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News on Regulation and Policy
On November 10, Ronald J. Deibert, renowned technology and security expert, will discuss the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity. In his new book ‘Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society’, Deibert will explore how the expansion of society towards a system of surveillance capitalism has […]
Ushering in the contemporary ‘fake news’ crisis, Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News reported that it outperformed mainstream news on Facebook in the three months prior to the 2016 US presidential elections. Here the report’s methods and findings are revisited for 2020. Examining Facebook user engagement of election-related stories, and applying Silverman’s classification of fake news, […]
By Richard RogersOn a late fall day last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sat down on a couch on the company’s San Francisco roof deck and dug into a problem. Next to him was the company’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde. The 2020 U.S. election was barely a year out and Twitter executives were worried the company was […]
By Nancy ScolaJoan Donovan, research director for Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said Wednesday that our increasingly polarized political climate and the poor regulation of online spaces has contributed to an “entangled web” of disinformation that bad actors can weaponize and amplify. This has enabled conspiracy theories like QAnon to spread from […]
By Zoe MathewsImagine living in a society in which most of the land and buildings available for meeting and working were owned by a few for-profit corporations. Churches, governments, groups of friends, schools, nonprofits, and grassroots social movements would each have to reserve space on — or have a key to — a privately-owned facility, often on […]
The Internet is an interconnected network of roughly 70.000 networks, but there are hardly and binding rules that prescribe _how it works_. Every network can set its own rules. Distribution and fragmentation are foundation concepts for the Internet. In this talk we will explore the governance of this distributed information network and the process of […]
In many emerging economies, a significant mobile gender gap persists—in which women not only have less access to mobile internet and mobile money, but continue to lag in mobile phone ownership. Drawing on one of the first large-scale experimental studies of mobile phone ownership among women, we analyze the effects of reducing this gender gap. […]
With the global onset of COVID-19, broadband access has never been more vital to our economies, democracies, and social well-being. The pandemic, however, painfully demonstrated the extent to which people in the United States are un- and under-connected. At least 42 million Americans lack access to broadband because of infrastructure availability, while upwards of 162 […]
In this talk, I explain what happens when human rights advocates try to change computer code, instead of legal code to protect human rights online. There is a growing chorus of policymakers and regulators calling on the tech sector to respect human rights and engage civil society, but very little empirical knowledge of what happens […]
Innovation and technological advancements are continuous, evolving products of knowledge consolidation, human ingenuity, and adaptive capacity. New forms of communication, banking, farming, and transportation technology have transformed the physical and social landscape of a rapidly globalizing world. Innovation often emerges in the face of a challenge, when the status quo fails to adequately meet the […]
Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in […]
By Tarleton Gillespie, Patricia Aufderheide, Elinor Carmi, Ysabel Gerrard, Robert Gorwa, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Sarah T. Roberts, Aram Sinnreich, and Sarah Myers West