Happy Friday! Liz Carolan here again this week sharing some thoughts on this past week from Digital Action Towers.
This week we have been mostly pressing ahead with planning for the {working title!} “2024: Year of Democracy” campaign. Next week we are very excited to be gathering about 15-20 partners from around the world to start working on what the campaign asks should be. I love getting to this part in the process – seeing a chequers board of faces from every corner of the globe co-working and learning from each other’s experience, and refining what exactly a campaign should be asking for.
One of the people we will be listening closely in this ongoing work in Mozilla Fellow Odanga Madung, and if you missed his piece in the Guardian this week you should give it a read. It reflects on the recent elections in the US, Brazil, Kenya & the Philippines – and I am going to add a long quote here:
“If these four elections were an exceptional challenge for platforms in one year, imagine how they would handle more than 70 in a year? This is not a matter of fiction or speculation. It’s real. In 2023 and 2024, there will be more than 90 elections across the globe. In 2024 alone, more than 2 billion people will be eligible to vote.
Among the elections will be both mature democracies with longstanding institutions and budding democracies whose systems are not as legitimised or established. It is in the latter – where platforms tend to neglect the safety of their users – that they could do the worst damage. The ingredients for what happened in Brazil are likely to be present in many of them.”
Elsewhere this week I got to participate in a great roundtable put on the GIZ – the German development agency – who are leading some work ahead of this year’s Democracy Summit looking at online political ads and Global Majority countries. They are doing some really good evidence based work to produce a paper for that event, which will be a really valuable contribution to the field. I was mostly in listening mode, but pitched in with the 3 ongoing questions that we are trying to get to the bottom of;
- Is it possible to quantify the difference in levels of investment between the Global “North” & “South” in platform protections – ie. can anyone quantity the levels of disparity and inequity when it comes to keeping people safe online?
- When it comes to thinking about globally impactful regulation about, say, political ads, where / or how can this happen? Who has both the power and the legitimacy to do it?
- What immediate actions can we ask platforms to take in particular for high risk elections in the coming years?
Things that caught the team’s eyes this week:
- Great work by SumOfUs and the PeopleVsBigTech Network for organising a response to what appears to be a sneaky attempt to get the much maligned “media exemption” loophole into the European Commission’s European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). The submission can be found here.
- On the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, a quick discussion on Meta’s decision to allow Trump back on its platform produced a choice quote. They talk about how Facebook in particular has been important for political donations, or as they put it;
“we are going to see {the Trump team} strip-mining for as much Boomer-money as possible”
- Irish TD (MP) Holly Cairns gave a brilliant interview to the Group Chat podcast about the reality of being a female politician in 2023. It is one of the clearest descriptions I have heard about how online abuse feels very different to people who are also subject to real world stalking and intimidation, which is something she has experienced with an individual turning up to her home.
“After that I felt like every message I got was potentially someone who could turn up at my house, and it really changed how I behaved in every single thing I did then”