The Meme Midterms
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2018
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Will Oremus and April Glaser are bringing you a special episode of If Then, all about the midterm elections and the role of Silicon Valley and online media in our beloved democratic process. We’re going to start with a roundtable with two extra tech journalists, Kevin Roose from the New York Times and Paris Martineau of Wired who have been reporting on issues of online speech, misinformation, and election interference this year.
Then we’ll have an interview with one of the country’s top experts on election security and voting systems. He’s the former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer: Ed Felten. We’ll talk to him about the problems that could rear their heads this cycle… namely with the very very outdated tech that we use to cast our ballots. Some of the voting machines we rely on are well over a decade old and are extremely vulnerable to hacking -- but here we are.
And we’ll end our show with a very special Don’t Close My Tabs where we take a look at the best way to watch the results come in on Tuesday night.
2:00 - Roundtable with Paris Martineau and Kevin Roose 31:22 - Interview with Ed Felten 49:01 - Don’t Close My Tabs
Podcast production by Max Jacobs
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to If Then, The Show About How Technology is changing our lives and our future. |
| 0:15.1 | I'm April Glazer. |
| 0:16.5 | And I'm Will Oremus. |
| 0:20.9 | Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. |
| 0:22.7 | We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State |
| 0:26.5 | University, and New America. |
| 0:28.2 | We're recording this on the afternoon of Friday, November 2nd. |
| 0:31.2 | We're days away from the midterm elections in the United States. |
| 0:34.4 | It's the first major national election cycle since the 2016 presidential elections. |
| 0:38.7 | These elections are, of course, critically important to the country's future. Democrats have a chance |
| 0:42.7 | to take back the House, new governors will be elected, and so on. But they're also important as a test |
| 0:47.0 | of our election system, and in particular, the capacity of major tech platforms to fix the problems |
| 0:52.7 | of misinformation and foreign interference that so muddled the 2016 elections. |
| 0:58.1 | That's right. So today we're going to have a special episode of If Then, all about the midterm elections and the role of Silicon Valley and online media and our beloved democratic process. |
| 1:07.8 | We're going to start with a roundtable with two extra tech journalists, as if anybody wanted more tech journalists, Kevin Ruse from the New York Times and Paris Martineau of Wired, who have been reporting on issues of online speech, misinformation, and election interference this year. |
| 1:21.6 | Yeah, I'm excited to have both of them here with us in the studio. And then we'll have an interview with one of the country's top experts on election security and voting systems. He's the former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Ed Felton. |
| 1:32.9 | We'll talk to him about the problems that could rear their heads this cycle, |
| 1:36.4 | namely with a very outdated tech that many of us are forced to use to cast our ballots. |
| 1:40.9 | Some of the voting machines we rely on are well over a decade old. Some don't |
| 1:44.4 | have a paper trail. Some seem to be very vulnerable to hacking. But here we are. And we'll end our show with a very special Don't Close My Tabs edition, where we take a look at the best way to watch the results as they come in Tuesday night online. |
| 1:58.6 | Today we're joined by Paris Martineau, a staff writer at Wired, covering tech, online |
| 2:02.6 | extremism, and social media. |
... |
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