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

I'm Will Oremus.

And I'm April Glazer.

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.

Yes, welcome to the first episode of If Then. We are recording this afternoon on Wednesday, November 1st, and just giving you the date because there was a lot of news that broke today, and we're going to be discussing a lot of it as well. And on today's show, we're going to talk about the huge news in tech this week. And really, it's the big news for the future of, you know, democratic participation in the country. And it's that Facebook, Twitter, and Google all took a trip to Congress this week to testify at three different hearings about how Russian operatives use their platforms to interfere in the 2016 election and help secure Donald Trump's victory.

After that, we'll have a conversation with author and former Facebook lead ad engineer Antonio Garcia Martinez about what he thinks the role of these powerful tech companies is now that we know more about what happened in the run-up to the presidential election. He's also the author of the book Chaos Monkeys. And later on in the show, we'll have a segment, don't close my tabs, with some recommendations from us, your dear hosts, about some stuff that we really enjoyed reading this week. All right, April, how are you doing this week? I'm okay. I'm good. A little tired. How are you doing, Will? It's always, it's always

sunny in Santa Barbara. So, Will, what are you keeping tabs on this week? Well, I can't help,

but at least pay a little bit of attention to the new iPhone, iPhone, iPhone X. All the reviews

are out this week from the big tech publications, specifically the tech publications that Apple's PR department

likes enough to give the phone too early for review purposes. We're not one of those publications,

sadly. So none of us has an iPhone X in our hands. I have read some of the coverage. And, you know, the reviews are positive. They're not maybe as glowing as you might hope for a phone that costs potentially $1,000. There was a good post in Slate from our colleague Christina Bonington about how you might actually miss the home button. You know, they got rid of the home button. It's now all hand gestures. You can learn that over time, but it was, I have to think, it was kind of nice to have that one analog button that you could always come back to to start over when things go awry on your device. Yeah, and, you know, the thing about that is that, you know, without the home button, you use your face to unlock it now, and that means no more slipping the phone out from under the table, you know, while you're hanging out with your friends to casually glance and see what's going on or check sports scores or something like that. You now have to actually look at the phone. So, so much for those clandestine, that clandestine phone addiction that we had. Totally. And in general, I mean, it just speaks to this general trend that I can't stand where

analog buttons are being replaced by touchscreens everywhere. I think of the Tesla Model X and the

fact that you don't have any buttons anymore. It's just a totally touchscreen control system.

It's actually really hard to do while you're focused on the road. But a story that got less

attention this week in the tech press is actually more interesting, in my opinion. The story was that Roger Stone, Trump's good friend and trusted

advisor, was permanently banned from Twitter. He went on a rant about the CNN anchors who were

covering the story of the Robert Mueller indictments of Trump associates. And his rant was filled with profanity.

It included personal attacks on CNN anchor Don Lemon that some read as racist and or homophobic.

People widely reported him for it. And Twitter took action. Surprising a lot of people. They actually,

they did not only remove the tweets, but they kicked Roger Stone off of the

platform and said he cannot come back. That guy, I think, sucks. I'm just going to say that.

And it's, you know, they followed their policies for once. So maybe this will be the start of a

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