"This book responds to mounting calls to broaden the theorization of digital journalism, addressing critical questions about an emerging yet rapidly expanding area of study, and presenting multiple entry points and approaches that help us understand digital journalism better. Seeking to establish it
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self as a rich resource and a defining reference point for the evolving field, the handbook provides a critical appraisal and a useful overview of novel approaches and concepts, backed by a full breadth of dynamic and diverse interactions drawn from overlapping and critical studies by some of the leading experts on digital journalism. This handbook presents multiple methodological perspectives, reporting strategies, threats and opportunities and valuable insights on future trajectories for digital journalism practice in an era dominated by digital media technology. Split into four parts, it has been uniquely assembled to investigate and critique the full potential of digital journalism capturing broader, cross-cultural perspectives from all four corners of the world." (Publisher description)
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"The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics is a lively and authoritative guide to ethical issues related to digital technologies, with a special emphasis on AI. Philosophers with a wide range of expertise cover thirty-seven topics: from the right to have access to internet, to trolling and online shamin
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g, speech on social media, fake news, sex robots and dating online, persuasive technology, value alignment, algorithmic bias, predictive policing, price discrimination online, medical AI, privacy and surveillance, automating democracy, the future of work, and AI and existential risk, among others. Each chapter gives a rigorous map of the ethical terrain, engaging critically with the most notable work in the area, and pointing directions for future research." (Publisher description)
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"This report offers a high-level, evidence-informed guide to some of the major proposals for how democratic governments, platforms, and others can counter disinformation. It distills core insights from empirical research and real-world data on ten diverse kinds of policy interventions, including fac
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t-checking, foreign sanctions, algorithmic adjustments, and counter-messaging campaigns. For each case study, we aim to give policymakers an informed sense of the prospects for success—bridging the gap between the mostly meager scientific understanding and the perceived need to act. This means answering three core questions: How much is known about an intervention? How effective does the intervention seem, given current knowledge? And how easy is it to implement at scale?" (Summary, page 1)
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"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
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mative justice frameworks as alternative approaches to platform governance to mitigate harms caused to marginalized users. As a complement to these recent calls, in this essay, I take up the concept of reparation as one substantive approach social media platforms can use alongside and within these justice frameworks to take actionable steps toward addressing, undoing and proactively preventing the harm caused by algorithmic content moderation. Specifically, I draw on established legal and legislative reparations frameworks to suggest how social media platforms can reconceptualize algorithmic content moderation in ways that decrease harm to marginalized users when identifying hate speech. I argue that the concept of reparations can reorient how researchers and corporate social media platforms approach content moderation, away from capitalist impulses and efficiency and toward a framework that prioritizes creating an environment where individuals from marginalized communities feel safe, protected and empowered." (Abstract)
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"Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube wield substantial influence over digital information flows using sophisticated algorithmic recommender systems (RS). As these systems curate personalized content, concerns have emerged about their propensity to amplify polar
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izing or inappropriate content, spread misinformation, and infringe on users’ privacy. To address these concerns, the European Union (EU) has recently introduced a new regulatory framework through the Digital Services Act (DSA). These proposed policies are designed to bolster user agency by offering contestability mechanisms against personalized RS. As their effectiveness ultimately requires individual users to take specific actions, this empirical study investigates users’ intention to contest personalized RS. The results of a pre-registered survey across six countries – Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and the USA –involving 6,217 respondents yield key insights: (1) Approximately 20% of users would opt out of using personalized RS, (2) the intention for algorithmic contestation is associated with individual characteristics such as users’ attitudes towards and awareness of personalized RS as well as their privacy concerns, (3) German respondents are particularly inclined to contest personalized RS. We conclude that amending Art. 38 of the DSA may contribute to leveraging its effectiveness in fostering accessible user contestation and algorithmic transparency." (Abstract)
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"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. In the past, colonialism was a landgrab of natural resources, exploitative labour and private property from developing countries. It made shiny promises to modernise and civilise, but actually sought to control. It made native populati
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ons sign contracts they didn't understand, and took resources just because they were there. Colonialism has not disappeared it has taken a new form. In the new world order where data is the new oil, big Tech companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources, our data, exploiting our labour and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations and discriminate against us. They tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact every time we unthinkingly click 'Accept' on Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to kept indefinitely, repackaged by big Tech companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. This is the era of data colonialism. The new colonial landgrab is a datagrab. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, two leading global researchers and founders of the concept of data colonialism reveal how history can help us understand the emerging future, and how we can fight back." (Publisher description)
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"Political and moral/religious contents are increasingly popular on TikTok, and the concerns associated with them create the premises for a re-exploration of the user–machine agency negotiation. Using algorithmic awareness as a process, this research examines the relationship between users’ awar
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eness of the TikTok algorithm and the main concerns associated with content that conveys political or moral/religious tenets. A survey of 329 Romanian students showed that greater algorithm awareness influences positive attitudes toward algorithms, but significantly stronger positive effects are observed between awareness and the two mediators related to political and moral/religious content perceived as contentious. Using Foucauldian insights on productive resistance, I argue that in-depth knowledge about the functionality of algorithms empower users to identify and subvert different forms of power, algorithmically mediated through political or religious content. When users perceive that they have enhanced agency over what they watch on TikTok, they feel that they can control potential concerns and consequently adopt positive attitudes toward algorithms and the overall platform. Foucault discusses pastoral power as a subtle form of power, designed to empty individuals of their deepest secrets. Similarly, such power is increasingly algorithmically mediated, given that digital machines enhance their agency in often nontransparent ways. Therefore, users’ awareness regarding the functionalities of algorithms allow them to combat the various mutations specific to pastoral power while encouraging them to adopt more positive attitudes toward algorithms in general." (Abstract)
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"As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more seamlessly integrated into our social life, the unfair outcomes and ethical issues associated with AI and its subtechnologies have been widely discussed in scholarly work across disciplines in recent years. This study provides an overview of the conceptu
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alization, empirical scholarship, and ethical concerns related to algorithmic bias across diverse disciplines. In doing so, the study relies on the framework of AI-mediated communication and human-AI communication, as well as topic modeling and semantic network analysis to examine the conceptualization and major thematic areas of AI bias literature. The study reveals the complexity of the concept of algorithmic bias, which extends beyond the algorithm itself. Empirical scholarship on AI and algorithmic bias revolves around conceptualizations, human perceptions, algorithm optimization, practical applications, and ethics and policy implications. Understanding and addressing the ethical challenges require a multilevel examination from the perspectives of different stakeholders. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed in the context of AI and algorithmic justice." (Abstract)
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"Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most c
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ommon perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security." (Abstract)
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"Drawing from rich ethnographic materials and perspectives from both the Global North and South, authors Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré explore how people appropriate and reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives in three domains of everyday life: gig work, cultural industries, and polit
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ics. They reveal how forms of algorithmic agency and resistance are endemic and mundane and how the platform society is a contested battleground of contrasting forces. Bonini and Treré begin by outlining their key theoretical framework of moral economies. This framework argues that algorithms exist on a continuum. At its two extremes are two competing moral economies: the user moral economy and the platform moral economy. From here, Algorithms of Resistance chronicles the various inventive ways that individuals can work to achieve agency and resist the ubiquitous power of algorithms." (Publisher description)
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"Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound impli
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cations for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To attend to this fundamental change, the authors propose the concept of algorithmic regimes and demonstrate how they transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sensemaking, and decision-making in contemporary societies. Across sixteen chapters, the volume offers a diverse collection of contributions along three perspectives on algorithmic regimes: the methods necessary to research and design algorithmic regimes, the ways in which algorithmic regimes reconfigure sociotechnical interactions, and the politics engrained in algorithmic regimes." (Publisher description)
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"This open access book provides practical guidance for non-profits and community sector organisations about how to get started with data analytics projects using their own organisations' datasets and open public data. The book shares best practices on collaborative social data projects and methodolo
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gy. For researchers, the work offers a playbook for partnering with community organisations in data projects for public good and gives worked examples of projects of various sizes and complexity." (Publisher description)
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"The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and so
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cial problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence." (Publisher description)
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"Trends towards greater transparency of platforms, in the form of extending cooperation around data, offer benefit to the interests of all stakeholders. This policy brief considers the normative, institutional and technical mechanisms that support access to datasets that are not accessible generally
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but have public interest value. The analysis below maps the general trends and issues, then proceeds to assess the separate cases of journalists’ safety and media viability, and concludes with recommendations." (Abstract)
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"YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. have their own logics, dynamics and different audiences. This book analyses how the users of these social networks, especially those of YouTube and Instagram, become content prescribers, opinion leaders and, by extension, people of influence. What
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influence capacity do they have? Why are intimate or personal aspects shared with unknown people? Who are the big beneficiaries? How much is vanity and how much altruism? What business is behind these social networks? What dangers do they contain? What volume of business can we estimate they generate? How are they transforming cultural industries? What legislation is applied? How does the legislation affect these communications when they are sponsored? Is the privacy of users violated with the data obtained? Who is the owner of the content? Are they to blame for "fake news"? In this changing, challenging and intriguing environment, The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing discusses all of these questions and more. Considering this complexity from different perspectives: technological, economic, sociological, psychological and legal, the book combines the visions of several experts from the academic world and provides a structured framework with a wide approach to understand the new era of influencing, including the dark sides of it." (Publisher description)
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