Tech and Democracy Profile: Zamaan Qureshi
All Tech Is Human’s Tech & Democracy report addresses key issues and best practices in the field, and highlights a diverse range of individuals working in the field (across civil society, government, industry, academia, and entrepreneurship). Similar to all of our reports, this is assembled by a large global working groups across multiple disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives.
As part of the Tech & Democracy report our team interviewed more than 40 people working to create a brighter tech future. This week, we’ll be highlighting select interviews.
Today, we hear from Real Facebook Oversight Board Zamaan Qureshi.To read more profile interviews, click below to download the Tech & Democracy report now.
Q: Tell us about your role and what it entails
I am a policy advisor for the Real Facebook Oversight Board (RFOB), a global group of over 30 academics, journalists, researchers, and thought-leaders who criticize Facebook’s role in our society. Working on policy for RFOB means I contribute to the board's decision-making around what policy issues we decide to weigh in on. I also spearhead our Congressional outreach with lawmakers on Capitol Hill connecting them to our board members and facilitating conversations that help elevate understanding of technology policy and laws. While we have a very public-facing Twitter presence that I also help run, much of our work is done behind the scenes such as our investigative and legal work which I help to run.
Q: How did you build your career in the tech & democracy field? What advice would you give others looking for a similar career?
In the spring and summer of 2020, I was a senior graduating from high school during lockdown and deep into the pandemic. The early months of online learning were not educationally stimulating and I began looking elsewhere for outside challenges. I remembered I had watched the Great Hack documentary on Netflix, about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it came out, and picked it up again that summer. I was always interested in politics, having worked on a Congressional campaign, and the impact of social media on our democracy fascinated me. I started researching and learning more about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and social media’s role in the 2016 election, purely out of curiosity. But by the end of that summer, I began discovering missing pieces to that saga and I began trying to find ways to get answers including learning how to file Freedom of Information Act requests or write to legislators. On one such occasion, I wrote to a parliamentary committee that was scrutinizing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Maybe out of pure luck or even some tenacity, a staffer wrote back. Overjoyed and completely unaware of the consequences, I tweeted out the staffer’s reply on Twitter. Within a few hours, it started to get noticed and within a few days, the award-winning Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr DM’d me inquiring about my interest in joining RFOB.
Q: What are the roles and responsibilities of the key players in the tech & democracy ecosystem like industry, government and/or civil society?
Government has a crucial role to play in regulating and overseeing the tech and democracy ecosystem. We need strong regulators to do this including Congress, the FTC, and the DOJ to enforce competition policy, and privacy standards, and create protections for children. People like to dunk on Congress saying that they don’t know what's what but we’ve come a long way since Senator Orrin Hatch’s “how do you make your money; Senator we sell ads” from 2018. The challenge is tech moves a million miles a minute and Congress does not. Big Tech and its front groups spent almost $200 million lobbying against privacy, antitrust, and child protection laws. But a colleague, Alex Harman at the Economic Security Project, put it best, "Big tech is delaying the inevitable, and the bigger fight continues. They aren't winning, they are just losing in slow motion." We can see from a slate of antitrust bills from Rep. Cicilline and Buck and Sens. Klobuchar and Grassley, that there is an impetus for updating and giving our regulators more tools. It’s now just about getting these bills over the line.
Q: Looking five years into the future, how would you hope the conditions have changed related to tech and democracy?
My experiences working in the tech policy space have given me a perspective on what people really care about. Data collection and privacy worry people but to an extent. But when the outcomes of data collection get creepy, that’s where people draw the line and that’s also when it gets scary. So values of privacy, integrity, and accountability have to be sacrosanct to online usage. In this space, we often have discussions about giving people more tools, controls, and power over their data. But when given those tools people don’t know what to do with them because protecting your data is not intuitive. Platforms are deliberately deceptive so for the average user, it’s hard to know what you are agreeing to. But the harms are real. People in this space often talk about them all the time but in somewhat of a bubble. We also have to understand that people have been socialized, in large part by these companies, to believe that they have no power over their information and data, or that the task is too great so they choose to ignore the problem. And the outcome of this is that our generation seems content to ignore these harms until individuals are directly affected by them. I actually think the values of most digital citizens are clear—privacy, accountability, controls, and power in the hands of the user—but the practice of actually building these into companies or platforms is the real challenge. We also have to help break the cycle of thought where people think they have no control and these harms won’t ever hurt them and to me that starts with education. Letting people know how to protect themselves and bringing that conversation to the kitchen table and the classroom.