Politics

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Simin Kargar, whose focus is on the harassment of civil society actors on the Iranian Internet. Such harassment and suppression has a long history in Iran, and is affected by shifts in the availability and popularity of platforms – Simin and her colleagues interviewed a range of actors (journalists, media producers, activists, ...), in Iran and the international diaspora, to explore these issues.

Diasporic civil society members were disproportionately targetted; gender is a particular component of vulnerability, and the abuse of family members still in Iran is a prominent tool for …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Rena Bivens, whose focus is on non-profit anti-violence activists online. The literature on such initiatives is still poorly developed; there is a great deal of advice on how these organisations should operate online, but how they actually operate remains poorly understood.

Rena approaches this by examining the Facebook and Twitter content posted by some 20 non-profit organisations in this space in Canada and the United States, which often also draw on the guidebooks for non-profits published by the platforms themselves. She is focussing here especially on Facebook, and enhances her …

Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

These opponents criticised Anne’s positioning as a feminist icon, and considerable discursive struggles between the two sides emerged. Anne is often depicted as a young girl with unmistakeable agency, unusual …

The final panel on this day at AoIR 2018 is on journalism, and starts with Òscar Coromina. His focus is on the influence that trending topics on Twitter had on journalistic coverage of the Catalan independence referendum. Trending topics are important in directing user attention, especially in the context of breaking news, and Twitter is of course also selling advertising at the top of its trending topics list, indicating their importance.

Trending topics may be hashtags or phrases, and work in similar ways to enable the formation of ad hoc publics or algorithmically generated publics; they are technosocial actors in …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the continuing consequences of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – and in particular its anti-circumvention elements that criminalise the bypassing of copyright protection mechanisms such as encryption, even in contexts where ‘fair use’ exceptions apply.

But there are some exceptions; the U.S. Copyright Office engages in triennial rulemaking processes that grant exemptions for particular, tightly defined cases of bypassing. However, do such exemptions work? While copyright users are by now well aware of the DMCA, they are less aware of the bypassing prohibitions …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.

Internet.org was subsequently renamed as Free Basics, and continues its activities; it was expelled from India, however. It represents an attempt to establish a socio-technical imaginary informed by a significant level of technological determinism …

The next AoIR 2018 speaker is Nathalie Maréchal, who focusses on digital rights technology: any kind of hardware or software that improves users’ privacy, access to information, and freedom of expression. This threatens government and corporate control of information flows in an age of surveillance capitalism, and is therefore also controversial; it challenges the networked authoritarianism that is beginning to take hold in many countries around the world.

Even as the U.S. government is itself sliding towards authoritarian governance, it has also been a major funder of the development of such technologies. Current key technologies in this context include Psiphon …

The next session at AoIR 2018 starts with Efrat Daskal, who begins with a brief review of the development of the digital rights discourse since the original UN Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights in the digital age have developed especially since 2000, and especially the Internet Rights and Principles Charter of 2014 has made an important contribution. This enshrined the rights to access to information and technology, privacy and safety, and freedom of speech.

Several civic campaigns have also contributed to this, driven by various digital activists and civil society organisations around the world. These operate at national …

The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Emma von Essen and Joakim Jansson, whose focus is on online hate speech towards women and foreigners, and the role of anonymity in enabling the expression of such hate; her project’s interest is especially in the Swedish context, and it hopes to predict the expression of hateful ideas.

The focus of the project is on relevant fora on the Swedish platform Flashback, which emphasised the anonymity of its participants but was subsequently shown to be less secure than claimed; the project scraped posts from these fora, and coded these posts …

Next up in this AoIR 2018 session is Julia deCook, who shifts our focus to Reddit – and particular its /r/TheRedPill men’s rights activism (MRA) space. MRA has grown in recent years, and represents a particularly virulent and misogynist form of male hegemony; Reddit’s TheRedPill forum plays an important role as a hub for this online community, which focusses on hypermasculinity, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist topics.

TheRedPill references the famous scene from The Matrix, and thereby suggests that men have been duped by feminism into an increasively submissive role in society. The forum has been reported by other Reddit …