News
RightsCon Debrief: Towards a rights-respecting global cybercrime treaty
This is the second of three articles drafted by the WIII Initiative’s summer researchers, reflecting on sessions they attended at this year’s virtual RightsCon. On December 27 2019, the United Nations General Assembly passed a Russian government sponsored Resolution for a new UN cybercrime treaty, with eighty eight countries voting in favour. Russia’s human rights record alone is cause to be suspicious of this initiative, but a careful look at the treaty’s language reveals that it poses a grave threat to human rights online. The problems include the use of vague language that can be
RightsCon Debrief: Privacy and Surveillance
This is the second of three articles drafted by the WIII Initiative’s summer researchers, reflecting on sessions they attended at this year’s virtual RightsCon. AccessNow held its annual conference on digital technologies and human rights from 27 – 31 July, 2020. The conference was conducted virtually with experts joining via video conferencing to discuss a range of issues, divided into ten tracks. I covered the Privacy and Surveillance track which included more than 30 sessions. Below I summarize the key themes emerging from these discussions: In an era of surveillance capitalism, the concept
RightsCon Debrief: No content moderation without representation
This is the first of three articles drafted by the WIII Initiative’s summer researchers, reflecting on sessions they attended at this year’s virtual RightsCon. Social media platforms are global content moderators. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok—companies that reach billions of users in countries all around the world—set rules about what content is allowed on their platform and what is not. They also build the algorithms that determine which content gets promoted to the top of users’ timelines and which get demoted. We can debate if they are ‘arbitors of truth’ or not, but they
Moderate Globally Impact Locally: Better Transparency Reporting Can Shed Light on Russian Internet Censorship
Over the last decade, the Russian internet has evolved from being freely accessible and almost uncontrolled to being a system over which the Kremlin has established very tight controls, molding it to its taste. The government can censor and block a wide range of content, control the actions of platforms and users and employ the internet as a communication tool to its own advantage. And all of this comes with very minimal oversight and opposition from the Russian-language community of the internet, the RuNet. When it attempts to exercise control over the internet, the Russian state has come to
Moderate globally, impact locally: A series on content moderation in the Global South
This entry is the first in our new series of articles on the global impacts of content moderation, which are being posted at a number of different sites online. This introductory post was originally posted on Global Voices here and on TechDirt here. Scroll to the bottom to find the rest of the entries in this series. Every minute, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 350,000 tweets are sent, and 510,000 comments are posted on Facebook. Managing and curating this firehose of content is an enormous task, and one which grants the platforms enormous power over the contours of
Submission to the Institute of Federal Telecommunications’ Consultation on the Draft Guidelines on Traffic Management and Network Administration
This submission was prepared for the Federal Institute of Telecommunications of Mexico (the “Institute”) public consultation on the Draft Guidelines for Traffic Management and Network Administration for concessionaires and authorized Internet Service Providers (“Draft Guidelines”). [1] The Draft Guidelines were published in December of 2019, in accordance with article 145 of the Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law which establishes, alongside article 146, network neutrality requirements for Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”). We appreciate the opportunity to submit our comments