen journalism, but recently the company has been reducing the role of news, which leads to costly partnerships, and is boosting personal content instead.
“It’s been downshifted in the last year or so, and they probably have a very small percentage of their traffic at risk here, so it may be a good place to take a stand,” says Edward Greenspon, president & CEO of the Public Policy Forum, who wrote an influential report on the crisis facing the Canadian media. Being news-free in Canada and seizing the momentum in other jurisdictions, he says, “might be a reasonable tradeoff for them.”
Diana Bossio, an associate professor of media at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology, thinks Meta may be serious about dropping news from its platform. “Meta is in a different financial situation than it was when Australia was discussing the [revenue-sharing code there]; there are currently about $240 million worth of reasons the platform will not want to set an international precedent for payment for news!”
Google, too, won’t want to open the floodgates to claims from dying publishers around the world.
“They settled deals quickly in Australia but may act differently in Canada to prevent an onslaught of claims,” says Bossio.
The new law won’t take effect for six months, so there is still time for the government to try to get the tech titans onside. But it looks like Trudeau may have misjudged the situation and is about to send a signal to the world that the tech giants can’t be made to pay for news.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Hard Numbers: Meta’s mess, Bangladesh’s bailout, Africa’s floods, China’s gender gap
11,000: There’s nothing meta about it: Mark Zuckerberg’s company on Wednesday laid off more than 11,000 employees, totalling 13% of its workforce. The cuts come after a wretched year for Meta, which is struggling with lower digital ad revenue amid a global economic slowdown, while facing fierce competition from other platforms for younger users. Zuck says the company will now focus more narrowly on artificial intelligence, advertising, and his beloved metaverse.
4.5 billion: Bangladesh is the latest country to have secured a provisional bailout – worth a whopping $4.5 billion – from the International Monetary Fund. Already highly indebted before the dual crises of COVID and the war in Ukraine, Bangladesh has seen its foreign reserves completely dry up.
4 million: Farmers across Central and West Africa are reeling after torrential floods decimated their crops. At least 4 million people, mostly small subsistence farmers, say their harvests have been destroyed. This comes as many import-reliant African countries were already facing severe food insecurity due to the war in Ukraine.
33: Under President Xi Jinping’s tenure, female participation in the Chinese workforce has dropped significantly, with the country's place in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report having fallen 33 places since 2012. Cultural norms in China have certainly shifted since Beijing hosted the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, where Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed that “women’s rights are human rights.”
Vladimir Putin, lifeguard (?!)
With the US suffering a massive lifeguard shortage this summer, America's beaches and pools will take just about anyone for the job now.
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Podcast: How to get social media companies to protect users (instead of hurting them)
Listen: Frances Haugen blew the whistle against Facebook because she believed her employer wasn't doing enough to stop its outrage-driven algorithm from spreading online misinformation and hate, which led to offline violence. Haugen speaks with Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World podcast about the major role that social media companies play in politics in the US and around the world, and the life-or-death consequences that can come from their actions. She believes governments need to rethink how they regulate social media, as the EU is trying to do with a new law mandating data transparency.
Haugen still believes social media companies can change for the better, but the gap between fast-changing tech and slow-moving governments will continue to widen. To narrow it, we'll need more whistleblowers — and better laws to protect them.
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Zuckerberg practices free speech on Elon Musk
Elon Musk is getting all the tech bro attention these days, and Mark Zuckerberg can NOT stand it.
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Facebook metaverse launch leads other Big Tech firms to focus on AR/VR
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses trends in big tech, privacy protection and cyberspace:
What is Facebook planning with the metaverse?
Well, my sense is that Facebook mostly prefers a virtual reality over the actual situation the company is in, with overwhelming criticism about the many harms to people it is causing all over the world. The metaverse at launch would be added to a number of services and experiences online in a more virtual and augmented reality setting. Think about what the gaming sector has done, but now, also, other big tech firms are jumping on the bandwagon. The thing to remember is that the user experience would be more immersive.
What have responses been to the metaverse, which Mark Zuckerberg announced?
Well, as one might expect, the responses were mixed. Some compared it to the hyped and eventually failed Second Life experience, but others, like Microsoft, announced their own more soft version with the option to use an avatar to participate in Teams video calls. Now, if you are like me, I have had more than enough of those during the pandemic, but let's see what happens to this gamification of the online experience. Certainly, some investors are sniffing opportunities, so they are probably playing up the potential of virtual and augmented realities. I'm personally most excited about seeing people in real life again, so checking out and going offline.