"The proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on online platforms has serious implications for human rights, trust and safety as per international human rights law and standards. The mutually-reinforcing determinants of the problems are: ‘attention economics’; automated advertising system
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s; external manipulators; company spending priorities; stakeholder knowledge deficits; and flaws in platforms’ policies and in their implementation. How platforms understand and identify harms is insufficiently mapped to human rights standards, and there is a gap in how generic policy elements should deal with local cases, different rights and business models when there are tensions. Enforcement by platforms of their own terms of service to date has grave shortfalls, while attempts to improve outcomes by automating moderation have their limitations. Inequalities in policy and practice abound in relation to different categories of people, countries and languages, while technology advances are raising even more challenges. Problems of ‘solo-regulation’ by individual platforms in content curation and moderation are paralleled by harms associated with unilateral state regulation. Many countries have laws governing content online, but their vagueness fuels arbitrary measures by both authorities and platforms. Hybrid regulatory arrangements can help by elaborating transparency requirements, and setting standards for mandatory human rights impact assessments." (Key messages)
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"Making Open Development Inclusive: Lessons from IDRC Research focuses on the connection between openness and inclusion in global development. It brings together the latest research that cuts across a wide variety of political, economic, and social arenas - from governance to education to entreprene
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urship and more. The chapters draw on empirical evidence from a wide and diverse range of applications of openness, uncovering the many critical and underlying elements that shape and structure how particular openness initiatives and/or activities play out - and critically - who gets to participate, and who benefits [or not] from openness, while exploring the frontiers where openness intersects with deeper challenges of development, technology, and innovation." (Publisher description)
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"It is evident that Uganda will need to do some things differently to ensure improved outcomes. Addressing inconsistencies in policy that affect the sector is critical. Each policy that impacts the sector, regardless of the Ministry that develops it, should be evaluated before implementation within
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the overall context of the Digital Uganda Vision so that adverse effects can be mitigated. Supply-side interventions on their own are insufficient. Demand stimulation is essential to driving Internet uptake. Affordability of devices is the primary challenge for policymakers, with even relatively low-cost devices being beyond the financial means of large numbers of citizens. Further, the price of data, even though relatively low, is simply beyond the means of many people for meaningful use. Shifting people from passive consumption of services to productive use represents a far greater challenge, however. This requires not only improving digital literacy in order to bring people online, but developing wider skillsets for the production of local content to stimulate demand, improving entrepreneurial application to create jobs and increasing the consumptive capacity of the economy more broadly to drive growth." (Key recommendations, page vi)
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"Although most Africans remain disconnected from the Internet, and access to broadband services continues to be a central policy issue, the increased availability of broadband services alone will not reduce digital inequality on the continent. While the provision of access to the Internet remains a
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key public policy issue — as a necessary condition of digital participation in the economy and society — it is insufficient. Even where networks and services are available, large numbers of people are unable to access these services affordably or use them optimally to enhance their social and economic well-being, unlike in more mature economies, where levels of human development and equality are higher [...] Demand stimulation measures — such as the reduction of prices to make services more affordable, the development of relevant local content and applications, the enhancement of citizens’ e-literacy and national skills development plans — are the focus areas of this paper. It examines alternative policy and regulatory interventions to so-called “international best practice” — assuming in the process certain political and economic conditions, by recognizing the institutional and resource constraints that generally exist in African countries — and proposes multiple strategies across the ICT ecosystem that could result in more inclusive digital development." (Executive summary)
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"In responding to some of the major narratives in the literature on information communication technologies and development, this article attributes the relatively poor ICT policy outcomes in Africa, particularly regarding the deployment of information and communication technologies for poverty allev
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iation, to the paucity of critical research that acknowledges the political dimensions of policy reform and economic regulation. Such research would be able to more meaningfully inform and capacitate policy formulation, regulatory practice, and business operations to produce positive growth and development outcomes. The essay argues that the purely economic analyses of ICT sector reform that dominate the literature on Africa fail to explain why, in the face of global evidence of the success of the reform paradigm of regulated competition—which has successfully driven increased penetration of information and communication technologies at lower and lower prices across the world—in Africa, communications sector reform has been so uneven and often resisted. Political economy approaches that highlight the political context in which economic reforms take place seem to have greater explanatory value. Rather than focusing on market reforms only, analyses of the interaction of state and market, and the interplay between various sector institutions may better explain how reform is faciliated or constrained." (Abstract)
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"What is clear from the Research ICT Africa (RIA) Household and Individual Access and Usage Survey is that the diffusion of ICT is highly uneven concentrating in urban areas and leaving some rural areas almost untouched. Access to these technologies is constrained by income as is usage, and as they
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become more complex, they are increasingly constrained by literacy and education. This analysis explores the inequities of access and usage further, by viewing them through a gender lens. Of the limited demand-side data on Africa that exists, very little is disaggregated on gender lines. This study provides a descriptive statistical overview of access to ICTs by women and men and their usage of them. This is supported by focus groups that were undertaken in five of the 17 countries surveyed in East, Central, South and West Africa. The survey reveals some surprising instances where more women than men own mobile phones, such as in South Africa and Mozambique, or where women have greater knowledge of the Internet such as in Cameroon. More generally however, the study confirms the differences in access by men and women to ICTs especially where they depend on public access." (Executive summary)
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