This op-ed looks at Australia and asks whether Europeans need to worry about social media blocking access to news content.
Political advertising exposed: tracking Facebook ads in the 2021 Dutch elections
How can we monitor political ads circulating on social media in the run-up to an election? This essay learns from the project "Analysis of Political Ads in Digital Campaigns”, combining scraping methods and public opinion research to investigate how online advertising shape political preferences in the Dutch general elections (15-17 March 2021).
Regulation of news recommenders in the Digital Services Act: empowering David against the Very Large Online Goliath
A much anticipated provision in the European Commission’s proposal for a Digital Service Act is Art. 29 DSA - the provision about recommendation algorithms. In this brief commentary we reflect on the background, purpose and potential of Art. 29 to address the effects of recommenders for users and society.
Towards a ban of discriminatory rankings by digital gatekeepers? Reflections on the proposal for a Digital Markets Act
This commentary provides first reflections on the recently published proposal for a Digital Markets Act and its prohibition of discriminatory rankings.
Borderline speech: caught in a free speech limbo?
To ban content that might possibly violate their own content policies, social media platforms use the term 'borderline‘. This means categorising content as potentially unwanted (e.g. harmful, inappropriate, etc) and sanctioning legitimate expressions of opinion - hence putting lawful speech in a twilight zone.
Too big to fail us? Platforms as systemically relevant
Some platforms become systemically relevant in a crisis, so we need regulation that takes this into account before and during the next crisis.
Harnessing the collective potential of GDPR access rights: towards an ecology of transparency
The European Commission recently released its first review of two years of application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). René Mahieu and Jef Ausloos do not agree with the largely positive self-assessment and explain their main points of contention by summarising their own submission to the Commission.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Recital 23 brought an obligation to all companies that receive, control or process personal data of European Union (EU) residents to comply with the minimal safeguards stated in European legislation. One of the main issues is the fact that companies that are not based in the EU, which receive, store
The President and free speech: consequences of Twitter’s fact-checking indication
Since Twitter labelled a tweet by Donald Trump as ‘potentially misleading’ and indicated that it was fact-checking the statement made, the US President signed an ‘ Executive Order'. Amélie Heldt finds that far from being new, the situation illustrates how torn we are when it comes to intermediary immunity or rather liability.
Digital inclusion and well-being
This commentary is part of Digital inclusion and data literacy , a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Elinor Carmi and Simeon J. Yates. At the Carnegie UK Trust, a charitable foundation based in Scotland and operating across the UK and Ireland, we have been working for more than 100 years to improve well-being for individuals