On January 6, 2021, President Trump and his far-right allies in the Republican Party tried to prevent the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s electoral college votes. It culminated in thousands of demonstrators violently forcing their way into the nation’s Capitol to disrupt the certification process. The protests that led to...
During the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IGP organized a panel discussion on The interaction of platform content moderation & geopolitics. The panel focused on how inconsistency in content moderation can reinforce existing power disparities, and make platform content moderation policies into a proxy battle among conflicting interest groups. The...
The past week saw a hurricane of activity around content moderation by platforms in the U.S. The Federal Communications Commission, the Justice Department, and a Supreme Court justice made it clear that they want to pull the plug on Section 230 of the Communications Act, the part of the law...
Just over a year after the U.S. government placed restrictions on China's Huawei, the ongoing economic rivalry between the two countries has found a new target. For weeks the Trump administration has hinted that it is considering banning TikTok, the short video app over national security concerns. With over 2...
This has been a grim week for the Internet. While nothing in the following article will be news to anyone who follows Internet governance, it is worthwhile to look at these events together, as part of a pattern: China imposed a repressive National Security Law on Hong Kong India forced...
Few social scientists have advanced studies at the intersection of information technology and security as much as Thomas Rid. His 2011 book, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, analyzed cyber conflict from a critical point of view, shattering the myth that actual wars would be fought and won through cyber...
A week and a half ago Facebook released its final charter for the Oversight Board it intends to create to tackle its content moderation problems. The charter spells out exactly how it would work, who would be on it and what its responsibilities are. CNET has a good basic description...
New fuel was added to the moral panic around social media last week when the New York Times published an article purporting to show that YouTube was responsible for a rightwing takeover of an entire country, Brazil. The new theme being pushed is that social media algorithms produce “online radicalization.”...
Content moderation online is a hot topic especially after the Christchurch Call, a New Zealand-France joint initiative to eradicate terrorist, violent extremist content online. At RightsCon this year, IGP is going to discuss the Christchurch Call and content moderation online during two sessions. Both sessions will be held on Wednesday...
For the past few days, we have been working with other civil society groups on the Christchurch Call process. The Christchurch Call involves a summit between the big social media platforms and a number of governments held in Paris May 15, as part of a reaction to the terrorist attack...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
