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News on Regulation, Policy, and Platform Governance
On a cloudy evening in Nairobi, Berhan Taye is scrolling through a spreadsheet in which she has helped document more than 140 Facebook posts from Ethiopia that contain hate speech. There are videos of child abuse, texts of hate speech against different ethnic groups, and hours-long live streams inciting hatred. These posts breach Facebook community […]
By Aisha GaniAs the pandemic rages in Cuba, many on the island have been finding it difficult to afford basic goods. Hundreds wait in line in central Havana for up to 12 hours at supermarkets, only to be disappointed. Most necessities, aside from rice, beans, and bread, are sold only in U.S. dollars or euros, referred to […]
By Lillian PerlmutterMany communities in Southeast Asia have a storied legacy of distrust toward media and technology regulation. Governments in the region have a long history of weaponizing the law—from libel to…
Online interactions are often understood through the corporate social media (CSM) model where social interactions are determined through layers of abstraction and centralization that eliminate users from decision-making processes. This study demonstrates how alternative social media (ASM)—namely Mastodon—restructure the relationship between the technical structure of social media and the social interactions that follow, offering a […]
Reengineering India explores India’s post-liberalization transformation through the lens of the software industry. It is an anthropological study of work, capital, and class in the software industry, viewed as a key site where novel forms of work and worker-subjects, dispositions, and social identities are being fashioned, and new aspirations and social imaginaries are introduced, worked […]
Critical assessments of the recent resurgence of right-wing nationalism have rightly highlighted the role of social media in these troubling times, yet they are constrained by an overemphasis on celebrity leaders defined as populists. This article departs from a leader-centric analysis and the liberal frame that still largely informs assessment of political action, to foreground […]
This chapter carefully examines the protest scene on the Azad Maidan which turned into a “riot” on that fateful day of 2012 and its aftermath, to pry open questions of mediation that underlie religious imagining and political friction in South Asia, in times of rapid digital media growth. It draws upon ethnographic analysis of observations […]
Many communities in Southeast Asia have a storied legacy of distrust toward media and technology regulation. Governments in the region have a long history of weaponizing the law—from libel to…