This paper discusses how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe, from the perspective of data protection law, freedom of expression, and political advertising rules.
This article identifies factors that could explain the increasing pressure to regulate Québec’s political parties’ uses of digital voter information.
This paper examines how Google Search ranked 29 junk news domains between 2016 and 2019, finding that SEO — rather than paid advertising — is the most important strategy for generating discoverability via Google Search. Google has taken several steps to combat the spread of disinformation on Search, and these strategies have been largely successful at limiting the discoverability of junk news.
Will the same cross-device technologies that track our journeys through the commercial marketplace now follow us into the polling booth?
This paper shows how platforms are transient in the policies, procedures, and affordances and details the implications for politics.
The current quest to understand the digital society is populated by a plethora of ideas, ranging from catchwords to concepts. This special section establishes a forum to reflect if these are actually worthwhile, provide analytic value and describe something new.
KEYWORDS:
Digital society
Datafication is a key concept of digital society referring to the quantification and, often, monetisation of human life through digital information.
The text reviews current technological developments and the challenges they pose for privacy. It provides an overview of the relevant theories of privacy and their recent developments in light of technological changes.
Concepts such as ‘filter bubble’ enjoy considerable popularity in scholarly as well as mainstream debates, but are rarely defined with any rigour. This has led to highly contradictory research findings. This article provides a critical review of the ‘filter bubble’ idea, and concludes that its persistence has served only to distract scholarly attention from far more critical areas of enquiry.
What is platformisation? This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms it develops a comprehensive approach to this process.