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News Can Help! The Impact of News Media and Digital Platforms on Awareness of and Belief in Misinformation

Sacha Altay, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Nielsen, Richard Fletcher

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 29, issue 2 (2024), pp. 459-484

"Does the news media exacerbate or reduce misinformation problems? Although some news media deliberately try to counter misinformation, it has been suggested that they might also inadvertently, and sometimes purposefully, amplify it. We conducted a two-wave panel survey in Brazil, India, and the UK ... more

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Approaches to an ethical development and use of AI in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Bonn: German Commission for UNESCO (2024), 8 pp.

Full Night: The Best Romanian Internet Cafe

Ruxandra Mãrgineanu, Radu-Mihai Tãnasã

Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (2024), 28 pp.

Designing for justice in freelancing: Testing platform interventions to minimise discrimination in online labour markets

Sian Brooke, Aliya Hamid Rao

Big Data & Society (2024), 19 pp.

"Online labour markets (OLMs) are a vital source of income for globally diverse and dispersed freelancers. Despite their promise of neutrality, OLMs are known to perpetuate hiring discrimination, vested in how OLMs are designed and what kinds of interactions they enable between freelancers and hirer ... more

Deeply embedded wages: Navigating digital payments in data work

Julian Posada

Big Data & Society, issue April-June (2024), 12 pp.

"Many workers worldwide rely on digital platforms for their income. In Venezuela, a nation grappling with extreme inflation and where most of the workforce is self-employed, data production platforms for machine learning have emerged as a viable opportunity for many to earn an income in US dollars. ... more

Foundation models are platform models: Prompting and the political economy of AI

Sarah Burkhardt, Bernhard Rieder

Big Data & Society, issue April-June (2024), 15 pp.

"A recent innovation in the field of machine learning has been the creation of very large pre-trained models, also referred to as ‘foundation models’, that draw on much larger and broader sets of data than typical deep learning systems and can be applied to a wide variety of tasks. Underpinning ... more

Repairing the harm: Toward an algorithmic reparations approach to hate speech content moderation

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin

Big Data & Society, issue April-June (2024), 13 pp.

"Content moderation algorithms influence how users understand and engage with social media platforms. However, when identifying hate speech, these automated systems often contain biases that can silence or further harm marginalized users. Recently, scholars have offered both restorative and transfor ... more

Privacy cynicism and diminishing utility of state surveillance: A natural experiment of mandatory location disclosure on China’s Weibo

Yuner Zhu

Big Data & Society, issue April–June (2024), 17 pp.

"This article examines the public response to mandatory location disclosure (MLD), a new surveillance technology implemented on China’s Sina Weibo. Initially introduced to geo-tag posts related to the Ukraine War, the MLD eventually expanded to encompass all posts and comments on the platform. Dra ... more

Cleaning up data work: Negotiating meaning, morality, and inequality in a tech startup

Benjamin Shestakofsky

Big Data & Society, issue July–September (2024), 14 pp.

"Data work—the routinized, information-processing operations that support artificial intelligence systems—has been portrayed as a source of both economic opportunity and exploitation. Existing research on the moral economy of data work focuses on platforms where individuals anonymously complete ... more

AI for social good and the corporate capture of global development

Gianluca Lazzolino, Nicole Stremlau

Information Technology for Development, volume 30, issue 4 (2024), pp. 626-643

"This article focuses on the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) movement, which aims to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). It argues that, through AI4SG, Big Tech is attempting to advance AIdriven technosolut ... more

Internet Shutdowns, Sovereignty, and the Postcolonial State in Africa

Nicole Stremlau

Global Policy (2024), 8 pp.

"Despite strong international condemnation, there is growing acceptance of internet shutdowns as a legitimate response to online content that governments—particularly in Africa—find concerning. This article explores government decision- making around internet shutdowns during contentious periods ... more

Problem-solving? No, problem-opening! A method to reframe and teach data ethics as a transdisciplinary endeavour

Stefano Calzati, Henrik Ploeger

Big Data & Society, issue July–September (2024), 14 pp.

"Starting from the recognition of the limits of today’s common essentialist and axiological understandings of data and ethics, in this article we make the case for an ecosystemic understanding of data ethics (for the city) that accounts for the inherent value-laden entanglements and unintended (bo ... more

The emergence of artificial intelligence ethics auditing

Daniel S. Schiff, Stephanie Kelley, Javier Camacho Ibáñez

Big Data & Society, issue October–December (2024), 16 pp.

"The emerging ecosystem of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics and governance auditing has grown rapidly in recent years in anticipation of impending regulatory efforts that encourage both internal and external auditing. Yet, there is limited understanding of this evolving landscape. We conduct an i ... more

Artificial intelligence as planetary assemblages of coloniality: The new power architecture driving a tiered global data economy

Kai-Hsin Hung

Big Data & Society, issue October–December (2024), 7 pp.

"We present a framework for viewing artificial intelligence (AI) as planetary assemblages of coloniality that reproduce dependencies in how it co-constitutes and structures a tiered global data economy. We use assemblage thinking to map the coloniality of power to demonstrate how AI stratifies acros ... more

Digitalisation, democracy and the GDPR: The efforts of DPAs to defend democratic principles despite the limitations of the GDPR

Michaela Padden, Andreas Öjehag-Pettersson

Big Data & Society, issue October–December (2024), 13 pp.

"This article discusses the perspectives of European Union (EU) / European Economic Area Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) on their role in protecting democratic rights and freedoms in digitalised societies. Data Protection Authorities, which are independent regulators, are responsible for implemen ... more

From human-centered to social-centered artificial intelligence: Assessing ChatGPT’s impact through disruptive events

Skyler Wang, Ned Cooper, Margaret Eby

Big Data & Society, issue October–December (2024), 14 pp.

"Large language models (LLMs) and dialogue agents represent a significant shift in artificial intelligence (AI) research, particularly with the recent release of the GPT family of models. ChatGPT’s generative capabilities and versatility across technical and creative domains led to its widespread ... more

The perils of ‘tech for good’ lie in its politics of helping

Lisa Ann Richey, Adam Moe Fejerskov

Big Data & Society, issue October–December (2024), 5 pp.

"Vexing political questions of power, inequality and coloniality permeate the tech sector and its growing use of global ‘virtual’ assembly lines that see them penetrate even refugee camps in efforts to extract value. As a response, tech companies have been expanding non-commercial activities wit ... more

Destructive polarization in digital communication contexts: A critical review and conceptual framework

Katharina Esau, Taroq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian F. K. Svegaard, Axel Bruns, O'Connor-Farfan Kate S., Carly Lubicz-Zaorski

Information, Communication & Society (2024), 22 pp.

"While the digital turn in communication research offers novel opportunities to study polarization at scale, it also adds complexity to a challenging concept. Ambiguities surrounding the conceptual understanding of polarization in different fields lead to problems in advancing the research in the di ... more