US Media, Selective Exposure, and the Promotion of COVID-19 Vaccinations in Black and Latino Communities

Through selective exposure, this study examined the role the US news media played in encouraging or discouraging minority races from getting vaccinated. Through content analysis and focus groups, we were able to demonstrate that most media messages focused on prior beliefs in their reporting, therefore, discouraging the black and Latino minorities from getting the COVID-19 vaccinations. Further, while blacks and Latinos based their fears of the vaccines on health effects, white respondents were more concerned about government surveillance and the desire to go back to “normal” life after the quarantine. Ultimately, white respondents were more positive about vaccination arguing that they were tired of the quarantine and wanted normal life back.

From Shadow Profiles to Contact Tracing: Qualitative Research into Consent and Privacy

For many privacy scholars, consent is on life support, if not dead. In July 2020, we held six focus groups in Australia to test this claim by gauging attitudes to consent and privacy, with a spotlight on smartphones. These focus groups included discussion of four case studies: ‘shadow profiles’, eavesdropping by companies on smartphone users, non-consensual government surveillance of its citizens and contact tracing apps developed to combat COVID-19. Our participants expressed concerns about these practices and said they valued individual consent and saw it as a key element of privacy protection. However, they saw the limits of individual consent, saying that the law and the design of digital services also have key roles to play. Building on these findings, we argue for a blend of good law, good design and an appreciation that individual consent is still valued and must be fixed rather than discarded - ideally in ways that are also collective. In other words, consent is dead; long live consent.

Cybersecurity, Global Commerce, and International Organizations

As private-sector enterprises became dependent on Internet-enabled technologies, cybersecurity threats developed into serious problems in international political economy. This chapter analyses how states use international organizations to address these threats. The chapter explains why international organizations were not prominent in the Internet’s emergence and impact on transnational trade and investment. It examines the main threats companies face, including cybercrime, economic cyber espionage, government surveillance and hacking, innovation in digital technologies, and poor corporate cyber defences. International organizations have been most involved in fighting cybercrime, but these efforts have not been successful. International organizations do not play significant roles in countering other cybersecurity threats in global commerce. The chapter argues that international organizations are unlikely to become more important in the future because geopolitics and shifts in domestic politics in democracies will make collective action on cybersecurity in global commerce more difficult.

From Interpersonal Violence to Institutionalized Discrimination: Documenting and Assessing the Impact of Islamophobia on Muslim Americans

Background: Muslims and people perceived as Muslims in the U.S. face Islamophobia, defined as anti-Muslim or anti-Islam sentiments. Reports of hate crimes motivated by Islamophobia have increased, as have other forms of Islamophobia, such as workplace discrimination. This qualitative study examined the impact of Islamophobia on Muslim Americans, ranging from school and workplace discrimination to policies that target Muslims, such as government surveillance. The objectives of this study were: 1) Document the spectrum of Islamophobia in the U.S.; and 2) Assess the impact of Islamophobia on Muslim Americans.Methods: Components of grounded theory guided data collection and analysis. Using a semi-structured interview guide, a total of 40 participants (20 women, 20 men) were interviewed regarding self-reported experiences with Islamophobia and responses to bias incidents. Participants self-identified as Muslim, were at least 18 years of age, and represented various ethnic groups. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Nvivo 12.Results: Findings indicate that Islamophobia and xenophobia are significant sources of long-term stress. Participants discussed physical assaults in public locations, vandalism at their homes, persistent questioning regarding their country of origin, and verbal harassment in the form of derogatory terms.Conclusion: Islamophobia in the U.S. is multifaceted and a significant source of stress for Muslim Americans. Findings from this study and others on this topic highlight the need for interventions to support Muslim Americans.

DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND THE DIGITISATION OF GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE

In Europe today, digital platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, provide essential means for millions of people to express themselves, engage in public debate, and organise politically (Poell & van Dijck, 2018). Crucially, governments are leveraging the power of platforms to impose new forms of restrictions on free expression, and engage in surveillance of individuals and online activism. This has profound implications for the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, and data protection. Further, platforms that once refused to cooperate with governments in identifying users responsible for disseminating allegedly illegal or harmful content are now expanding cooperation with authorities, including sharing data about users flagged by law enforcement and other authorities. As civil society organisations warn, this trend is contributing to ‘invasive and unlawful digital surveillance’ (Amnesty International, 2019, p. 24). This paper examines how European governments are leveraging the power of digital platforms to engage in government surveillance online, and assesses the compatibility of these measures with European human rights law. The paper applies a unique interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together law, political communication and surveillance studies. First, the paper examines how platforms’ algorithmic systems shape (and limit) information dissemination. The paper then critically analyses government-platform initiatives that exist to surveil citizens and gather information, including new measures under the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act. Third, it assesses how these measures comply with freedom of expression and the right to privacy, and concludes with recommendations on remedying problematic elements of the role platforms play in digitisation of government surveillance.

Jurisprudence-Legal Government Surveillance and Interference in the Relations between Workers and Employers in Egypt

One of the most important laws of the countries is the labor law whose the target society is made of a large number of people, i.e. workers and employers. There are laws and regulations in Egypt on the relation between the workers and the employers. There are also principles for protecting this group (workers) as the fundamental principles of work, all of which are intended to improve the workers' lives and to establish rules that will better serve the interests of workers. The main aim of the labor rights is to improve the socioeconomic status of workers and to provide more security and justice and also to establish a social order for this class of society. The present study is a descriptive-analytic research, which investigates jurisprudential-legal government supervision and interference in the relation between the worker and the employer in Egypt. The results indicate that the necessity of government involvement in worker-employer relations has two main reasons. These reasons include changing the nature of labor relations after the industrial revolution and changing the function of government in contemporary time. The complexity and transformation of various relationships, including labor relations, which justifies the need for the intervention of a superior power to support the weak party of this relationship.

Unfolding Media Source Characteristics Regarding Food Fraud: A Comparative Study of the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) in China (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The ongoing rumors and scandals regarding food fraud, adulteration, and contamination are highly visible. Health risk information circulating through media and interpersonal communication channels has made health crises an important research agenda. OBJECTIVE This study explores the issue of food fraud and the effect of rumors, scandals, and misinformation. Further, it studies whether and how these issues have impacted governmental efforts to mitigate food fraud. METHODS The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) was adopted for use in China, after which a cross-sectional study with face-to-face interviews was performed. Participants from Beijing and Hefei were selected using multistage sampling of adults during May 2017. Based on four government surveillance reports on food rumors and safety scandals, a descriptive, correlation, and multivariate variance analysis was applied to the data. RESULTS A total of 3,090 results were gathered and analyzed. An average of 83.6% (n = 2,584) respondents heard at least one food rumor. Learning about food fraud is correlated with interpersonal connections (e.g., doctors or health specialists) for accessing food health information. Overall, Chinese citizens with a higher level of interpersonal connection were more likely to be concerned about food scandals with the statistical difference (p < .001). The Interpersonal connection was the highest frequency of communication sources (n = 698, 55.7%), followed by traditional media (n = 325, 25.9%) and Internet portal (n = 144, 11.5%). The respondents in Beijing were confronted more frequently by food rumors (range 346-1253) than those in Hefei (range 155-946). The urban dwellers in Beijing and their rural counterparts in Hefei also differ in terms of perceiving different levels of food risk from different media sources. The food scandal narratives examined the conspiracy belie finds that social media play a more important role in influencing attitude against scandals for users in Hefei, rather than in Beijing. CONCLUSIONS A media complementarity and food fraud information acquisition examined food fraud incidents with intent to harm, mainly done for economic gain. The HINTS China reports that around 73.6% of Chinese respondents prefer to go to their physicians for quarrying food health information first; however, when asked where they actually went, up to 36.6% of Beijing respondents and 55.6% of Hefei respondents reported going online first. Food fraud regarding food originating from Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand implies that the information concerning food fraud in these countries negatively affects the valuation of importing country. This study extends beyond local food products to foreign countries that import conspiracy beliefs with the fake food. Nonetheless, in China, consumers have to be on guard not just against fake food, but also spreading fake information and news about food.

Contact Tracing Apps in ASEAN: A Threat to Privacy and Personal Data

On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially categorized the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a global pandemic. The rapid spread of COVID-19 prompted governments all around the world to take steps toward controlling the pandemic and its significant socio-economic impacts. Digital technology has been relied upon to provide innovative solutions to aid efforts of stopping the spread of COVID-19. One such innovation is the development and implementation of contact tracing applications or apps. The use of these apps allows public health authorities to track confirmed cases of COVID-19 and mitigate its transmission. However, as useful as they may be, there exists a well-grounded fear that contact tracing apps may be used as a tool to broaden government surveillance powers. This is especially true among member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), where domestic regulations guaranteeing the right to privacy and protection of personal data are relatively weak. Additionally, ASEAN lacks a comprehensive and strong regional mechanism for the protection of human rights and personal data. This paper aims to analyze the implementation of contact tracing apps in ASEAN member states, whether its implementation fulfills the international standards of the protection of the right to privacy and personal data, as well as provide recommendations to ensure that countries do not spiral towards a state of unrestricted government surveillance.

The Panoptic Sort

The Panoptic Sort was published in 1993. Its focus was on privacy and surveillance. But unlike the majority of publications addressing these topics in the United States at the time that were focused on the privacy concerns of individuals, especially those related to threats associated with government surveillance, that book sought to direct the public toward the activities of commercial firms. The Panoptic Sort was intended to help us all to understand just what was at stake when the bureaucracies of government and commerce gathered, processed, and made use of an almost unlimited amount of personal and transaction-generated information to manage social, economic, and political activities within society. While the first edition provided numerous examples from marketing, employment, insurance, credit management, and the provision of government and social services, the second edition extends descriptions of the technologies that have been developed and incorporated into the panoptic sort in the nearly thirty years since its initial publication. Assessments of the implications for democracy that many associate with the possibility of an algorithmic Leviathan, invite a reconsideration of Jacques Ellul’s distressing predictions about the future that ended the first edition of The Panoptic Sort.

'You have the right to remain silent' an exploration of public perceptions of free speech

This study explores the online public's reaction to the National Security Agency's surveillance Prism programs in light of the confidential government document leakage to the public on June 7, 2013. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of top recommended user comments to the news article published in The Guardian describing the technicalities of the Prism program, public perceptions of civil liberties like free speech in new media communication are explored. Overarching themes and salient discourses on the public's understanding of their democratic rights emerged in the analysis. The findings revealed a number of competing views of liberty, and while the majority of the users opposed government surveillance and agreed it was in violation of their rights, further examination revealed a temptation to withdraw from using new media communication susceptible to government surveillance, thereby hindering the Internet's ability to act as a valuable arena for public debate as afforded by new media communication