logo
episode-header-image
Jul 2020
10m 46s

In The Pandemic, Big Tech Is Bigger Than...

NPR
About this episode
The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google faced questions today from a House subcommittee. Some lawmakers believe those companies have too much economic and political power. Former Facebook policy executive Dipayan Ghosh agrees.

Email the show at considerthis@npr.org.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy
Up next
Yesterday
What a day in immigration court is like now
The Trump administration is deploying a new strategy to speed up deportations. Government lawyers are asking immigration judges to dismiss on-going cases. Then, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents arrest people as soon as they step out of the courtroom. The process is oft ... Show More
11m 58s
Aug 24
Bubbling questions about the limits of the AI revolution
OpenAI founder Sam Altman floated the idea of an AI bubble, an MIT report found that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing and tech stocks took a dip.With the AI sector is expected to become a trillion dollar industry within the next decade, what impact might slowi ... Show More
10m 46s
Aug 23
High stakes diplomacy and canceled Halibut Olympia, insights from the Alaska Summit
Normally, foreign policy summits between world leaders involve painstaking planning and organization days and weeks in advance. The hectic and last minute nature of the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska provided a window into how so mu ... Show More
12m 31s
Recommended Episodes
Jul 2020
Meet the Guy Who's Hauling All 4 Big Tech CEO's (Virtually) Up to the Hill Next Week, Rep. David Cicilline
Next Monday, the CEO’s of four of the most dominant and important technology companies in the world will testify to Congress:  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook will all appear before the House Judiciary Committee’s subc ... Show More
25m 12s
Jul 2020
The Big Tech Hearing
The C.E.O.s of America’s most influential technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook — were brought before Congress to answer a question: Are they too powerful?Today, we talk to our colleague who was in the room about what happened. Guest: Cecilia Kang, a technolog ... Show More
33m 3s
May 2020
Congress weighs liability for businesses, Amazon will put its $4billion profit into its supply chain, and Anand Giridharadas on "Rich Corona; Poor Corona"
Kara and Scott talk about whether or not Congress should give businesses legal protections against lawsuits from workers who contract COVID-19. They discuss Amazon's earnings and Jeff Bezos' strategy to put $4billion in profits towards vaccinating and socially distancing the comp ... Show More
1h 1m
Feb 2024
U.S. Senators Grilled Social Media CEOs. Will Anything Change?
Was it political progress, or just political theater? The recent Senate hearing with social media CEOs led to astonishing moments — including Mark Zuckerberg’s public apology to families who lost children following social media abuse. Our panel of experts, including Facebook whis ... Show More
25m 6s
May 2021
Why is corporate America getting political?
This week Exxon Mobil saw a board revolt over its stance on climate change. One of the energy giant's biggest shareholders supported rival directors to successfully replace two Exxon board members with more green-friendly candidates. This reflects a growing trend across the Unite ... Show More
48m 49s
Oct 2021
The panic over Big Tech
On October 3, 2021, Frances Haugen—the so-called Facebook whistleblower—appeared on 60 Minutes to detail her time with the social media giant, as well as the content of the thousands of internal documents that reveal, according to her, the "conflicts of interest between what was ... Show More
42m 18s
Jan 2022
The Sunday Debate: It's Time to Break Up Facebook
Whether we call it Facebook or the recently coined Meta, the Silicon Valley tech giant founded by Mark Zuckerberg has rarely been out of the headlines since its inception over a decade ago and rarely have those headlines been good news. From Cambridge Analytica to the United Stat ... Show More
49m 24s
Mar 2019
Facebook says it’s all about privacy now. OK, sure.
Kara and Scott are back! They talk about Zuckerberg's supposed shift towards more privacy on Facebook and, well, we'll believe it when we see it. Meanwhile Congress is ramping up its efforts on shaking up how we think of antitrust and big tech companies. They get into what they e ... Show More
36m 22s