News and Research articles on GovernanceThis op-ed argues that tech regulations need to focus on platform design, not just content moderation, advocating for prosocial tech design that promotes healthier online spaces and strengthens societal cohesion.
This article explores how civil society can contribute to constitutionalising social media global content governance by bridging international human rights law with platform policies.
This article analyses the role that informational architectures and infrastructures in federated social media platforms play in content moderation processes.
This paper focuses on the dynamics of accountability in blockchain governance. Drawing on a case study of the Lido protocol on Ethereum, it explores the rule of code, on-chain accountability, accountability trade-offs, and the complexities of determining when accountability can be better instantiated via on-chain or off-chain mechanisms.
The Brazilian Social Security Management Office's AI system reduces the waiting list but increases automatic refusals, harming beneficiaries and increasing inequality in the delivery of public services to the poorest and elderly people.
This paper investigates decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as a potential policy response to the issue of declining trust online and argues that while DAOs have privileged displacing the need for trust, they can also be designed to nourish trust thereby fostering participation and prosocial use cases.
Against the backdrop of ongoing public and political debates about the power and regulation of large platform conglomerates, this special issue presents critical, conceptual, and empirical studies that home in on the various modalities of platform power.
The author argues that the regulation over transnational audiovisual platforms (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+) is framed by two crucial variables: handling state-interest groups relationships and global interdependence.
This special issue brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to identify the human rights implications of algorithmic, biometric and smart city technologies and the means to govern them. In the editorial, we propose a framework for the analysis and design of human-rights-based smart cities.
When we look at the recent Twitter-Mastodon exodus, we see a new trend of responsibilisation or placing the burden someplace else — from platform to user.
This opinion piece looks at resilience in science in the context of digital transformation.
“Permissionlessness” is a term often used in association with public blockchains. This glossary entry explores the origins, evolution, and coexisting uses and meanings of the term “permissionless” to contextualise it.
The UK welfare system relies on gender stereotyping and, increasingly, on surveillance: risking a vicious cycle of categorisation and control
Blockchain governance can be regarded as the integration of norms and culture, the laws and the code, the people and the institutions that facilitate coordination and together determine a given organisation.
Cybersecurity describes technical and social measures needed to protect networked information systems. But its evolution has led to concerns of inappropriate militarisation.
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.
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.
Algorithmic governance as a key concept in controversies around the emerging digital society takes up the idea that digital technologies produce social ordering in a specific way.
Standard form consumer contracts (SFCCs), including Terms of Service agreements, are drafted by businesses and presented to consumers on a non-negotiable basis. Since these contracts present an asymmetric imbalance of information and resources between parties, they have been of concern for consumer rights in recent years. While some have characterized these issues as a ‘duty to read’ for consumers or as egregious terms and weak disclosures by drafters,’ this project suggests at least part of the issues exist from a lack of consideration of the document itself (i.e., medium, format, authenticy, reliability, stability) and the processes that deem it ‘standard.’
Data ethics has gained traction in policy-making. The article presents an analytical investigation of the different dimensions and actors shaping data ethics in European policy-making.