"With the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) package, the European Union will adopt what is probably the most significant international standard-setting project besides the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is expected that the DSA will have far-reaching impact
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beyond the EU. This legal opinion deals with concrete questions on the effectiveness of the DSA, as well as in the areas of conflict with freedom of communication and dissemination of disinformation. The opinion concerns the draft published by the European Commission in December 2020." (Executive summary, page 5)
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"In the late 2010s, the Internet overtook television as the most popular media format in Russia. It was also the time when Russian-speaking YouTube went political: well-known bloggers started producing political content, opposition politicians became the most popular YouTubers, and finally mainstrea
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m journalists migrated to the platform, a move precipitated by Covid-19 isolation when the demand for Russian-speaking content on YouTube skyrocketed. Therefore, it came as no surprise that when the war started it was YouTube that became the main battlefield for independent Russian journalists, including those who had moved out of the country. However, YouTube was also used by Russian propaganda for years with great effect. For that reason, the Russian government was hesitant to block YouTube, unlike other global platforms that Kremlin censors blocked immediately after the war started. That provided time for Russian users to adapt and install censorship circumvention tools. The other platform that was not immediately blocked was Telegram, and Russian journalists didn’t miss that opportunity to talk to their audience either." (Summary, page 4)
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"This study argues for the diversification of South Africa's digital economy, as it builds a case for the support of platform co-operatives, which are worker-owned and managed social enterprises that contribute to the diversification, decentralisation and democratisation of the digital economy by fo
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stering structural change for fair social outcomes as a natural consequence of economic development. Platform cooperatives represent an important counterbalance to the rent-seeking venture capital funded tech monopolies that currently dominate the platform economy. This study views their emergence - as well as other social enterprise models - as a gauge for the diversification of South Africa's digital economy." (Introduction)
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"The first section of this article frames the discussion of oversight in the legal theory of governance; then it analyzes different initiatives of regulation, co-regulation, and self-regulation centering on a few aspects of the mechanisms that impact their independence, impartiality, competence, and
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effectiveness: who heads and imposes the supervision, the legal nature of the obligations that are supervised; the material and geographical competence of the body; the supervision mechanisms and the tools to implement said supervision. Finally, this article concludes that there are critical challenges to how current supervision is conceived. Strictly self-regulatory mechanisms (i.e. ToS or transparency reports), although positive, lack legitimacy; and the mechanisms that are being designed by the states, as will be developed here, require substantial inputs and amendments to guarantee their independence, their compatibility with human rights, and above all, their effectiveness in achieving their intended purpose. In this framework, this essay suggests that co-regulation with expert multistakeholder oversight could be a plausible and even desirable model for the supervision of cross-jurisdictional behaviors and services and evaluates the best practices and the challenges that this model poses for its adoption in other areas." (Page 5)
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"For months, our team has been tracking how China has exploited search engine results on Xinjiang and COVID-19, two subjects that are geopolitically salient to Beijing — Xinjiang, because the Chinese government seeks to push back on condemnation of its rights record; COVID-19, because it seeks to
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deflect criticism for its early mishandling o f the pandemic. In both cases, Beijing is quite focused on positioning itself as a responsible global leader and softening perceptions to the contrary. To evaluate these concerns, we compiled daily data over a 120-day period on 12 terms related to Xinjiang and COVID-19 from five different sources: (1) Google Search; (2) Google News; (3) Bing Search; (4) Bing News; and (5) YouTube. We found that Chinese state media are remarkably effective at influencing the content returned for the term “Xinjiang” across several search types. “Xinjiang,” which is among the most neutral terms in our data set, regularly returned state-backed content across news searches, with at least one Chinese state-backed news outlet appearing in the top 10 results in 88% of searches (106 out of 120 days searched). On YouTube, state media appeared among the top 10 results in searches for “Xinjiang” in 98% of searches (118 out of 120 days searched) [...]" (Executive summary)
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"Developed and delivered in 2021/2022, the Digital Media Arts for an inclusive Public Sphere (Digital MAPS) programme brought together three universities, a data science and software company, an international Digital Peacebuilding NGO, as well as 18 country-based media-arts initiatives, to explore l
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ocal responses to affective polarisation – defined as the increasing dislike, distrust, and animosity towards those from other cultural or identity-based groups. As you will read, through Digital MAPS, we worked with young leaders from the creative and media-arts sector, across eight countries in MENA (Libya, Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Tunisia and Syria), providing them with the skills, resources and technology to understand polarisation and depolarisation approaches, conduct their own social media analysis and on the basis of this design and deliver pilot interventions to undercut affective polarisation - whether it be centred on gender, ethno-sectarian conflict, intergenerational conflict or hate speech in general. We hope the information contained here within, will be of interest to digital peacebuilding and digital cultural relations practitioners, policy makers and academics. More especially, we hope it can stimulate a conversation on the intersection between the two and the role of Cultural Relations in addressing the drivers that undermine it." (Introduction)
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"The year 2018 marks the first year in human history in which a majority of the world's population are now connected to the internet. This mass connectivity means that we have an internet that no longer connects only the world's wealthy. Workers from Lagos to Johannesburg to Nairobi and everywhere i
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n between can now apply for and carry out jobs coming from clients who themselves can be located anywhere in the world. Digital outsourcing firms can now also set up operations in the most unlikely of places in order to tap into hitherto disconnected labour forces. With CEOs in the Global North proclaiming that 'location is a thing of the past' (Upwork, 2018), and governments and civil society in Africa promising to create millions of jobs on the continent, the book asks what this 'new world of digital work' means to the lives of African workers. It draws from a year-long fieldwork in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, with over 200 interviews with participants including gig workers, call and contact centre workers, self-employed freelancers, small-business owners, government officials, labour union officials, and industry experts. Focusing on both platform-based remote work and call and contact centre work, the book examines the job quality implications of digital work for the lives and livelihoods of African workers." (Publisher description)
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"There are two highlights to this year’s findings, firstly, the same three platforms that scored the first point for Fair Pay last year scored a point this year too. No other platform publicly committed, or provided sufficient evidence, to ensure that workers earn at least the hourly local minimum
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wage after work-related costs. Even with workers and worker groups repeatedly emphasising the importance of a stable income for platform workers, platforms have been reluctant to publicly commit to, and operationalise, a minimum wage policy. Secondly, while workers have engaged in various forms of collective action to voice their concerns in the platform economy, platforms have been uncompromisingly unwilling to recognise or negotiate with any collective body representing workers." (Key findings, page 4)
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"Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures,
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its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere." (Publisher description)
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"Drawing on an original dataset of survey responses collected in the summer of 2022 across four countries - Brazil, India, the UK, and the US - they examine the relationship between trust in news and how people think about news on digital platforms, especially Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube
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, some of the most widely used platforms around the world. What they find is somewhat nuanced; how people think about information on platforms varies considerably. It depends on the platform, it depends on the country, it depends on the audiences within those countries, and it depends on the kinds of news those audiences are encountering in these varying spaces." (Executive Summary and Key Findings, page 3)
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"Beginning in August 2017, the Myanmar security forces undertook a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Northern Rakhine State. A UN investigation found that the role of Facebook in the violence was “significant”. This report is based on an in-depth investi
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gation into Meta (formerly Facebook)’s role in the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya. It reveals that in the months and years leading up to the 2017 atrocities, the Facebook platform became an echo chamber of virulent anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar. Meta’s algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya – pouring fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increasing the risk of an outbreak of mass violence. Despite its partial acknowledgement that it played a role in the 2017 violence against the Rohingya, Meta has to date failed to provide an effective remedy to affected Rohingya communities. However, Amnesty International’s systematic legal analysis of Meta’s role in the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya leaves little room for doubt: Meta substantially contributed to adverse human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya and has a responsibility to provide survivors with an effective remedy." (Back cover)
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"Cet ouvrage s’intéresse aux relations qu’entretiennent les GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) et les médias en Afrique. Il aborde tout d’abord les réseaux sociaux numériques comme terrains d’amplifi cation et de transformation de diffusion de l’information et questionn
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e leur utilisation pour la diffusion de fausses informations et la remise en cause de la légitimité des médiateurs traditionnels de l’information. Il se consacre ensuite aux relations entretenues sur les plans éditorial, socioéconomique et sociotechnique par les plateformes et les médias, et y observe un certain opportunisme des médias et une domination des plateformes. Enfi n, il s’intéresse au rôle joué par l’État à travers la régulation et les nouvelles lois qui intègrent les médias numériques mais mettent aussi en lumière les diffi cultés liées à l’implémentation d’un véritable cadre régulatoire." (Dos de couverture)
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"Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) led a two-year investigation into the online media ecosystem of al-Shabaab and the Islamic State in Africa, analyzing the role of “independent news” outlets and their intersections with hundreds-strong networks of amplifier profiles on F
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acebook linked to a number of central pages identifying themselves as “media outlets” or “media personalities” operating in Somali, Kiswahili and Arabic. Researchers found that the network of support for al-Shabaab and Islamic State extended across several platforms, including decentralized messaging applications such as Element and RocketChat, and encrypted messaging platforms such as Telegram, as well as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. A qualitative cross-platform analysis showed the most active, networked, and multilingual ecosystem of support for al-Shabaab and the Islamic State existed on Facebook, where profiles and pages classified as “media outlets” were sharing terrorist content openly and eschewing private groups and profiles. The content that ISD researchers observed through the networks is often linked to “media” and “media personality” pages in Somali, Kiswahili and Arabic, and not only violates the platform’s community guidelines, but also points to language moderation blind spots that have been previously documented by journalists as well as whistleblowers." (Publisher description)
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