News and Research articles on United States of America

TikTok is at the centre of a geopolitical contest between the US and China. What can this platform controversy tell us about the future distribution of power in the digital environment?

This paper examines data and privacy governance by four China-based mobile applications and their international versions - including the role of the state. It also highlights the role of platforms in gatekeeping mobile app privacy standards.

Will the same cross-device technologies that track our journeys through the commercial marketplace now follow us into the polling booth?

Personalised political messaging undermines voter autonomy and the electoral process. Use of voter analytics for political communication must be regulated.

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.

Why did China’s Alibaba platform reform its enforcement practices in line with demands from the US government and US companies?

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.

Zero rating has emerged as one of the most contentious communications policy debates of the last decade. The offer of ‘free’ access to select applications compromises network neutrality, at the same time as it can present advantages to users with limited economic resources. How can we attempt to reconcile these conflicting dimensions of zero rating?

This paper provides qualitative analysis of Google’s and Microsoft’s policies and examines case studies to enhance understanding about the privacy role of information intermediaries in self-regulatory arrangements.

Agribusinesses are buying into big data for its predictive powers, bypassing farmers and aggregating previously proprietary farming data. Given this power asymmetry, what are the ethics of the use of big data in big agriculture?

How should the EU regulate the expanding role of for-profit vendors in school operations making use of big data technologies?

Personalised news websites can have serious implications for democracy, but little is known about the extent and effects of personalisation.

In the last two decades, the industry has deployed endlessly the rhetoric of the “digital threat” in order to demand harsher measures against digital piracy. This paper shows that the “digital threat” discourse is based on shaky grounds.

Re-assessing jurisdictional issues, the author examines the 'monkey selfie case' from a UK and European perspective and finds that the photographer could be subject to copyright protection in Europe.

Contrary to expectations of a “net empowerment”, net neutrality debates on Twitter show that established political and media actors still play important roles.