Hello readers,
Starting in September and throughout the fall, a consortium of 17 news organizations from more than 15 countries has been publishing an extraordinary set of stories about how Big Tech exercises influence globally.
So far, the investigative project, known as “Big Tech’s Invisible Hand,” has mapped nearly 3,000 “influence actions” by the tech industry. This reporting has revealed, among other things, the elaborate web of intermediaries and lobbying used to influence Latin American regulators, how Google obtained leverage over the news media, and how proponents of building more data centers made a series of dubious claims about their benefits.
Of course, Big Tech has also been trying to influence policy on its home turf, as well. In California, Google tried to organize small businesses to oppose a web browser privacy bill, and the tech industry banded together to successfully oppose mandatory testing of artificial intelligence models. At the federal level, tech lobbyists have reportedly been pushing Congress to pre-empt state AI regulations, a goal that the Trump administration recently contemplated advancing through lawsuits in a leaked draft of an executive order.
Natalia Viana, who helped lead the Invisible Hand project, says there are important takeaways for Americans in the investigation, starting with the fact that the fight to regulate Big Tech is, in her view, today’s most important issue. Viana, who co-founded and is co-executive director of Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, Agência Pública, recently sat down with me over Zoom to talk about what she and her collaborators have learned. You can find our conversation below, edited for brevity and clarity.
