Focusing on recommender systems used by dominant social media platforms as an example of high-reach AI, this study explores the directionality of transparency provisions introduced by the Digital Services Act and highlights the pivotal role of oversight authorities in addressing risks posed by high-reach AI technologies.
News and Research articles on Social media
Recent public discourse on social media sounds somewhat dystopian: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and co. knowingly use manipulative design features and algorithms to keep users hooked. Children and young people are particularly susceptible to this — staring at their screen for countless hours, they become addicted, depressed, and plagued by anxiety. Losing control over their own behaviour, they neglect other activities. A problem so serious that politicians need to intervene.
Advertisers’ concerns about “brand safety” and “brand suitability” are an underappreciated influence on social media platforms’ content governance, with concerning implications for social equality and the freedom of public debate online.
Is public concern for political microtargeting addressed on empirical grounds?
This article examines epistemic uncertainty about the nature and extent of fake accounts on social media and the implications therein.
A proposal, informed by feminist theory, for a policy agenda of “governable spaces” across the domains of social media, gig economies, and network infrastructure.
Virtual reality—a central technology to Facebook’s metaverse ambitions—is a powerful digital sensor. But whose interests does it serve?
This article considers the unique challenges of platform policies aimed at the off-platform misbehaviour of users through the case of Twitch.
The spread of hate speech and disinformation on social media has contributed to inflaming conflicts and mass atrocities as seen in Myanmar. Is the doctrine of information intervention a solution to escalations of violence?
This op-ed looks at Australia and asks whether Europeans need to worry about social media blocking access to news content.
A critical perspective on platform monopolies through the empirical study of their rejection in the social worlds of peer production.
What more can social media platforms do to combat misinformation? Recommendations from policymakers suggest reconceptualising social media policies as a necessary step.
Content moderation has exploded as a public and a policy concern, but the debate remains too narrow. Nine experts suggest ways to expand it.
This paper examines the ethical and legal issues arising from the closure of a data-rich firms such as Facebook and provides four policy recommendations to mitigate the resulting harms to society.
This article highlights what we know about the empirical effects of data-campaigning in political campaigns and how those findings fail to live up to claims about its power.
This paper analyses the spread of misinformation in the context of 2018 Brazilian elections. We give a general overview of the Brazilian political context, its media ecosystem and the weaponisation of the country’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp, as a political persuasion tool. The current architecture of the platform does not allow, once appropriated for purposes of election campaigns, users to notice or become aware that they are being monitored and managed.
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.
The German Network Enforcement Act is an attempt to counteract the effects of hate speech on social media platforms. This paper analyses and evaluates the reports on the handling of complaints about unlawful content after its coming into force.
This paper compares two controversies in social media governance and argues that social media companies’ actions indicate an expanded role for marketing and advertising as arbiters of the public interest in media content delivery.
This essay argues that we have anxieties about micro-targeting because we have anxieties about democracy itself.