media

The 2023 elections, in which we witnessed many facets of disinformation activities with a very high potential to change the voting tendencies of Turkish voters, were characterised by post-truth narratives that exacerbated the existing polarization and appealed to emotions, which were used by both the government and some parts of the opposition.

Countries such as Poland or Hungary frequently face criticism for a lack of media freedom. Their governments dispute that they oppose critical media. Yet, restrictions on media freedom come in many shapes and sizes.

Tasos Telloglou reports on the surveillance of journalists and politicians, the violation of telecommunications secrecy and his research into spyware.

A new law in Turkey that would jail people for spreading “fake news” online has widened the rift with European digital regulations and human rights standards to tighten the muzzle on the press and social media users ahead of elections next year.

Digital Rights Foundation, in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, conducted a series of focus group discussions with researchers from across the globe in order to deconstruct ‘gendered disinformation’, understand existing work on the subject and identify areas for future interventions.

AI in the context of international conflict is more likely to be associated with lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) on the battlefield. Hiding on the other side of that coin are, however, rewarding questions regarding AI’s possible contribution to peace.

In Turkey, where twenty years of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule has seen the country descend into authoritarianism, mainstream media is almost completely under Erdoğan’s control. Social media remains one of the only outlets for those opposing Erdoğan to voice their discontent. Since the 2013 Gezi protests, the AKP has been trying to control the narratives on social media by employing social media trolls: networks of fake accounts that disseminate propaganda for the AKP and targets the opposition. Studies show that these troll networks are becoming more sophisticated and are changing tactics. Fazıl Alp Akiş explains how.

A conversation with Carlos Hernández- Echevarría from Maldita.es, a Spanish independent journalistic platform focused on the control of disinformation and public discourse through fact-checking and data journalism techniques. 

A conversation with Danny Rogers from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) on the business model behind disinformation activities and ways to defund and disincentivize their propagators by providing the industry with clear definitions and data.

A conversation with Sam Jeffers, Co-Founder of "Who Targets Me", about the power of social media, and particularly, of social media advertising in influencing people in election campaigns and ways of making the political campaigning environment more trustworthy, transparent and comprehensible for people.

A conversation with Nicole Krause from the Life Sciences Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin about science and political communication and ways to communicate more effectively with conservative, religious and rural audiences.

This backgrounder explores AI's impact on democracy, focusing on three areas: its influence on the public sphere, its role in election campaigns, and the accountability of automated decision systems in public services.

A conversation with Noa Barak about disinformation and the role of fact-checkers in Israel. 

A conversation with Dr. Philipp Lorenz-Spreen about cognitive patterns, heuristics and the role of policymakers in designing healthy online choice environments. 

Based on the data they collect, platforms are able to target personalized content at the user level. What are the collective aspects of personalization on media platforms? How do they affect our privacy?    

This analysis aims to capture and cluster different post-GDPR enforcement styles by DPAs across the EU to better understand why enforcement over data protection issues vary across borders.

Every single day, women are abused, threatened or slandered on digital social networks. Yet the operators of these platforms are doing very little to make the digital space a safer place for women. The whistleblower Frances Haugen talked to Spiegel journalist Ann-Katrin Müller and Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, about what needs to be done right now to stop violence on the net.

After a long period during which the media landscape has been mirroring the prevailing clientelism, Greece is now experiencing a rapid downslide towards dangerous pathways regarding media pluralism that bring the quality of democracy in the country into question. A look at the events and political developments that have accumulated over the last months.

Disinformation has become a regular plague of democratic elections. Is regulation able to tackle this problem? How promising are other initiatives by civil society and industry actors? What should be the role of the state in a new media and information order? And how do people decide what to believe or not? A diversity of information and a plurality of communities are essential to rebuild trust in public communication.

WhatsApp is huge in Spain. It is on almost every phone and Spaniards spend more time on this platform than in any other digital space. Telegram is also growing massively, yet the fundamental role these private messaging apps play in the dissemination of disinformation has often been overlooked. It is there where most disinformation originates and, at the same time, where it is most difficult to monitor.