Episode 90, presented by Naftogaz: Twitter's Nick Pickles — Syria conference — AKK's vision

Nick Pickles, Twitter’s senior policy strategist, is our main guest. He responds to heated criticism of Twitter’s handling of free expression, misogyny, disinformation and transparency. “Increasingly, problems have tech components, but often societal problems can’t be solved by technology alone,” he says. We also check in with polling guru Cornelius Hirsch, hashing out the details of what could happen if the U.K. votes in the European election. Our podcast panel discusses this week’s Syria conference in Brussels — and debates the tepid response from Germany’s Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance vision. And following up on a recent promise, we crunched the numbers to determine the balance between men and women featured on the podcast. Over the last year, 68 men were featured guests, compared to 44 women. Although it's not an exact science, we also had a shot at measuring total air time. Factoring in our podcast panelists Lina Aburous and Alva Finn, women accounted for 60 percent of speaking time. But when we added in an estimate for host Ryan Heath, total speaking time for women fell to 45.3 percent. It’s not perfect, but we reckon we're on the right track.