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.
News and Research articles on Social media
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.
Fernando N. van der Vlist and Anne Helmond discuss Data Selfie, an open source browser extension that collects and analyses data about your behaviour on facebook.com
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.
Two months after military coup attempt in Turkey shocked the world, senior internet researchers Melih Kırlıdoğ and Mustafa Akgül find counter-intuitive evidence on the role the internet played.
A new Danish study calls into question a cornerstone of the data protection regime in Europe: user consent. This article discusses the findings in light of the concept of 'privacy as a human right'.