Over the past fifty years, surveillance practices once considered untenable due to their incompatibility with democratic rights and values have been rebranded as tolerable, neutral, or even desirable.
News and Research articles on Democracy
Internet freedom rankings are a comparative tool that serves as an evaluative shorthand in decision-making contexts internationally. Understanding their aims and how they define internet freedom, as well as the power relationships within the ranking ecosystem, can reveal a lot about their politics – and their limits.
Digital commons, understood as shared information, culture and knowledge resources created and maintained online, are a crucial concept to think about the development of the digital sphere beyond surveillance capitalism and steer it toward a more socially inclusive and sustainable economy and a renewal of democracy.
Targeted political advertising can potentially exclude voter segments from important political information, and undermine the democratic process
Focusing on whether data-intensive technologies used in political campaigning are accurate and effective misses the point about their larger role in politics. This piece briefly addresses the popular question of “Does it work?” and suggests a series of questions and provocations that aim to more holistically capture the extent of tech-led
Discussing three factors that characterise the activities of political campaigners, this article demonstrates variations in who is using data in campaigns, what the sources of campaign data are, and how data informs communication.
This paper is part of Transnational materialities , a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. 1. Digitalisation and democracy: proposal for a research perspective The relevance of digital media for contemporary democracies is a subject of increasing interest across the social sciences, the media
Introduction The digitisation of our societies comes along with a number of challenges and opportunities - the dimension of which are far from being assessed, not to say understood. While the internet allowing easy access of everybody to the general political discourse was for some time understood as a great opportunity for strengthening democracy
Political micro-targeting has become a popular topic after the surprise results of the 2016 US presidential election, the UK vote on leaving the European Union, and a number of general elections in Europe in 2017. Yet, we still know little about whether PMT is a tool with destructive potential or if it’s “just” a new phenomenon to be incorporated
Abbreviated version of a speech delivered by the Member of the European Partiament Sophie in ‘t Veld in Amsterdam in May 2017 to Data & Democracy, a conference on political micro-targeting.
