Archive

The Breakdown: eve­lyn douek on Doctored Media, Platform Response and Responsibility

The ques­tion also does come up, you know, is there any­thing real­ly new here, with these new tech­nolo­gies? Disinformation is as old as infor­ma­tion. Manipulated media is as old as media. Is there some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly harm­ful about this new infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment and these new tech­nolo­gies, these hyper­re­al­is­tic false depic­tions, that we need to be espe­cial­ly wor­ried about? 

Reducing Side-Effects of Copyright Bots on Twitter

Underlying this project is a pret­ty sim­ple and we think pow­er­ful idea that pro­vides a solu­tion to a com­plex chal­lenge that’s fac­ing online com­mu­ni­ties like Twitter, like Reddit, with­in the CivilServant uni­verse. That chal­lenge is the increas­ing automa­tion of the enforce­ment of legal rules and norms online.

What Do We Do About the Haters?

A lot of the top­ics that we’re try­ing to tack­le” or try­ing to deal with on the Internet, we’re not actu­al­ly defin­ing ahead of time. And so what we’ve end­ed up with is a sys­tem where­by both com­pa­nies, and gov­ern­ments alike, are work­ing some­times sep­a­rate­ly, some­times togeth­er, to rid the Internet of these top­ics, of these dis­cus­sions, with­out actu­al­ly delv­ing into what they are.

Sin in the Time of Technology

Social media com­pa­nies have an unpar­al­leled amount of influ­ence over our mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions. […] These com­pa­nies also play a huge role in shap­ing our glob­al out­look on moral­i­ty and what con­sti­tutes it. So the ways in which we per­ceive dif­fer­ent imagery, dif­fer­ent speech, is being increas­ing­ly defined by the reg­u­la­tions that these plat­forms put upon us [in] our dai­ly activ­i­ties on them.