What Happened To WikiLeaks
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2019
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode April Glaser is joined by guest host Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia and author of several books about social media and the internet, including a recent one on Facebook, “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.”
First they talk about the ongoing elections in India and how fake news and propaganda on Facebook and WhatsApp is wreaking havoc on an electoral process that’s otherwise celebrated for working quite well in the world’s largest democracy. Then they discuss Uber’s recent IPO filing and the litany of ways the company’s reliance on a contractor workforce and business in only a handful of major cities could destabilize the rideshare company’s hopes of ever being profitable.
After that, author and WIRED writer Andy Greenberg joins the show to talk about the recent indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, threats the case poses to press freedom, and how Assange’s ideology has been much more fluid than his alleged co-conspirator, Chelsea Manning. Greenberg is the author of This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers.
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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. |
| 0:04.8 | I'm April Glazer. |
| 0:06.4 | And I'm Sivavadianathan. |
| 0:11.0 | Hey, everyone. Welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, |
| 0:18.8 | a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 16th. Before we get |
| 0:26.5 | started, I want to introduce my co-host for the next two weeks, Siva Vaidianathan. He's the director of |
| 0:32.0 | the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He's also the author of a book |
| 0:37.0 | called Anti-Social Media, How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Virginia. He's also the author of a book called Anti-Ssocial Media, |
| 0:38.5 | How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. It's a great book I've read it. And also the book, |
| 0:43.8 | The Googolization of Everything. Seva, thanks so much for co-hosting. Oh, my pleasure, April. |
| 0:49.2 | You know, I've been a guest on this show, and this is just a great honor. And I look forward to |
| 0:53.6 | having some fun here. Yeah. And so this is just a great honor. And I look forward to having some fun here. |
| 0:55.0 | Yeah. And so this is our first week. Next week will hopefully be a little more, even more ironed |
| 1:01.6 | out and more used to this. On today's show, we're going to talk about India's ongoing election |
| 1:06.3 | and how parties are taking advantage of social media to spread propaganda to voters in the world's |
| 1:12.1 | biggest democracy. Then we'll talk about Uber's decision to take the company public despite |
| 1:17.3 | massive legal disputes with its workforce over their employment status and the fact that the |
| 1:22.3 | company is hemorrhaging and eye-popping $1.8 billion a year. After that, I will talk to Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for Wired, about the recent indictment |
| 1:31.1 | of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I'll discuss the details of the U.S. indictment against him, |
| 1:36.5 | as well as Assange's strange ideological trajectory from radical transparency activists |
| 1:41.7 | to a collaborator with Russia during Trump's bid for the White House. |
| 1:45.6 | And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best things we saw on the web this week. |
... |
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