News and Research articles on Corporations

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.

This paper shows how platforms are transient in the policies, procedures, and affordances and details the implications for politics.

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

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.

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.

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.

Is the “European approach” an adequate response to the challenges of disinformation and political manipulation, especially in election periods?

The countering of terrorism propaganda online, through private companies, may little by little kill our right to freedom of expression.

The new European public sector information directive, released in June 2013, makes “marginal cost” the default charge for government data. How to implement this principle? A consultation is ongoing. This article focusses on the calculation criteria for marginal costs.

This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future deployment of cloud computing.