Back in November, the BBC published a report into the online abuse (or ‘toxicity’ as the report termed it) that MPs suffer on social media. The report was eight months in the making and put an AI tool that had been built by the BBC themselves at the heart of the research. However, upon the publishing of the research to much fanfare online, flaws in the report became swiftly apparent. The BBC had linked directly to the tool itself in the report, which allowed anyone to test the tool. Users began to test certain slurs, particularly those of a racialised nature. Highly offensive terms for Jewish, Black and Hispanic people went entirely unrecognised by the tool. Well known far-Right and …

    Those that define internet standards shape our thinking and hold the key to our freedom of communication—no trivial task. Yet tech policy is seen as boring, a yawn-inducing issue offloaded to engineers, corporate lawyers, research universities, and government ministries. In the previous age of global internet governance, regulations and protocols were outsourced to technocrats (and a few “civil society” NGOs agitating on the margins). However, in this age of “techno sovereignty,” where everything from 5G to TikTok is capable of causing geopolitical conflict, there is no more consensus. In short, we demand protocols, not platforms. But who’s going to get us there? Meet the stacktivists.   What is the Stack? Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016) can be useful to …

It was once more or less assumed that the digital world was good for democracy. That turned out to be premature (see Jarzombek 2016). Because the digital was for so long embedded in narratives that emphasised supposed benefits of techno-sociability to society, the political face of the digital was slow to emerge, forcing those now interested in it to play catchup. When we now raise the question of how the digital intertwines itself with the political we jump to issues like privacy, surveillance, digital suppression, disinformation and failed governmental oversight. And yet, despite the laws and policies that have all been put in place, the situation is an oily mess that seems to have no provenance and certainly no easy …