After more than a year of work and a review of more than 3000 sources, the OID is launching its first meta-analysis. The report is set to provide a global understanding of the current structure of the information and communication space and its impact on public debate and democracy around the world.

The event will be held in English and moderated by Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann.

Renate Nikolay is Head of Cabinet of Vĕra Jourová, Vice-President for Values and Transparency, working on matters such as rule of law or disinformation. She was Director in charge of Asia and Latin America in DG Trade and, from 2014 to 2019, she was Head of Cabinet of the Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality where she played a key role in the adoption of the data protection reform and the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor and the Code of Conduct with platforms on online hate speech. She holds a law degree (erstes und zweites Staatsexamen) from the Free University of Berlin.

Wolfgang Schulz is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research │ Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and holds the university professorship “Media Law and Public Law including its Theoretical Foundations” at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg. Since February 2012, he has been Research Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). His work emphasizes the freedom of communication, problems of legal regulation with regard to media contents, questions of law in new media, above all in digital television, and the legal bases of journalism, but also the jurisprudential bases of freedom of communication and the implications of the changing public sphere on the law.

How can economically vulnerable media regain editorial independence and stand up against the powerful propaganda channels? To find answers to this question, this edition of the lecture series features two scholars who specialize in the digital transformation of media systems in democratic societies and the particular challenges in Central and Eastern Europe.

Marius Dragomir talks about the changes experienced by media systems in Central and Eastern Europe and presents the findings of his research into the impact of media capture on independent journalism. He highlights risks that independent journalism is likely to face in the near future. Krisztina Rozgonyi analyses how digital societies in Central and Eastern Europe are embedded in a politically manipulated communicative context and sheds light on its historical roots. This unique situation is further complicated by social media platforms, resulting in an increased vulnerability of the public to hate speech, disinformation, and propaganda.

Marius Dragomir is the Director of the Center for Media, Data, and Society. In 2015, he founded MediaPowerMonitor, a community of experts in media policy covering trends in regulation, business, and politics that influence journalism. He has spent the past two decades in the media research field, specializing in media and communication regulation, digital media, governing structures of public service media, and media and ownership regulation. Marius is now running a slew of comparative research projects including the Media Influence Matrix, a global research project looking into power relations and undue influence in news media.

Krisztina Rozgonyi is a senior scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and a senior expert on international media, telecommunications, and IP legal and policy. She works with international and European organizations, national governments, and regulators as an advisor on media freedom, spectrum policy, and digital platform governance. Her recent work for the Venice Commission focused on responding to disinformation online. Krisztina Rozgonyi has also engaged recently with the OSCE Representative on Media Freedom as an expert on Artificial Intelligence & media pluralism.

A journalist in Asia for 35 years, Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler.com, the top digital-only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s CEO and president, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government.

Maria was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous fights to uphold freedom of expression. She was also Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, and has received numerous other awards and recognition for her journalism and fearlessness in the face of efforts to silence her.

The Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press is delivered annually by a prominent journalist, scholar, or practitioner. Named for Mr. Richard Salant, a former president of CBS News, and a defender of the freedom of the press as well as a champion of high ethical and news standards for the press, the annual lecture is made possible through a 2007 fund established by Dr. Frank Stanton’s estate. Dr. Frank Stanton, also a former president of CBS News and staunch defender of First Amendment rights, set up the fund in honor of his longtime friend and colleague, Richard Salant, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Within the framework of a ten-week virtual research sprint hosted by the HIIG, thirteen international researchers from various disciplines came together to tackle the challenges posed by automation in content moderation. Their work resulted in policy briefings focused on algorithmic audits and on increasing the transparency and accountability of automated content moderation systems. We warmly invite you to learn more about their findings and attend their output presentations followed by a panel discussion.

Agenda

Opening remarks on the project and the research sprint by research director Wolfgang Schulz and research lead Alexander Pirang

Presentations of the research outputs by the sprint fellows:

• David Morar, guest researcher at George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, USA
• Aline Iramina, PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, Great Britain
• Sunimal Mendis, lecturer at the University of Tilburg, Netherlands

Followed by a panel discussion moderated by Jennifer Boone with:

• Angelica Fernandez, fellow of the research sprint and PhD candidate at the University of Luxembourg
• Philipp Otto, founder and director of the iRights.lab
• Matthias Kettemann, associated researcher at the HIIG and scientific lead of the research project ”Regulatory Structures and the Emergence of Rules in Online Spaces” at the Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung I Hans-Bredow Institut 

On 3 March 2020, AlgorithmWatch launched a project to monitor Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm. Volunteers could install a browser add-on that scraped their Instagram newsfeeds. Data was sent to a database we used to study how Instagram prioritizes pictures and videos in a user’s timeline.

Over the last 14 months, about 1,500 volunteers installed the add-on. With their data, we were able to show that Instagram likely encouraged content creators to post pictures that fit specific representations of their body, and that politicians were likely to reach a larger audience if they abstained from using text in their publications (Facebook denied both claims). Although we could not conduct a precise audit of Instagram’s algorithm, this research is among the most advanced studies ever conducted on the platform. The project was supported by the European Data Journalism Network and by the Dutch foundation SIDN. It was done in partnership with Mediapart in France, NOS, Groene Amsterdammer and Pointer in the Netherlands, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and was covered by dozens of news outlets over the world.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford. He was previously Director of Research at the Reuters Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. His work focuses on changes in the news media, on political communication, and the role of digital technologies in both. He has done extensive research on journalism, American politics, and various forms of activism, and a significant amount of comparative work in Western Europe and beyond.

Iyad Rahwan is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and leads the Center for Humans and Machines. He is also an honorary professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin. Until June 2020, he was an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rahwan holds a PhD in Information Systems (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the societal impact of artificial intelligence and social media. In addition to various journal articles, Iyad Rahwan is co-author of the study Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles and together with Jean-François Bonnefon he published the paper Machine Thinking, Fast and Slow (both 2020).

The event will be held in English.

We explore new models of thought and action

Modern societies are based on ever-changing sets of norms, procedures and structures that are intended to enable free and democratic coexistence. In times of fundamental social, economic and technical transformation, however, some of these institutions are reaching the limits of their ability to change and "broken concepts" are emerging. This term refers to ways of thinking, patterns of action or explanatory models that are so deeply connected to their previous context that they now seem to have come from a different era and need to be rethought. We want to research such broken concepts – such as the once-meaningful distinction between the offline and online world – and help overcome them by offering new models of thought and action. 

By doing so, we are actively shaping the society of the future. Based on the scientific competences brought together at the institute and its dedication to interdisciplinarity, HIIG can engage with current topics such as the "platformisation" of the economy and society or the use of artificial intelligence and question the underlying concepts, structures and norms.

The Center in Brief

We bring together the sharpest, most thoughtful people from around the globe to tackle the biggest challenges presented by the Internet. As an interdisciplinary, University-wide center with a global scope, we have an unparalleled track record of leveraging exceptional academic rigor to produce real- world impact. We pride ourselves on pushing the edges of scholarly research, building tools and platforms that break new ground, and fostering active networks across diverse communities. United by our commitment to the public interest, our vibrant, collaborative community of independent thinkers represents a wide range of philosophies and disciplines, making us a unique home for open-minded inquiry, debate, and experimentation.

In response to increasing public pressure to tackle hate speech and other challenging content, platform companies have turned to algorithmic content moderation systems. These automated tools promise to be more effective and efficient in identifying potentially illegal or unwanted material. But algorithmic content moderation also raises many questions – all of which eschew simple answers. Where is the line between hate speech and freedom of expression – and how to automate this on a global scale? Should platforms scale the use of AI tools for illegal online speech, like terrorism promotion, or also for regular content governance? Are platforms’ algorithms over-enforcing against legitimate speech, or are they rather failing to limit hateful content on their sites? And how can policymakers ensure an adequate level of transparency and accountability in platforms’ algorithmic content moderation processes?

Recommended resources:

• MediaManipulation.Org
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Thank You for Posting: Smoking’s Lessons for Regulating Social Media. MIT Technology Review.
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Covid Hoaxes Are Using a Loophole to Stay Alive—Even after Content Is Deleted.” MIT Technology Review. 2020.
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Trump’s Viral Flu Tweet Proves America Is Losing the Battle against Covid Misinfo.” NBC News.
• Donovan, J., and boyd, d. 2019. “Stop the Presses? Moving From Strategic Silence to Strategic Amplification in a Networked Media Ecosystem” American Behavioral Scientist, September.

Elizabeth Hansen and Marc Hand have released a paper proposing a new National Trust for Local News that would support the financing and transition of local newspapers to new ownership and governance structures. They will present the outline of their proposal in this webinar, and engage in conversation with fellow panelists about the future of local newspapers. Steve Waldman, CEO and cofounder of Report for America will discuss his similar “replanting” proposal, recently published by the Open Markets Institute. Geoff Davis, CEO of the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah, will comment on how social impact capital might be mobilized to respond to the business crisis in local journalism, and how these proposals relate to other new institutions being built to solve major social challenges. Setti Warren, Executive Director of the Shorenstein Center and former Mayor of Newton, MA, will moderate and comment on the importance of local journalism to public life in cities and towns.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has led to severe harms in multiple instances: as an example, a rumor that drinking methanol would cure the virus resulted in hundreds of deaths. While end-to-end encryption is an important privacy safeguard, this encryption prevents platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, and others from employing centralized interventions and warnings about misinformation. Several options, however, from user interface changes to tip lines to having more intelligence on client devices offer hope.

In this presentation Dr Scott A. Hale will discuss how text similarity algorithms are being used to help fact-checkers locate misinformation, cluster similar misinformation, and identify existing fact-checks in the context of tip lines on platforms with end-to-end encryption. The presentation will detail research at the Oxford Internet Institute and Meedan, a global technology not-for-profit developing open-source tools for fact-checking and translation, that is actively being used by fact-checkers to improve the information available online.

Key findings in Terms of Disservice include:

• “The exploitative rake of data and attention on the path to natural monopoly”: The dominant internet firms deal in a novel currency with consumers based on data and attention — and through it have become natural monopolies.
• “The radical commercialization of decision making”: Personal data is collected at a mind-blowing rate and level of granularity. Internet firms engage in radical, “commercialized bias” — and have marketized the segmentation and splicing of society.
• “The dilemma of attending to content policy reform”: Our immediate attention to matters of content policy reform is misplaced; the more important target in the realm of Big Tech reform is fundamental economic regulation of the industry.

“When normally we analyse societal effects of weather extremes, now we used the corona outbreak as a study case to better understand social responses to extreme events”, explains Leonie Wenz, author and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Using social media data, we basically counted English language tweets containing a set of key word combinations like Chinese AND Corona AND hate and examined the evolution of this daily tweet count since the corona outbreak”, Annika Stechemesser, co- author and also at PIK, adds. “The picture thus unveiled was quite striking: On March 11th the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic; stock markets around the world crashed –and within the first half of March, the number of offensive tweets in our dataset increased by more than 1000%”, she lays out.

Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of Information Studies and serves as the Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in search engines titled: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

Sarah T. Roberts serves as an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. Roberts is a leading authority on “commercial content moderation”, the term she coined to describe the work of those responsible for making sure the photos, videos and stories posted to commercial websites fit within legal, ethical and the site’s own guidelines and standards. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released on Yale University Press in 2019.

Elizabeth Dwoskin, a Silicon Valley correspondent at The Washington Post, covers the rise of data mining, machine learning and AI throughout the tech industry and in the economy at large. Dwoskin’s recent articles – from smartphone apps that map infection pathways to new trends in consumer habits that give way to greater market monopolization – offer readers around the world fresh insight on what’s at play amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom (Yale University Press 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in communications. In 2012 he received a lifetime achievement award from Oxford University in recognition of his contribution to the study and public understanding of the Internet and information goods. His work is socially engaged, winning him the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for 2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006. It is also anchored in the realities of markets, cited as “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times and named best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. Benkler has advised governments and international organizations on innovation policy and telecommunications, and serves on the boards or advisory boards of several nonprofits engaged in working towards an open society.

His work can be freely accessed at http://www.benkler.org.

In this lecture, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen will revisit the history of the first twenty years of relations between platforms and news publishers to identify the underlying dynamics that have shaped the development of our digital society, and will shape it for years to come. He argues that publishers have – sometimes reluctantly, but often actively – fueled the rise of platform companies by embracing the very real opportunities they provide. This is the case even though they also challenge publishers’ historically dominant position by competing for attention and advertising and by controlling key parts of the infrastructure of free expression. In the process publishers, like the rest of us, become increasingly empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and powerful platforms.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. Most of his research deals with news media organisations and their ongoing transformations, changing forms of digital media use in political and news-related contexts, political communication and campaign practices. He is involved in a wide range of different comparative research projects around the future of news, the changing business of journalism and the rise of digital media.

This publication gives an overview of actors and areas of action and stresses that collective engagement is needed more than ever to further develop Internet governance, to strengthen multistakerholderism as well as multilateralism and to hinder the fragmentation of the net. The publication was created by iRights.Lab on behalf the FES.

Here you find the online version of "Who Governs the Internet?"

Panelists included:

• Prof. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, faculty director of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability and Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School
• Prof. Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University
• Latoya Peterson, journalist, digital media consultant, co-founder of Racialicious, and current Director of Culture at Glow Up Games

Moderator: Dr. Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project

German and European researchers have thus far dealt only tentatively with the topic of microtargeting in election campaigns. Most of the research projects and scientific papers on the subject are from the USA. Since Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 at the latest, it has become clear that both Democrats and Republicans in the US are employing massively data-driven processes in their election campaigns. In the paper State of Research: Microtargeting in Germany and Europe, we summarize the current expert debate on microtargeting in political communication, point to gaps in the research and provide suggestions on where new work is needed.

The paper was commissioned by the Landesanstalt für Medien NRW. The publication can be downloaded (German) free of charge from the Media Authority’s website and from our own.

This question of whether Facebook gathers information about users who are not signed in or do not have an account was raised in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal by lawmakers in hearings in the United States and in Europe. Discussions, as well as previous fines by Data Protection Authorities about the tracking of non-users, however, often focus on the tracking that happens on websites. Much less is known about the data that the company receives from apps. For these reasons, in this report we raise questions about transparency and use of app data that we consider timely and important.

Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using the free and open source software tool called "mitmproxy", an interactive HTTPS proxy, Privacy International has analyzed the data that 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from 10 to 500 million, transmit to Facebook through the Facebook SDK.

1. Community Standards

2. Proactively Identifying Harmful Content

3. Discouraging Borderline Content

4. Giving People Control and Allowing More Content

5. Addressing Algorithmic Bias

6. Building an Appeals Process

7. Independent Governance and Oversight

8. Creating Transparency and Enabling Research

9. Working Together on Regulation

...

Shoshana Zuboff is a social scientist and author of three books, each of which has been recognised as the definitive signal of a new epoch in technological society. Her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reveals a world in which technology users are no longer customers but the raw material for an entirely new economic system. Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School from 2014 until 2016.