The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2021 report unequivocally linked climate change to human activity and predicted more frequent and more severe natural disasters over the coming years. Given the current trajectory of emissions and lack of meaningful climate action, the world is...
Mozilla, the organization/community that built the Firefox browser and now has a Foundation working to ensure the internet remains an open and accessible public resource, has released a 12-minute documentary, “Unknown Influence” The documentary interviews independent researchers and technology experts from the US, Kenya, France, United...
The world’s law enforcement services are in cahoots, sharing detailed data about individuals as well as corporations “in the interest of national security”. In 2021, the Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America on Access to Electronic Data...
Pursuit of profit and social media algorithms foster and elevate hate into the mainstream. In yet one more example, misogynistic and violent messages made by influencer Andrew Tate, recently banned from social media platforms, were viewed billions of times on TikTok alone. His rise on...
On September 4, 2022, Chilean voters rejected a new proposed constitution that would have set the foundations for a progressive, rights-based, gender-sensitive, decolonial, and ecologically sound form of governance. Despite some gaps in terms of clarity and concerns about the fiscal load that the constitution would...
On 5 July 2022, the European Parliament approved the final text of its Digital Services Act (DSA), the new rule book for moderating digital content. The DSA aims to limit the spread of illegal content online and it establishes a new set of obligations for private...
In the Netflix documentary “the most hated man on the Internet”, a mother seeks justice for her daughter and other women whose intimate photos obtained through hacking are posted on a revenge porn website. The magnitude of apathy of the site owner and his upto...
In Latin America, the “pink tide” governments of the first decade of the 21st Century transformed the movement for communication rights by introducing far reaching media reform legislation. As a second wave of progressive governments are elected, the region has a new opportunity to move...
News fatigue is an age-old phenomenon. Not only do media have a reputation for “moving on” after a catastrophe, but readers, listeners, and viewers have a tendency to get bored. Sadly, extended calamities – the drought in the Horn of Africa, the war in Ukraine...
Whether inroads are made to reducing violent crime depends to an extent on the media. On 24 May 2022 another massacre of children in an American school took place, this time in Uvalde, Texas (1), Russia’s war on Ukraine raged on, (2) and a woman was...