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Sex Work Re-loaded: How Digital Platforms are re-defining Sex Work

Sex Work Re-loaded: How Digital Platforms are re-defining Sex Work

“Maybe I should start an OnlyFans” has become a well-known phrase across different platforms. This blog post explores how the dynamics of sex work have changed on online spaces by looking into the relationship between OnlyFans and Instagram, specifically...
Censorship creates discourse: the implications of banning political advertising

Censorship creates discourse: the implications of banning political advertising

Ayushi Arora (13237748, arora.ayushi@gmail.com) Thomas Ba (13286544, thomas.ba.7@outlook.it) Maurice Dharampal (10439250, maurice.dharampal@student.uva.nl) Alex Soete (13208918, alex.soete@gmail.com) Introduction Is free-speech under attack? Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has recently joined the head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in the...
The Death of the Meme: Article 13 and what this means for the internet

The Death of the Meme: Article 13 and what this means for the internet

On the 12th of September 2018, the European Parliament voted on a version of an EU copyright directive, namely the The European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Two articles are currently stirring up controversy, one...
Dissecting Facebook’s Censorship

Dissecting Facebook’s Censorship

Since September 2016, Facebook’s banning of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, one of the most powerful images that represented the atrocities of the Vietnam War, has sparked a debate on Facebook’s censorship power and policies. In the 1972 photograph, Kim...
Is Vidme the ‘NewTube’? Why video creators are changing sides and how they feel about it

Is Vidme the ‘NewTube’? Why video creators are changing sides and how they feel about it

A few weeks ago on September 9, video platform Vidme’s own channel uploaded their weekly episode of ‘This Week @ Vidme’ titled ‘German INVASION’. The video refers to a sudden and significant increase of German led channels on Vidme:...
Gab.ai: Freedom of (conservative) speech?

Gab.ai: Freedom of (conservative) speech?

A few weeks ago a Norwegian journalist posted the Pullitzer Prize-winning ‘napalm girl’ photograph on Facebook. But instead of founding the intended discussion, he found his account suspended and the picture removed. The picture contained nudity, which may not...
Advertiser-friendly vs. Youtuber-friendly: who does YouTube really care about?

Advertiser-friendly vs. Youtuber-friendly: who does YouTube really care about?

In the Internet age, while some companies choose to be LGBT-friendly, eco-friendly or even vegan-friendly, YouTube is openly advertiser-friendly. The de facto standard video-hosting website of the western world has become a staple of our modern society – an...
Introducing Toosheh: The new mesh network application that tries to tackle the problem of information controls inside Iran

Introducing Toosheh: The new mesh network application that tries to tackle the problem of information controls inside Iran

Branded as a little blue bundle, the new android application developed by the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California is a slight play on words. Toosheh which in Persian means baggage, endeavours to connect Iranian’s through what...
Social Media and Sensitive Content

Social Media and Sensitive Content

Since its inception, Twitter has considered itself a stalwart for free speech. It’s gotten them into some hot water in the past, including outcries over abusive Internet trolls, as well as the intricate balancing act of promoting open dialogue...
GOOGLE SYNDROME: A Psychological Perspective

GOOGLE SYNDROME: A Psychological Perspective

Usually Google needs no introduction. But what it stands for is quite relative and as all things in life, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Thus, for my mum Google is the whole internet (!), for some tech...
Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

The internet as we know is a place with limitless accessibility and constant access to all shareable online information within an open exchange where media exist and co-exist in the way of informing and entertaining. It also means to...
Internet Imperialized

Internet Imperialized

In 2010, Google.cn redirected users to Google.com.hk. Google released an official blog post announcing that it would no longer censor search results for Chinese users. The decision proceeded an allegation that U.S. companies (Google included) had been attacked by...
The Prosecution of Jokes on Social Media: Lets Ask the Audience.

The Prosecution of Jokes on Social Media: Lets Ask the Audience.

Last week a 19 year old man from Lancashire in the UK was found guilty of section 127 of the Communications Act; a British law which makes it an offence to send any message that would be considered ‘grossly...

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: an interview on Chinese internet usage

How do we find happiness? I cannot answer that question for you, but it is relevant to everybody. The state of happiness was deemed so important by the Founding Fathers of the United States that they added it to...
Iranian Censorship of Women’s Online Magazines

Iranian Censorship of Women’s Online Magazines

Although media censorship in Iran is a widely publicized fact, this research report seeks to establish a clearer picture of which women’s online consumer lifestyle titles Iranian web users are currently forbidden to view. This report was conducted...

Ai Weiwei: How a Chinese Artist Uses the Internet To Protest

Reading an interview with the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the weekend magazine of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, I was instantly drawn to his faith in the democratizing power of the Internet. More than once Weiwei, who...

And the nominees are…

The Nobel Peace Prize is handed out every year to a person or an organization that has acted according to the standards written by Alfred Nobel in his final will; “The whole of my remaining realisable estate shall be...

The Era Of The Digital – a lineage

The Daily We ‘The principal threat to the Richmond Daily News, and indeed to all newspapers small and large, was not competition from other newspapers but radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.’ As Clay Shirky explains the...
Book Review: “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World”

Book Review: “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World”

Imagine a place where there are no differences among people, everyone is living in a common space where the same language is spoken, borderless communication and free trade is frictionless and the freedom of speech is fully guaranteed. Yes,...
The Craigslist Circus

The Craigslist Circus

Craigslist censoredLast month a friend was planning a trip to the U.S and while trawling Craigslist for a short-stay apartment in New York she commented on her growing wariness of...

The Digital Revolution vs. the Cuban Revolution?

‘ since information wants to be free, then so do the people who have it - setting the stage for a titanic political struggle between the last Soviet-style dictatorship in the world and the first Internet insurgency. Call it...

Democracy of the Algorithm

Working on the Society of the Query conference, I often find myself confronted with an unquestioned believe in what are believed to be the empowering or even emancipating qualities of universally accessible open and free information. Michael Stevenson once...

South Park and the Demise of the Big Other

Unsurprisingly, yet another South Park episode has made the news recently. And as usual, the comments have ranged from praise and approval to shock (and even subtly worded death wishes?). In pure South Park fashion, “Dead Celebrities” is a...

Response to sarahnats: What is Causing the Decline in Wikipedia Participation?

This short article is a response to sarahnats’ article “What is Causing the Decline in Wikipedia Participation”? You can see this short article as a further extension of her argumentation structure and my own experience of adding information to...