Pakistan, Bangladesh fail to tackle online violence

Significance However, women as well as gender minorities in these countries have experienced an uptick in cyberviolence in recent years. Most existing laws lack clear definition on what constitutes gender-based cybercrimes, and some cybercrime laws have been misused to limit free speech and increase state surveillance. Impacts Across South Asia, content regulation laws for tech platforms are likely to be used to target dissidents. Tech platforms do not face an immediate political push to improve the safety of their female customers. Civil society activism on digital dignity will create reputational risks for platforms failing to take action.

Malicious uses of social media bots will rise

Significance In particular, bots are used to increase the speed and scale of misinformation campaigns and foreign propaganda. They make attribution of such activities to specific actors harder, while disorientating users and degrading public debate. With advances in text-generation methods and deepfake technologies, they are also becoming more human-like, making users more susceptible to manipulation. Impacts Artificial amplification of political messages via bots will remain a major problem, although its actual impact is difficult to measure. Legislative reform to ensure tighter content regulation would curb malicious bot activity on social media. Current foreign influencer campaigns rely on human-controlled accounts on social media.

Contested Sovereignties: States, Media Platforms, Peoples, and the Regulation of Media Content and Big Data in the Networked Society

This article examines the legal and normative foundations of media content regulation in the borderless networked society. We explore the extent to which internet undertakings should be subject to state regulation, in light of Canada’s ongoing debates and legislative reform. We bring a cross-disciplinary perspective (from the subject fields of law; communications studies, in particular McLuhan’s now classic probes; international relations; and technology studies) to enable both policy and language analysis. We apply the concept of sovereignty to states (national cultural and digital sovereignty), media platforms (transnational sovereignty), and citizens (autonomy and personal data sovereignty) to examine the competing dynamics and interests that need to be considered and mediated. While there is growing awareness of the tensions between state and transnational media platform powers, the relationship between media content regulation and the collection of viewers’ personal data is relatively less explored. We analyse how future media content regulation needs to fully account for personal data extraction practices by transnational platforms and other media content undertakings. We posit national cultural sovereignty—a constant unfinished process and framework connecting the local to the global—as the enduring force and justification of media content regulation in Canada. The exercise of state sovereignty may be applied not so much to secure strict territorial borders and centralized power over citizens but to act as a mediating power to promote and protect citizens’ individual and collective interests, locally and globally.

The existential stakes of platform governance: a critical literature review

This study introduces a comprehensive overview of literature concerning the concepts of regulation and governance, and attempts to connect them to scholarly works that deal with the governance of and by social media platforms. The paper provides fundamental definitions of regulation and governance, along with a critique of polycentricity or multi-stakeholderism, in order to contextualise the discussion around platform governance and, subsequently, online content regulation. Moreover, where traditional governance literature conceptualised stakeholders as a triangle, this article proposes going beyond the triad of public, private and non-governmental actors, to account for previously invisible stakeholder clusters, like citizens and news media organisations. This paper also contends that, while platform governance is an important field of study and practice, the way it has been structured and investigated so far, is posing an existential risk to the broader internet governance structure, primarily, because of the danger of conflating the internet with platforms. As a result, there exists a timely need to reimagine the way in which we understand and study phenomena related to platform governance by adjusting our conceptual and analytical heuristics. So, this article wishes to expand the theorisation of this field in order to better engage with complicated platform governance issues, like the development of regulatory frameworks concerning online content regulation.

Content security and Content regulation

Discussed is the growing influence of the Internet and social networks on modern society and the formation of a young person’s personality. Due to the development of digital and telecommunication technologies, the number of treats and crimes in this field has been increasing. Thus, the problem of content security and violent content faced by the state and society has never been as acute as in recent years. The article discusses the existing content management systems and their features and briefly describes the activity of the Federal service for supervision of oommunication and information technology Roskomnadzor, as well as its successes and shortcomings. It also describes steps taken by the state in the field of content management and provides examples of existing regulations in the Russian Federation. The article discusses the role of social welfare organizations in the creation of safe cyberspace. It lists public organizations that existed in Russia and were involved in content management and security activities. With the abundance of violent content, some of results obtained by these organizations and solutions they use can be reused to develop a secure virtual environment today.

The existential stakes of platform governance and online content regulation: a critical conceptual model

This study introduces a comprehensive yet non-exhaustive overview of literature concerning the concepts of regulation and governance, and attempts to connect them to scholarly works that deal with social media platforms’ content regulation. The paper provides fundamental definitions of regulation and governance, along with a critique of polycentricity, in order to contextualise the discussion around platform governance and online content regulation. Regulation is framed here as a governance mechanism within a polycentric governance model where stakeholders have competing interests, even if sometimes they coincide. Moreover, where traditional governance literature conceptualised stakeholders as a triangle, this article proposes imagining them as overlapping circles of governance clusters with competing interests, going beyond the triad of public, private and non-governmental actors. Finally, the paper contends that that there exists a timely need to reimagine the way in which we understand and study phenomena appertaining to public discourse by adopting the platform governance perspective, which is framed as the advancement of internet governance. Finally, the article ascertains to study the governance of online content and social media platforms not as a sub-section of internet governance but as a conceptual evolution with existential stakes.

Enhanced self-regulation: The case of Facebook’s content governance

Content regulation on digital platforms has become a contested issue on the public and scholarly agendas. To understand how digital platform providers experiment with making commitments regarding their regulation, this article process-traces Facebook’s content regulation to ask how it self-regulates despite constant pressures for policy intervention. The first part of the article shows how Facebook moved from its initial “thin” self-regulatory regime toward what I call “enhanced self-regulation,” which relies on first-party and independent third-party intermediaries. Thereafter, I show how Facebook self-regulated the balance between public and private interests over time and across the regimes. The findings suggest that powerful actors such as Facebook can innovate in self-regulation by reallocating content-related responsibilities to intermediaries and subsequently create polycentric governance regimes. Lessons about how self-regulators that face public criticism can make more credible commitments to public interests are then drawn from the strengths and weakness of enhanced self-regulation.