News and Research articles on DemocracyUnder-16 social media bans may seem like a reasonable response that forestalls consequences, but, in ways we have yet to appreciate, they may prove a strategic blunder, serving the best interests of the very tech companies they seek to counter.
AI development is concentrated in corporate hands, but community-controlled alternatives ‒ open, efficient, and democratically governed ‒ are already proving viable.
This article explores some conditions and possibilities for public contestability in AI governance; a critical attribute of governance arrangements designed to align AI deployment with the public interest.
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.
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
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.
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 disruption in a time of creeping voter surveillance.
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 and the political sphere. We are observing a growing diversity of political engagement, political actors and organisational forms, particularly around election and referendum campaigns. At the same time, conventional boundaries between social movements, public audiences and political parties, even between political and non-political action are …
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 into our political processes.
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.
This essay argues that we have anxieties about micro-targeting because we have anxieties about democracy itself.
After the global euphoria about the internet's potentials for empowering individuals and supporting democracy, more realistic arguments have been put forward against this optimism. 1 Indeed, we have been observing an ongoing fight between the autocratic government in Turkey and the Turkish people over using the internet for the last 10 years. It started with Law No. 5651 which was passed in 2007.
Focusing on different democratic ways of negotiating online privacy the authors identify several governance modes, including the currently prevailing protectionist mode.
Liberal democracies are increasingly considering internet filtering as a means to assert state control over online information exchanges. A variety of filtering techniques have been implemented in Western states to prevent access to certain content deemed harmful. This development poses a series of democratic and ethical questions, particularly when states introduce regulation mandating ISPs to block online content. A first version of this article was previously published at the FOCI'12 conference.