Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Oremus. My co-host, April Glazer, is off this week.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 13th. My co-host, April Glazer is off this week, but to make it up to you, we have two guests today, and they both are great.

Our trusty producer, Max Jacobs, is also here to help out, and he'll fill in for April with a tab at the end of the show. First, we're going to talk about the employee uprising at Google, and the changes that it and other tech companies have made to their sexual harassment policies in response. joining me for that segment will be Caroline O'Donovan, senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News.

She was there to cover the importance. sexual harassment policies in response. Joining me for that segment will be Caroline O'Donovan, senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News.

She was there to cover the employee walkouts in person and has continued to report on the fallout from them.

Then we'll talk about a story that's been making headlines for months, finally reached its

culmination this week with a big announcement.

That would be Amazon's HQ2 contest.

Or maybe now it's HQ 2..5, or HQ2 and 3, HQ2A and 2B. Whatever you want to call it, we'll talk about the company's decision to open

not one but two new headquarters. One will be in Arlington, Virginia, just outside D.C., the other

in Long Island City, Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan. That decision, of course, prompted an outcry from critics around the country, not to mention all the cities that weren't chosen. Here to help me make sense of all this will be Tim Bartik. He's a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and he's done some fascinating work on the incentives that cities offer to companies to try to get them to locate there, and whether it really pays off for their residents in the long run or not. And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the most interesting things we saw on the web this week. All right, so I should mention we're now a week removed from midterm elections, which April had been following intensely. And we may look back on them a bit more

when she rejoins us next week. In the shows leading up to the big night, we talked about both

online misinformation and potential problems with voting technology. Suffice it to say both of those

issues proved relevant. We did at least see some progress from Facebook, in particular on the

misinformation front. That's according to multiple studies that found less fake news on the platform in 2018 than was there in 2016 and 2017.

If you're interested, I wrote a piece for slate last week headlined why social media's

misinformation problem will never be fixed. It's not very optimistic, I know, but actually

the takeaway was that barring some fundamental

changes to the structure of social media, this is going to be for the foreseeable future a problem

to be managed rather than solved.

And Facebook is working on that.

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