Despite their active and growing involvement in monitoring the implementation of the “Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online”, civil society organisations have been barred from translating this expanded role into enhanced influence at the policy-making level.
News and Research articles on Social media platforms
This study critically discusses platforms’ non-compliance with data access based on a collaborative policy effort from scholars engaging in data donation studies.
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.
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.
The idea of decentralising social media is driven by historical concerns over centralised power structures and the more contemporary issue of content moderation policies.
In the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is timely to review the state of the debate about the impact of data-driven elections and to identify key questions that require academic research and regulatory response. The papers in this collection, by some of the world’s most prominent elections researchers, offer that assessment.