Facing fragmentation of digital space in the Snowden aftermath, this article considers regulatory models available to avoid the balkanisation of the internet.
News and Research articles on Western democracies
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.
NationBuilder is a global, nonpartisan political technology firm that sells to anyone. Through a review of its use, this paper questions whether NationBuilder should sell to extremists, spammers or frauds.
This paper examines how Google Search ranked 29 junk news domains between 2016 and 2019, finding that SEO — rather than paid advertising — is the most important strategy for generating discoverability via Google Search. Google has taken several steps to combat the spread of disinformation on Search, and these strategies have been largely successful at limiting the discoverability of junk news.
This paper is part of Transnational materialities, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. Introduction Questions about how data is generated, collected and used have taken hold of public imagination in recent years, not least in relation to government. While the collection of data about populations has always been central to practices of governance, the digital era has placed increased emphasis on the politics of data in state-citizen relations and contemporary power dynamics. In part a continuation of long-standing processes of bureaucratisation, the turn to data-centric practices in government across Western democracies emerges out of …