A new report commissioned by the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), and supported by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung's EU | Global Dialogue and Washington, DC USA | Canada | Global Dialogue offices, highlights mounting concerns that international trade agreements are creating barriers to consumers’ right to repair the products they own. As everyday devices from smartphones to tractors become ever more reliant on software, restrictive clauses in free trade agreements are making it harder for consumers and independent repairers to access the tools and information they need for effective repairs.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is now in force, but climate disinformation is not explicitly recognised as a “systemic risk”. With this regulatory gap in mind, we set out to examine how platform responses to climate disinformation evolved or failed to evolve between 2023 and 2025, and what their policies look like in practice.
Will the EU-US Trade and Technology Council shape a resilient future or succumb to geopolitical rifts? This in-depth exploration of scenarios, challenges, and opportunities for transatlantic collaboration on trade, tech, and climate action outlines possible futures.
This factsheet delves into platforms’ policies on climate change misinformation, focusing on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter and YouTube and their actions are currently in place to limit the impact of such content.
This e-paper examines systemic failures in curbing the funding of hateful content as well as disinformation and misinformation with the public money of Slovenian taxpayers. At the same time, it describes the very effective yet opaque methods of circumventing the co-regulative measures proposed by the EU Digital Services Act, which tries to curb such practices.
Platforms can empower groups that have previously been silenced. However, platforms also host hateful and illegal content, often targeted at minorities, and content is prone to being unfairly censored by algorithmically biased moderation systems. This report analyzes the current environment of content moderation, particularly bringing to light negative effects for the LGBTIQA+ community, and provides policy recommendations for the forthcoming negotiations on the EU Digital Services Act.
Existing content moderation practices, both algorithmically-driven and people-determined, are rooted in white colonialist culture. Black women’s opinions, experiences, and expertise are suppressed and their online communication streams are removed abruptly, silently, and quickly. This paper explores algorithmic misogynoir in content moderation and makes the case for the regular examination of the impact of content moderation tactics on Black women and other minoritized communities.
The need for cross-border data sharing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the future of multilateral threat management will hinge on steady yet flexible open-data publishing norms and multilateral data-transfer agreements. In many ways, India typifies the perspectives and needs of emerging economies related to data sharing, data flows, and related commercial regulation.
The absence of an integrated digital market and a unified political vision for tech policy in Latin America and the Caribbean puts the countries of the region at risk of dependency on a foreign private sector for their digital transformation. The investment that will be required to recover from the pandemic offers a unique chance to break out of the current market logic and treat technology as critical social infrastructure that must be sustainable and requires citizen participation.
On the EU’s periphery, Serbia has deployed enough biometric surveillance technology from China’s Huawei for law enforcement and “Safe City” solutions to cover practically all of Belgrade’s public spaces. Public pressure has raised the bar for turning on the technology, but the alarming project illustrates the need for transparent regulation of such systems everywhere, to ensure the protection of fundamental human rights.
Trade agreements have become an important battleground for tech companies to fight the regulatory pressure they are finally facing in the Global North. But allowing tech companies to capture digital trade talks to defang domestic regulation creates serious risks for privacy, fundamental rights, competition, social and economic justice, and sustainable development.
Les pays africains ont de plus en plus accès à l’Internet haut débit, les questions liées à la neutralité de l’internet, à la régulation et à l’interopérabilité adéquate se posent, il est nécessaire de veiller à ce que les citoyens puissent exercer librement leurs droits. En tant qu’intermédiaires, les plateformes numériques peuvent mettre en relation, faciliter l’accès à l’information, à la liberté d’expression et de communication. Ce qui fait que la force des plateformes tient en grande partie à leur capacité à multiplier les flux d’informations collectées auprès de leurs utilisateurs.
A digital policy for and within the digital society is subject to constant transformation. This nascent policy area has, thus far, lacked deeper feminist analyses in order for this transformation process to take place. This initial introduction describes one way of plugging this gap. Developmental lines, findings, and standpoints that have been propounded thus far are consolidated as a means of developing appropriate visions and perspectives.
With the increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across society, it is important to understand in which ways AI may accelerate or impede climate progress, and how various stakeholders can guide those developments.
Technical standards have been a driving engine behind globalisation. In recent years, they run the risk of turning into a core subject of great power competition over high technology. While Europe has benefited from technical standards, it may suffer if standards turn into a matter of power rivalry.
This research examines how aspects of privacy and data protection are working for consumers in two major economic areas – the EU and the US. Both have high levels of digital use, and major online providers offer very similar services in both regions. However, their legal approach to data protection and privacy are very different: while the EU has a general data protection law, the US to-date has not enacted such an all-encompassing law at the federal level.dig
Across 14 case studies from international and national civil society organisations, networks and movements from populist contexts around the world, the report highlights their innovativeness, effectiveness in countering different elements of populism, and responsiveness to the potential of digital media in the specific context.
