Deepa I.’s Post

Last week, we ran a series marking 100 days since the DSA came into effect. We're grateful to all of the contributors that pitched into making this happen! https://lnkd.in/dAKnRRRW 🔹 Gabby Miller interviewed Ireland's DSC,John Evans, about getting up and running 100 days after the full implementation of the DSA. https://lnkd.in/dXfvEmyE 🔹100 days on from the date of full implementation of the DSA, the landscape of DSCs across the EU varies broadly, writes Grace Nelson. https://lnkd.in/dNV_2r6J 🔹Jordi Calvet-Bademunt and Joan Barata explore enforcement gaps and uncertainties in the DSA and AI Act as a result of generative AI. https://lnkd.in/dhNVzWpn 🔹Pooja Iyer considers how guidelines around advertising transparency in the DSA have impacted the world of advertising technology. https://lnkd.in/d5huKD-m 🔹Théophile Lenoir unpacks the difficulties of the DSA's "trusted flagger" program. https://lnkd.in/d2jn7vMx 🔹Ramsha Jahangir, Elodie Vialle, and Dylan M.  examine open questions about the implementation of Article 22 of the DSA, which sets out the "Trusted Flaggers" mechanism. https://lnkd.in/d-RPP-8i 🔹Inbal Goldberger looks at the DSA's regulatory obligations which may give rise to new businesses aimed at helping platforms and governments meet compliance requirements. https://lnkd.in/d7_WsPHH 🔹Jordi Calvet-Bademunt provides a round-up of DSA-related developments in the past month. https://lnkd.in/dsuWQBn3 🔹Mateus Correia de Carvalho argues that new centralized rules are necessary to avoid compromising the DSA's research access provision. https://lnkd.in/d2SxuMMX 🔹Charis Papaevangelou and Fabio Votta argue that "observability" is more important than just transparency for understanding the nuances of how digital platforms operate. https://lnkd.in/dVCTQpEf 🔹Niklas Eder and Giovanni De Gregorio examine how organizations tasked with settling content moderation disputes under Article 21 of the DSA can improve platform accountability. https://lnkd.in/de7_eTXN Please subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date with all things tech policy! https://lnkd.in/dn-vvrMC

I am happy to share that the second issue of LEHR’s Seventeenth volume on “Crowdsourcing and the Decline of the Individual”, co-edited by Prof. Shelly Kreiczer-Levy, Dr. Tamar Megiddo, and me, has now been published online. This issue contains four excellent articles analyzing a range of challenges and opportunities resulting from the rise of crowdsourcing platforms and the parallel and related disempowerment of individuals. The first article by prof. Anat Ben-David, explores crowdsourced voter surveillance by political parties to maximize voter turnout. It shows that parties combine digital access to the Voters’ Registry with digital tools and lateral surveillance by citizens who collectively resign their rights and the rights of their peers to ensure the party’s success. Next, Dr. Tomer Shadmy proposes the creation of “Users Unions” – legal structures that would enable users to have a collective voice within platforms’ corporate governance and decision-making mechanisms. Shadmy claims Users Unions could mitigate the power disparities between users and online platforms and assist in respecting, protecting, and fulfilling users’ political rights. In the third article, Dr. Anna Berti Suman and Amelia Burnette analyze the use of Citizen-gathered evidence to demonstrate environmental and social wrongdoings through a practical and theoretical analysis of case studies of civic environmental monitoring addressing coal ash pollution in North Carolina. Lastly, Dr. Izabela Schiffauer and Dr. Łukasz Szoszkiewicz discuss the under-protection of platform workers labor rights and suggest strengthening protection of platform workers by using International Human Rights Law’s right to just and favorable conditions of work. All articles can be found here https://lnkd.in/dURxijKr   Free access to the full text of the articles is available by logging in and entering the passcode BEPress2021 I want to thank Prof. Shelly Kreiczer-Levy and Dr. Tamar Megiddo, for organizing the annual researchers' workshop held by the College of Law and Business in January 2022, in which early drafts of the articles in this volume were presented #crowdsourcing #platforms #humanrights #surveillance #politicalparties #environmentaljustice #laborlaw

US Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Looks like this message has some necessary steps to make AI policy in the USA consistent with that...

“other platforms” The Supreme Court errs in considering Big Tech companies platforms instead of publishers. The New York Times is free to decide “all the news that’s fit to print” and bears the responsibility for that decision. Likewise, The Weekly World News and National Enquirer hold editorial sway. Setting that aside, it ignores that Big Tech companies fail to comply with the agreements made when users joined, fail to be transparent in their editorial decisions, and fail to act in accordance with shareholder value. As always, these problems are solved when we break up Big Tech. https://lnkd.in/gGRfiUxM

Excited to share my latest article on LessWrong about YouCongress, my new project exploring innovative solutions for collective decision-making! We're tackling coordination problems like those described by Scott Alexander in his insightful essay "Meditations on Moloch." Curious to learn how we can move beyond traditional voting systems and create a more rational and impactful future? Check out the article here: https://lnkd.in/d8RAC3PZ

NewsGuard’s co-founder and co-CEO, Steven Brill, writes about “The Death of Truth” in his recently released book, covering the many ways misinformation has pervaded society, including:  • Social media algorithms that put profit over accuracy • Automated advertising systems that reward misinformation • Foreign adversaries that sow division through sophisticated disinformation campaigns • Artificial intelligence technologies that create alternate realities and division over what’s real Pick up a copy of Brill’s book today to learn more about the forces deepening polarization in our society — and what we can do to fix it. https://lnkd.in/ePNzQVgd

How should online speech be regulated? What happens when we prohibit all discussion on topics like race, climate change and abortion on social media platforms? The Supreme Court in the US is considering how people and tech platforms can deal with misinformation online, especially in light of Texas and Florida, which decided to impose content moderation on certain tech platforms. The laws have not yet been passed and have been brought to the Supreme Court. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama and Stanford researcher Daphne Keller wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “A better response to concentrated power is to dilute it.” They argue that people should be able to control their social media feeds, search and AI results. Laws that “encourage competition and diversity in the way that content is moderated, through technologies that put control in the hands of individual Internet users.” Users can be empowered and "choose content moderation services from an array of competing providers.” Keller and Fukuyama write, "Laws that empower individuals to make their own choices about speech are, in First Amendment terms, far better than laws that impose new state rules to regulate lawful speech." They refer to the Supreme Court case of US v Playboy in 2000 and to the laws requiring cable operators to block pornography. This was The Supreme Court explained this bluntly in the 2000 case of U.S. v. Playboy. Their verdict was: “Technology expands the capacity to choose, and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.” Essay authors believe Texas and Florida "shouldn’t be permitted simply to disregard that option and impose their own preferred rules." From a Factiverse point of view, and all the user feedback we have gathered, users want to be empowered to understand information; they definitely don't want the technology to control them or the large tech platforms to decide on their worldview. They want more transparency on the algorithms that decide their feed and their AI chatbot answers and be able to make decisions themselves about what they want to see. We strive for the accountability and explainability of AI when analysing textual information, and we look forward to sharing more in the year to come on our new features to empower users in this information-overload age. https://lnkd.in/gidgxYr7 #aiforensics #misinformation #riskassessment #freedomofexpression #factiverse

Important point, even if in op-ed format

The real online harms are: ad-based models, algorithms, anonymity, and abuse. To lessen the last of these four As, you need to hobble the first three. My column for the @ottawacitizen

In its opinion in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton last week, SCOTUS signaled a surprisingly—and healthily—narrow interpretation of platform’s First Amendment curation rights. Read our takeaways here: https://lnkd.in/eCN34W-P   Takeaway 1: A majority of Justices agreed that content moderation is expressive when it is based on a platform’s content and community guidelines. These guidelines most closely resemble the editorial judgment protected for traditional curators like newspaper editors. Takeaway 2: Machine-learning algorithms that enforce content and community guidelines may receive less constitutional protection because using black-box algorithms may attenuate the connection to human editorial judgments. Takeaway 3: The Court was skeptical that using algorithms to curate content outside a platform’s published guidelines is expressive, such as recommending content based on user behavior. This is good news for content-neutral laws that focus on these systems such as NY's SAFE Act. The general guidance that can be pulled from these cases is that courts need to drill into the expressiveness of a curatorial activity at a granular level of specificity. Not everything companies do to select and display content is inherently expressive, but some of it is.