 So Jeff Chester, welcome. You are the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a good friend of ours and really a leader in talking about really important issues like surveillance, technology and advertising. And recently you and the team at Center for Digital Democracy have come out with this very significant report called Big Food, Big Tech and the Global Childhood Obesity Epidemic. So how does this tie into the work that you had been doing for years around children and advertising and protecting our children from capitalism effectively? I mean, what companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon have done is that they have partnered with companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi and Montgolais, all the big food and beverage companies to in essence sell some of the unhealthiest food to kids all across the planet. We track what they do. So you can look at, and luckily a lot of this stuff is public for reviewers to look for themselves. But if you look at the case studies about Brazil or in the Middle East or South Africa or anywhere in Asia, you will see example after example of how Facebook and Google and Amazon certainly in the United States have worked with these big food and beverage brands to promote these foods selling millions of millions of units of product which have been linked to the obesity crisis. I mean, there is a global public health crisis because of advertising and especially because of digital advertising, where on the one hand, I mean, you have all these people who face real nutrition problems, not enough to eat. On the other hand, you have many kids in the same countries are consuming too much in terms of unhealthy foods and beverages, becoming obese, becoming much more vulnerable to illnesses and even the current coronavirus pandemic. So look, even though food and beverage companies today, as most companies are, have become big data digital marketing companies. I mean, that's one of the findings of the reports, so to speak, but it's not a secret. The same techniques and technologies that have empowered Google and Facebook and Amazon, for example, to dominate our communication system have been adopted by the Fortune 1500, Fortune 2000 company. So McDonald's is a data broker, Pepsi's a data, they're all data brokers. But when they work together, right? And because they're able to surveil you and analyze you and reach you in myriad ways, most of which is invisible, it's the invisible digital hand. They influence our behaviors, who we vote for, what we buy, what we eat. So that's a very long-winded answer, perhaps on burning calories, to about what we looked at is that it's not just the big food. Look, the short version is this. Historically, if you wanted to blame unhealthy eating and the obesity problems, you would look at the food and beverage companies, McDonald's, McDonald's, kids' meals, Mountain Dew and Pepsi, but in fact, they couldn't do it without the help of the US-led digital platforms. And perhaps that's not as significant an example of the very problematic role that these digital giants play in our global society because clearly they've also being used to undermine democracy all over the world. What's the data show about obesity levels and childhood health indicators? Well, there's just been this dramatic increase in the number of young people and families and communities who now suffer from obesity in the United States. It's particularly focused on communities of color who are both more vulnerable to a number of public health concerns which are exacerbated by problems with obesity. So it's just growing, it's unchecked. The companies don't wanna do anything. I mean, during the Obama administration, Mrs. Obama tried to raise the concerns as you would call, but the food and beverage lobby and the advertising lobby is so powerful, they beat back all the calls to regulate the industry. And so the question now is, there's a little background for us on the computer. The question now is, will there be any public policy to regulate that? Big digital companies are able to take all of the tools that they've created to market us politicians and cars and financial services and provide them to the big food and beverage companies. And that includes collecting all our geolocation information, developing profiles about what we like and don't like, using influencers, people who are either paid or kind of induced to market these products to us on YouTube. There's all kinds of product placement. And increasingly food and beverage marketing has colonized the latest media application. So our report looks like how big food is found in the games that young people play, such as on Twitch and increasingly on streaming video, which is really the newest platform being used by advertising and marketers to target us. So in the 80s, if I'm not mistaken, you and your partner, Catherine Montgomery, were effective in getting laws passed to protect children from television advertising during the Saturday morning cartoons where it just seems so innocent now, big sugar cereal was on offer. So tell us a little bit about how that work has evolved into laws protecting children in the digital sphere. And then we can talk about how much farther meets we need to go. Well, you know, one of the few areas where we've been able to secure public interest regulation of communications has been children, but none of it was ever perfect and really effective. The most, well, beginning actually it was 1990. You know, then Boston based activist Peggy Charon who has recently passed away, led a campaign during the 1980s to regulate broadcast television to provide some educational programming for children, but also to limit the amount of commercials. And we kind of came in, my organization came in around 1990 and helped what became kind of the key law called the Children's Television Act get passed by the Congress. And that limited the amount of time one could advertise to children. It was still usually significant. It was like 12 minutes on the weekend, 15 minutes per hour during the week. But there were a number of policies that were included by the Federal Communications Commission. So you couldn't have program-led commercials, for example. And it was supposed to be educational programming. Now that never worked perfectly. I guess our biggest accomplishment and the one that was the most strategic and which has remained a force until recently was in 1998 when we got the Congress to pass what's known as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA. And the reason today that you might read in your terms of service of online websites like YouTube, for example, that we don't want children 12 and under on the site or we don't serve children on our site. Facebook and Google will say that is because under the COPPA law that was passed in 1998 and went into effect in 2000, parents literally have to opt in, they have to consent to having their child's data collected. Very few parents were willing to do that until recently. So what we did, COPPA was designed really to help regulate the growth of digital data-driven advertising targeting children. Data-driven digital advertising was already at the heart of the internet model that was really introduced in the United States in the early 1990s. But unlike broadcasting or even cable television advertising, as you know, digital advertising is far more invasive and far more effective and comprehensive. It can follow you wherever you go. It takes notes, it assesses and evaluates you. Today it's connected to a very sophisticated and far-reaching complex of services involving artificial intelligence and machine learning and other big data analytics that really get a sense of who you are and offer advertisers and marketers ways to really influence your behavior. Now, the Europeans have passed some extensive laws protecting the people in the European Union. You've been part of that. Let's say a little bit about that regulation and the prospects of it happening in the United States. Well, I'm the Andrew, you're right. So we got COPPA passed in 2000 and until recently at work, but now more and more parents realize, God, my children wants to play online, watch YouTube, that's how I'm doing the dishes, I'm distracting them. Of course I'm gonna agree to have all this data gathered. The US advertising industry and media industry has successfully fought what's called data privacy legislation in the United States for about 20 years. In the European Union and in the UK, privacy is considered a human right, which is one reason why we have always supported what they were trying to do. When the EU was created, it was created specifically to address the shadows hanging over Europe from both Nazism and communism. And so under those regimes, as you know, right? I mean, it was government doing surveillance, but the EU recognized that the distinctions between government surveillance and corporate surveillance, in fact, are really not that clear. I mean, that government can spy on you, companies can spy on you, and both can manipulate and undermine you. So the Europeans passed a now I'm losing the date, I believe it was in 2016, what's called the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, but even the GDPR relies on something called consent. In other words, you have to kind of agree to have this data collected. The idea being, and it's an important principle, that you as a citizen or as a consumer should make the decision about what's gathered about you, not the company. But today, because of new technology, because of machine learning and artificial intelligence and super fast computers, that make decisions about you in milliseconds, the ability of an individual to make decisions about how it works and under what terms is no longer really realistic. So we believe, and there's a whole movement now to quote ban what's called surveillance advertising, this data that's collected about you, that understands your behaviors, is in fact surveillance and there are groups in the United States and Europe and elsewhere calling for the end of it to ban it and to find a different, but we did not have to take advertising as a business model for the internet. And there were a number of people that thought A would never happen and or that you could regulate it. What we know from the history of media in the United States that advertising is the dominant way that the media system is constructed and operated. So what happened in the early 1990s was that the advertising and marketing industry were able to completely shape the evolution of the internet, defend against any regulation. So now you have the most powerful advertising system ever created. And because the US companies dominate the commercial internet and dominate really the global marketplace with the exception of China, like Google and Facebook, we have exported our surveillance and manipulation business model to every country on the planet. And none of these companies are constrained by anything, right? They are daily expanding their ability to manipulate us and to gather data about us in so many ways. So, but now we're at a moment in time in the United States when there's been kind of a great awakening. Up until the 2016 election, a lot of progressives frankly thought that Google and Facebook were a friend of democracy. We at the Center for Digital Democracy, and I'm sure from many of your viewers have always recognized that really Google and Facebook are just another form of news core or CBS or the old radio networks, just the latest form of commercial media that only has profits, not the health of our democracy in mind, but there is a movement to regulate them and we hope that they will be successful. Well, we were talking before about the breakup of AT&T and the breakup of monopolies, but now we see that despite that breakup, there's this conglomeration again. And it seems to me that given the economic order, there's always this deregulation regulation. I mean, for the last hundred years since mass media existed, there has been these cycles. So what makes us think that any effort to regulate is gonna last in a meaningful way? Well, I mean, I would also defer to you because you're also a scholar of all this, I'm glad, but I don't think we've ever did a very good job regulating. I mean, the whole, it's been a, I'm part of a movement and so are you. I hope I'd be interested in your reaction. We're part of an historic failure. I mean, in the early 1930s, we wanted to reserve 25% of the spectrum for public interest use, right? The Wagner Hatfield Amendment, we lost that and radio became a huge commercial enterprise. We weren't really able to regulate broadcast television. I cut my teeth as you did in trying to regulate cable television. And if you look at who owns what or your monthly bill that you get, you will see we didn't win very, very much. The fact that the only privacy law we can get out of the United States was on kids. That was in 1998, we couldn't do that again today. It's easily in some ways, says a lot. So I don't think we ever regulated very well. And our country, I think, has shown what the implications are. If you look at the growth of Fox News and the fact that they were able to create this huge network that's now kind of focused on disinformation, they did that in cahoots with the Federal Communications Commission. And the Democrats might have wanted to regulate more, but they were always very conflicted and corrupted, frankly. But by who funded their campaigns? Yeah, or the revolving, yes, exactly. I mean, I always said, which Congressperson's going to, well, whenever the Congressperson always knew in the old days that their reelection would depend on the coverage they would get from their local television station, well, today it depends on their ability to effectively leverage Facebook and YouTube, right? So there's a huge conflict of interest there. And there's a huge conflict of interest in our society about really capitalism or the best way to regulate capitalism. But there has been a sea change and it's incredibly promising. But the question is how successful we will be. When 2016 happened in Cambridge Analytica, organizations and foundations that up until then were basically not critical of Google Facebook and the commercial digital culture started funding alternative organizations, opposition movements and groups that had not been as critical of the digital media industries such as the civil rights community are now speaking out. So you have many, many more critics out there. Some are better funded and there's a real dedication to make change. It's increasingly global, there are movements all across the world to regulate it. So we have our best chance that we've had in at least 20, 30 years to do something. The question is, will we do it? What will really happen I think it's too early to see and these companies are huge and powerful and they have so much money and the system is still so corrupt. What are the recommendations in the report on obesity in children and big food and big tech that you make? Well, frankly, we don't think that any of the, there are ways of identifying which foods are unhealthy. And frankly, none of the food and beverage companies or the platforms, Google, Facebook, Amazon should in fact promote those foods. They simply shouldn't. And especially in the ways that they do using the data, doing the targeting, the stealth product placement, et cetera. They should not be doing various advertising practices pushing these unhealthy foods. The use of influencers using our geolocation information. So for example, companies like Google, which owns Waze, they will know, let's say that Waze is working with McDonald's, which it does. Google's Waze works with McDonald's or even Burger King. And when you're driving by one of the fast food outlets, Google is alerted through your mobile phone and then you get a coupon saying come right over we'll give you a discount. None of those tactics are fair. Companies should not also be using artificial intelligence and things like emotional analytics to understand how the influence are unconscious and subconscious behaviors. So we have a number of recommendations that we'd like to see. And this once again is kind of a test case. If we can't protect the most vulnerable and it's in our self-interest, frankly, not to foster a generation of young people in the United States and all over the world who are going to face serious health consequences in the future, tragic for them, but has consequences for what we pay in terms of our healthcare costs. If we can't do that, then it says a lot about our commitment for a fair of just digital democratic society. Who are the allies in this work, Jeff? Well, I was gonna say you on Glenn and that was no. Well, we have, there are public health organizations that care about this most notably the Center for Science and the Public Interest, which has been the champion of healthy nutrition for decades. And there are other public health organizations, but you know what, more or less, we still, despite the fact that I say that we have a new movement going to regulate the digital platforms, it's not as deep as it could be. And there's a lot of anger focused on Google and Facebook and Amazon as it should be, but the focus isn't kind of on breaking those companies up without necessarily examining closely like we do in this report, how these platforms operate under particular sectors. I mean, isn't this work a little difficult because so many of the public interest groups are funded by Google? Yeah, well, I mean, increasingly there are groups that are completely independent, but historically, one of the things that's kept us back as a media reform community in the 21st century has been that Google and Facebook have their tentacles in all these public interest organizations and all these think tanks and let alone a revolving door between those officials in Washington and these companies and that's been a real problem. So I don't know, look, our report has been actually better received in Europe where there is interest in regulating these companies than in the United States. So, but look, if things change in Europe, if Google and Facebook and McDonald's and Pepsi have to operate differently in Europe, then we can say, well, if you're protecting children there, why not protect children here? But there's a long road ahead, I think. Not to interrupt you, but is the Biden administration promising in this regard? Do you see some opportunities with the politics of this administration? Well, I think it's too early to tell. I think the Biden administration has appointed and she's waiting Senate confirmation a highly regarded digital expert to be on the Federal Trade Commission, professor named Lena Kahn. However, the next appointment that the president makes will determine the composition of the FTC, if not who will lead it. And the FTC could easily fall into the same behaviors it's fallen into under previous democratic administrations, which is basically to let big digital data grow unimpeded. So it's too early to see if they have a commitment on it, frankly. So this study that you did big food, big tech in the global childhood obesity crisis was funded largely by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Is that right? Yes, they have been the key funder of our work on digital marketing for a number of years. And why do they care? Well, I mean, do they fund healthcare? Yeah, they look Robert Wood Johnson is probably the leading foundation. I'm impressed with Bloomberg Philanthropies and obviously the Gates Foundation too, that focused on healthcare and making healthcare equitable. To be honest with you, I think there was, people still don't appreciate the role of the digital media play in influencing the behavior of individuals. Just look at the political sphere, even with Cambridge Analytica, and part of it is the political divide, but there's not been real calls to kind of regulate the role that data plays in political campaigns and trying to make it more fair and equitable and get rid of those advertising. Look, the same advertising practices that drive junk food marketing drive political behaviors online. So there's, I would say that we're kind of still pioneers and this is not for self-angrantizement. I mean, if you ask me, we gave this, we did this with the support of the foundation which we're very grateful, but whether or not the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or other foundations really recognize that they need to seize control at this moment about the future of the digital media and challenge the course that the industry is taking and force it to become much more diverse and democratic. If we don't do that now, then our hopes for a better digital media future, I think will be frustrated. And I think the consumers need to have a better understanding because we benefit from the convenience of these systems of surveillance that serve up things that we think that we want. But I think we're less critical and aware that it's happening, right? Yeah, and then what are you gonna do about it? But you're absolutely right, consumer education is key. I mean, we at Center for Digital Democracy, and as you know, well, in some ways, our constituency has actually been the policymakers and the news media who are still unaware just today I had to send something to the Federal Trade Commission about the Amazon MGM deal where there was a sense of kind of less criticality. I mean, because that deal, although it's not as significant, you know, Facebook buying Instagram or WhatsApp, for example, but it all hinges on data collection. It involves the future of the streaming market and where Amazon has developed a very considerable position. And you have to look at that deal through the data assets that Amazon hopes to bring through owning, because MGM is more than James Bond. It's a number of studios, a number of other commercial properties. But you still have to kind of remind these people and this is to be critical. And what is, just describe a little bit more detail. What does MGM have, besides the James Bond franchise that Amazon wants? Well, they have many, many titles. I mean, they own MGM studios and they own United Artists, certain, they own a bunch of films, actually, and media properties that will be used to bolster Amazon Prime and Amazon's ad supported activity. And interestingly, and if your viewers wanna see, last December, Amazon and MGM, you know, developed a deal prior to the merger where Amazon's cloud computing service, AWS, was going to help MGM leverage data for more effective targeting to anticipate our needs, to figure out where the advertising should be. So, you know, you have to look at all that. I mean, you might say, okay, the merger will be approved, but we're not gonna let you have access to all that data or we're not gonna let you merge the data that we get from when you shop on Amazon, if you go to Whole Foods, if you are streaming stuff, and then if you do anything with James Bond, we're not gonna let you have all that leverage, all that given where you are in the marketplace. Like there's no, you know, one has to analyze this more closely, but today, the big media mergers are really data deals in my view, right? And that's what we have to look at. That's where the power is and the regulators haven't been looking at it, let alone the privacy aspects. So just say a little bit more to educate our viewers about what that means, a data deal. Well, you know, I'm trying to use a good example. Well, for example, even in the discovery, Warner Media, right? And which by the way, for those of your viewers who are cable advocates involves Liberty Media, which used to be TCI, you know? But what you're talking about is discoveries has a lot of information about its viewers, both watch it on television, but also online. Warner Media is part of a huge complex of digital advertising resources. And so they're gonna merge the two, more information about you, greater ability to predict what you watch, what you buy, where you go, how you behave, no limits on what they can do when they leverage all that data and help advertisers take advantage of it. So what you're really seeing also now, Lauren Glenn, which has been consistent actually over the last 10 or 15 years, but there's a spade in them now, is you're seeing this more and more consolidation going on in the digital data industries, more and more digital data companies are merging, consolidating their resources and partnering with everybody else so they have much more, they have greater ability to really know who we are and figure out ways of getting to us. And then selling that information to political marketers or food marketers. If it's not selling directly, because it's basically leveraging their assets, they will say to the local campaign, look, we know where your target voter is, hire us and we'll reach them. And we'll be able to reach them because we partner with everybody else. So, I mean, and that illustrates, I guess, the question here for the Biden administration, which is a very slim majority in Congress and right for the moment and is ambivalent, I'm sure, about how well to regulate these folks, how well, whether to regulate these folks is that the digital industry is really highly interlocked with a handful of giants but with other big companies that have now developed alliances with many, many others. It's a very small club that really controls the future of the digital media system. And whether or not we're gonna try to break that up or create some fairer rules and safeguards remains a question. Well, Jeffrey, thank you so much. It's always inspiring, even though sometimes a little depressing to talk with you about what's happening in the world of the surveillance advertising and especially how it's affecting our children and children of color and just across the world. So, I really am gonna encourage folks to follow the link that I'll post to Big Food, Big Tech and the Global Childhood Obesity Epidemic and really to follow your work at Center for Digital Democracy because you do quite a bit to lift the lid on what's happening and also not only are you lifting the lid but you're informing, as you said, the policymakers and the media folks so they can be better educated in the decisions that they make as well as our own. So thank you so much. Your organization is also an inspiration to me. Thank you. Well, we have the Mutual Admirations Society, us media activists with to stick together. You got it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.