News and Research articles on AcademiaComplex and possibly irreversible legal initiatives - that normally take years to be debated and responsively shaped - are being implemented overnight.
Feel like living in a dystopia? Take a deep breath, get a strong coffee, and let us challenge your ideas of where reality ends, and sci-fi begins…
While conducting research on YouTube’s algorithms, three researchers discovered that YouTube’s recommendations had created a community of sexually suggestive channels. When they shared their findings with The New York Times, YouTube implemented changes, and US lawmakers demanded consequences.
This issue brings together a selection of articles presented in the Communication Policy and Technology section of the IAMCR conference in 2018.
Christina, you’ve been an editor at an open access journal yourself and are now spearheading open access at Freie Universität Berlin. We have a candid and naive question for you: what does open access mean in 2018?
In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Facebook has recently announced a substantial tightening of access restrictions to the APIs of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms it owns. Researchers at leading international research organisations are deeply concerned about collateral impacts of the new API access rules. Here is why.
Mustafa Akgül of Bilkent University passed away on 13 December 2017 after a long battle with cancer. Commonly regarded as the "father of the internet in Turkey," he was one of the most important figures in establishing the first internet connection in Turkey on 12 April 1993.
The rapid development of the Internet of Things - or IoT - affects the protection of privacy in profound ways. Eduardo Magrani argues in favour of a shift from privacy protection to the idea a “right to non-tracking”.
Datafication leads to subtle forms of governance; this article explores them by drawing on science and technology studies as well as sociologies of visibility.
How did early network designers govern the internet before internet governance? With archival research, this article shows how designers conceived of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a solution to the problem of governing future network users.
The internet and its regulation are the result of continuous conflicts. By analysing policy fields as fields of struggle, this essay proposes to observe processes of discursive institutionalisation to uncover core conflicts inscribed into internet policy.
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?
Medical insurance companies, doctors and medical researchers face-off over the increasing use of big data in healthcare. Here is why.
The “Post-Snowden Crypto conference” last week pondered over repairing or replacing core parts of the net, the morale of cryptography and the nihilism of the surveilled society.
In a talk within the series “Big Data: Big power shifts?” held on 5 November 2015 in Berlin, sociologist Mike Savage argued that the most successful and popular social scientists primarily build up their work on data analysis.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) starts on Wednesday in Switzerland. Count on internet governance to become a trending topic.
Contrary to the early view that cryptocurrencies’ decentralisation makes them unregulable, the formation of new intermediaries will guarantee regulators’ ultimate power. The key challenge is how to balance control and innovation.
The 'Facebook online social experiment' has caused much controversy. Researchers Cornelius Puschmann and Engin Bozdag review the debate around research ethics and come to the conclusion that "benefits for science should be balanced with possible hazards that may be caused by experiments, rather than precluding that such benefits outweigh the gains".
The way we handle digital assets post-mortem is a young field of inquiry and it is researcher Edina Harbinja's sandbox. Journalist Philippa Warr takes a look at the issues.
The French parliament has just decided to set up a Commission du numérique (Committee on digital affairs). This could change the course of European internet policy.