The State of Content Moderation for the LGBTIQA+ Community and the Role of the EU Digital Services Act
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Reform of the EU Liability Regime for Online Intermediaries
Reform of the EU liability regime for online intermediaries Background on the forthcoming digital services act IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service Author: Tambiama Madiega Members' Research Service PE 649.404 – May 2020 EN The E-commerce Directive, adopted in 2000, aims at harmonising minimum standards of liability for internet (online) intermediaries across the European Union (EU). Under the current EU legal framework, digital or online platforms are not legally responsible for hosting illegal content, but are required to remove such material once it is flagged. However, technologies and business models have evolved in the last 20 years and the EU liability framework struggles to capture liability issues raised by new actors, such as search engines, social networks and online marketplaces. Furthermore, societal challenges have changed the nature and scale of liability, with the development of a range of new harmful online practices, such as the dissemination of terrorist content online, the increasing use of platforms to distribute counterfeit products and the spreading of false or misleading news and online advertisements. The European Commission has pledged to present a new framework to increase and harmonise the responsibilities of online platforms. New EU legislation is expected in the forthcoming digital services act package, and this will set rules on how companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter will have to police illegal and possibly harmful content online. Against this background, this paper aims to (1) describe the current EU liability regime for online intermediaries set out under the E-commerce Directive; (2) highlight the implementation gaps that have been identified; and (3) present the main proposals for reforming such an online liability regime and the main policy questions that have been discussed so far. -
Regulation of the Digital Sector
EU-US EXPLAINER July 2021 Regulation of the digital sector With online platforms and markets enmeshed in our societies and economies, the need to revisit and update existing digital regulations is becoming increasingly apparent. The debate around these reforms in the US, the EU and elsewhere touches on fundamental questions of privacy, transparency and free speech and the dynamic between private firms and governmental oversight is complex. While online platforms play a salient role in daily life, both the US and the EU continue to operate with regulations dating back over a generation. As significant challenges regarding illegal and harmful online content and moderation liability continue to have real world effects today, both the EU and the US are currently considering precedent-setting updates. Background: Existing EU and US digital regulations The close trading ties between the US and the EU in the area of digitally enabled services have been key to the growth of the digital economy. With 450 million users, the EU is one of the most profitable markets for US tech firms. This has enabled the US to export information and communications technology (ICT) services worth US$31 billion to the EU, with ICT-enabled services potentially adding another US$196 billion. Digital regulation has proved challenging, however, as the seminal laws governing conduct and liability of online platforms in both the EU and US are over 20 years old, with few updates over the years. In the US, a crucial piece of governing legislation is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. Section 230 consists of two primary elements: the first removing liability for third-party content on platforms and the second encouraging platforms to self-moderate. -
Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning
Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning Erwan Le Merrer, Benoˆıt Morgan, Gilles Tredan,´ Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, Irisa IRIT/ENSHEEIT LAAS/CNRS [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Shadow banning consists for an online social net- happens on the OSN side, collecting information about po- work in limiting the visibility of some of its users, without them tential issues is difficult. In this paper, we explore scientific being aware of it. Twitter declares that it does not use such approaches to shed light on Twitter’s alleged shadow banning a practice, sometimes arguing about the occurrence of “bugs” to justify restrictions on some users. This paper is the first to practice. Focusing on this OSN is crucial because of its central address the plausibility of shadow banning on a major online use as a public communication medium, and because potential platform, by adopting both a statistical and a graph topological shadow banning practices were recently commented. approach. Shadow banning and moderation techniques. shadow banning We first conduct an extensive data collection and analysis (SB or banning for short, also known as stealth banning [6]) campaign, gathering occurrences of visibility limitations on user profiles (we crawl more than 2:5 millions of them). In such is an online moderation technique used to ostracise undesired a black-box observation setup, we highlight the salient user user behaviors. In modern OSNs, shadow banning would refer profile features that may explain a banning practice (using to a wide range of techniques that artificially limit the visibility machine learning predictors). -
Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes — Second Edition — Arjun Panesar Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes Second Edition
Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes — Second Edition — Arjun Panesar Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes Second Edition Arjun Panesar Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare Arjun Panesar Coventry, UK ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-6536-9 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-6537-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6537-6 Copyright © 2021 by Arjun Panesar This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. -
European Union Update: the Digital Services Act
European Union Update: The Digital Services Act ICANN Government & Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) Engagement Elena Plexida GE-004 15 July 2020 ICANN | European Union Update: The Digital Services Act | July 2020 | 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword 3 What is the Digital Services Act? 4 Why a DSA? 4 What will the DSA likely contain? 5 How are ICANN and the ICANN community affected? 6 Next steps 6 ICANN | European Union Update: The Digital Services Act | July 2020 | 2 Foreword This paper provides an update and analysis of the Digital Services Act (DSA) initiative launched by the European Union (EU). The DSA initiative was identified in the first of the series of the ICANN Government & Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) Engagement papers capturing EU policy updates as an area of potential relevance to the ICANN community and to ICANN’s technical role in the Internet ecosystem.1 This paper broadly explains the initiative to date and its potential impact. It is worth noting that the European Commission launched a public consultation on the DSA initiative that will remain open until 8 September 2020.2 ICANN org will submit a contribution to the open consultation and encourages the community to take this opportunity to contribute as well. ICANN organization will continue to monitor the DSA initiative and will provide updates as relevant developments unfold. 1 https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/eu-policy-update-03apr20-en.pdf 2 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/consultation-digital-services-act- package ICANN | European -
Sexual Preferences and Presentation on Geosocial Networking Apps by Indian Men Who Have Sex with Men in Maharashtra
JMIR MHEALTH AND UHEALTH Rhoton et al Original Paper Sexual Preferences and Presentation on Geosocial Networking Apps by Indian Men Who Have Sex With Men in Maharashtra Jayson Rhoton1*, MA; J Michael Wilkerson1*, MPH, PhD; Shruta Mengle2*, MSc; Pallav Patankar2, MBA; BR Simon Rosser3*, LP, MPH, PhD; Maria L Ekstrand4, PhD 1Department of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences, The University of Texas Health Sceince Center Houston, Houston, TX, United States 2The Humsafar Trust, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 3School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States 4Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States *these authors contributed equally Corresponding Author: Jayson Rhoton, MA Department of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences The University of Texas Health Sceince Center Houston 7000 Fannin Street 2610 I Houston, TX, 77030 United States Phone: 1 713 500 9757 Fax: 1 713 500 9750 Email: [email protected] Abstract Background: The affordability of smartphones and improved mobile networks globally has increased the popularity of geosocial networking (GSN) apps (eg, Grindr, Scruff, Planetromeo) as a method for men who have sex with men (MSM) to seek causal sex partners and engage with the queer community. As mobile penetration continues to grow in India, it is important to understand how self-presentation on GSN app is relevant because it offers insight into a population that has not been largely studied. There is very little information about how Indian MSM discuss their sexual preferences and condom preferences and disclose their human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status with potential sex partners on Web-based platforms. -
Analyzing Twitter Users' Behavior Before and After Contact By
Analyzing Twitter Users’ Behavior Before and After Contact by Russia’s Internet Research Agency UPASANA DUTTA, RHETT HANSCOM, JASON SHUO ZHANG, RICHARD HAN, TAMARA 90 LEHMAN, QIN LV, SHIVAKANT MISHRA, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The goal of this research is to understand whether general Twitter users changed their behavior in the year following first contact from an IRA account. We compare the before and after behavior of contacted users to determine whether there were differences in their mean tweet count, the sentiment of their tweets, and the frequency and sentiment of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump or @HillaryClinton. Our results indicate that users overall exhibited statistically significant changes in behavior across most of these metrics, and that those users that engaged with the IRA generally showed greater changes in behavior. CCS Concepts: • Applied computing ! Law, social and behavioral sciences; • Human-centered com- puting ! Collaborative and social computing. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Internet Research Agency; IRA; Twitter; Trump; democracy ACM Reference Format: Upasana Dutta, Rhett Hanscom, Jason Shuo Zhang, Richard Han, Tamara Lehman, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra. 2021. Analyzing Twitter Users’ Behavior Before and After Contact by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 90 (April 2021), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449164 INTRODUCTION For many years, the growth of online social media has been seen as a tool used to bring people together across borders and time-zones. -
Gay Immigrants and Grindr: Revitalizing Queer Urban Spaces?
Gay Immigrants and Grindr: Revitalizing Queer Urban Spaces? “Gay Dance Clubs on the Wane in the Age of Grindr,” proclaimed the journalist Michael Musto in the New York Times in 2016. Musto, who has reported on gay life in New York for decades, had noticed a decline in weekly dance parties. In speaking to club promoters and performers, Musto kept hearing the same thing: people would rather meet others via the comfort of their mobile phones than in a gay space. (“Clubs have been usurped by the right swipe”; “Social media changed the landscape of going out”; “Why pay an expensive cover charge and deal with rude bouncers when you can just swipe on your iPhone?” and so forth.) Similarly, a New Orleans bartender told gay reporter Chris Staudinger: “You could ask any bartender in New Orleans whether the apps have affected business in gay bars, and they would all say yes.” Scholarly research has also pointed to Grindr (and related platforms) as troublesome technologies that might obviate the need for urban gay spaces. Grindr (founded 2009) is a smartphone-only platform that allows mostly gay men (and also queer and trans people) to connect to others in their immediate vicinity via private messages. Related geo-social apps include gay platforms like Scruff, Hornet, Growler or Chappy, or the app versions of websites like Gaydar or PlanetRomeo, and mainstream equivalents like Tinder and Happn. These geo-locative platforms challenge the idea that a “gay space” needs to be a physical space distinct from a straight space, since the “grids of the Grindr interface can be overlaid atop any space” (Roth 2016: 441). -
Response to the European Commission's
Response to the European Commission’s “Inception Impact Assessment for an Ex-Ante Regulatory Instrument of Very Large Online Platforms Acting as Gatekeepers” INTRODUCTION On behalf of the Center for Data Innovation (datainnovation.org), we are pleased to submit feedback to the European Commission’s roadmap titled “Digital Services Act package: Ex-ante regulatory instrument of very large online platforms acting as gatekeepers.”1 In this submission, we discuss a number of assumptions and claims the Commission's proposal is based on, analyze the consequences of this proposal, and identify recommendations the Commission should consider. The Center for Data Innovation is the leading think tank studying the intersection of data, technology, and public policy. With staff in Washington, D.C. and Brussels, the Center formulates and promotes pragmatic public policies designed to maximize the benefits of data-driven innovation in the public and private sectors. It educates policymakers and the public about the opportunities and challenges associated with data, as well as technology trends such as open data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. The Center is a non-profit, non-partisan research institute affiliated with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). BACKGROUND In recent years, a number of discursive strategies, laws, and rules have reflected the growing sense among EU policymakers that digital platforms have been under regulated. In the EU, there is an ongoing debate as to if and how much the high degree of market -
Changing Gears
Equity. Dignity. Social Justice. Changing Gears: A guide to effective HIV service programming for gay men and other men who have sex with men in Asia Acknowledgements: This document was developed by an independent consultant, Jan W. de Lind van Wijngaarden, PhD, for UNAIDS Regional Support Team for Asia and the Pacific and APCOM. Invaluable comments, edits and suggestions to improve it were gratefully received from the following peer reviewers: Lou McCallum (APMG), Steve Mills (FHI 360), Niluka Perera and team (Youth Voices Count), Edmund Settle (UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub), Roy Wadia (UNFPA Asia Pacific Regional Office), Donn Colby (Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Centre), Eamonn Murphy (UNAIDS Myanmar), and Vladanka Andreeva, Manuel da Quinta, Tony Lisle and Aries Valeriano (UNAIDS Regional Support Team). EThis policy brief is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This means that you are free to share and copy this content, provided APCOM and originating author(s) are acknowledged. Author: Jan W. de Lind van Wijngaarden, PhD Design and layout: Vaness Silpakhon Kongsakul Cover Photo: MStyle, delivering services CSO for LGBT people in Cambodia Source : UNAIDS Regional Support Team for Asia and the Pacific © APCOM 2016 Photo Captions: The photos used throughout this document, excluding the cover photo have all been taken during APCOM related events and workshops, and legally purchased via a online stock images website. These photos are being used without the individuals knowledge of this particular resource. -
Generating Counter Narratives Against Online Hate Speech: Data and Strategies
Generating Counter Narratives against Online Hate Speech: Data and Strategies Serra Sinem Tekiroglu˘ 1, Yi-Ling Chung1,2, and Marco Guerini1 1Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive 18, Povo, Trento, Italy [email protected],[email protected],[email protected] 2University of Trento, Italy Abstract the conversations (Bielefeldt et al., 2011; Jurgens et al., 2019). In this line of action, some Non- Recently research has started focusing on avoiding undesired effects that come with Govermental Organizations (NGOs) train operators content moderation, such as censorship and to intervene in online hateful conversations by writ- overblocking, when dealing with hatred on- ing counter-narratives. A Counter-Narrative (CN) line. The core idea is to directly intervene in is a non-aggressive response that offers feedback the discussion with textual responses that are through fact-bound arguments and is considered as meant to counter the hate content and prevent the most effective approach to withstand hate mes- it from further spreading. Accordingly, au- sages (Benesch, 2014; Schieb and Preuss, 2016). tomation strategies, such as natural language generation, are beginning to be investigated. To be effective, a CN should follow guidelines simi- 1 Still, they suffer from the lack of sufficient lar to those in ‘Get the Trolls Out’ project , in order amount of quality data and tend to produce to avoid escalating the hatred in the discussion. generic/repetitive responses. Being aware of Still, manual intervention against hate speech the aforementioned limitations, we present a is not scalable. Therefore, data-driven NLG ap- study on how to collect responses to hate ef- proaches are beginning to be investigated to assist fectively, employing large scale unsupervised language models such as GPT-2 for the gen- NGO operators in writing CNs. -
EMIS): Design and Methods
Sex Res Soc Policy DOI 10.1007/s13178-013-0119-4 The European Men-Who-Have-Sex-With-Men Internet Survey (EMIS): Design and Methods Peter Weatherburn & Axel J. Schmidt & Ford Hickson & David Reid & Rigmor C. Berg & Harm J. Hospers & Ulrich Marcus & and the EMIS Network. # The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Community-based opportunistic self-completion move towards harmonisation of existing systems. Six asso- surveying for sexual health programming is common among ciated partners (APs) recruited another 77 collaborating men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) in Europe, being used partners from academia, public health and civil society to generate evidence of unmet prevention need, for behav- across 35 countries. Partners’ existing MSM surveys were ioural surveillance and as a platform for advocating HIV collected and collated, producing a meta-survey which was precautions. However, comparing survey findings across discussed by all partners through rotating round-tables at a Europe is difficult because of varying measures and recruit- 2-day summit. Survey development continued iteratively ment designs, and surveying has not occurred in all coun- through user piloting and partner feedback until the English tries. EMIS (the European Men-who-have-sex-with-men language content was agreed. Transfer to an online survey Internet Survey) aimed to develop a pan-European Internet application was followed by further testing before on-screen survey on HIV-related male homosexual behaviours and translation into 24 other languages, final testing and sign- prevention needs both to increase research capacity and to off. The project’s visual identity and promotional materials were developed in close collaboration with national leads, : : : P.