A Manifesto: Using Empirical Research in Journalism and Scholarship to Understand Big Tech

The lessons from this style of tech reporting go beyond journalism. The legal academy is used to starting with an argument about where the law should go. From this viewpoint, the scientific method—which moves only toward an argument if one is suggested by evidence—can seem a strange beast. But it need not be. For years, legal scholars have been developing work that surveys the harms of technology and uses that evidence to argue for change. Danielle Citron has spent her career documenting the dark side of the internet, and most recently she and Benjamin Wittes have examined the harm done by bad Samaritans on the Internet to argue for reforming certain types of regulation. Mary Anne Franks has done similar work documenting nonconsensual pornography in working to try and put an end to it through new state and federal legislation. Ari Ezra Waldman has used interviews and primary source research within the privacy industry to demonstrate how current privacy laws fail to deliver on their promise to protect people.