Democracy

The rise of social media has heralded multiple challenges and adverse societal effects that are linked to the way in which content on social media platforms is moderated, leading up to debates across countries on ways to address these adverse effects by means of regulation.

Targeted advertising is at the core of the business model of platforms like YouTube, Twitter or Meta. Since the US election in 2016, followed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Brexit, targeted advertising has become the subject of a broadening debate in society and is discussed more critically than in previous years.

This backgrounder aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how digital media are shaping democracy and what might be done to limit possible avenues of anti-democratic abuse, while kindling their democratic potential.

Over the past two decades, the digital rights discourse gained ground in internet governance debates around the world, however, the meaning and scope of digital rights differs across borders. This Spotlight provides an overview of the state of digital rights in Israel.

A conversation with Carlos Hernández- Echevarría from Maldita.es, a Spanish independent journalistic platform focused on the control of disinformation and public discourse through fact-checking and data journalism techniques. 

A conversation with Danny Rogers from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) on the business model behind disinformation activities and ways to defund and disincentivize their propagators by providing the industry with clear definitions and data.

A conversation with Sam Jeffers, Co-Founder of "Who Targets Me", about the power of social media, and particularly, of social media advertising in influencing people in election campaigns and ways of making the political campaigning environment more trustworthy, transparent and comprehensible for people.

A conversation with Nicole Krause from the Life Sciences Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin about science and political communication and ways to communicate more effectively with conservative, religious and rural audiences.

This Spotlight explores how the ability of AI to disseminate information more effectively is prone to abuse and can pose a threat to democracy. It then discusses the preconditions and potential of AI to support the building of a critical public sphere.

The DSA could help addressing the challenges of harmful content and disinformation online by increasing the legal protections while encouraging platforms to be more transparent and accountable without imposing requirements to generally monitor content.