While the social media and digital platforms started with an objective to enhance social connectivity and information sharing, they also present a significant challenge in content moderation resulting in spreading disinformation. Disinformation Paradox is a phenomenon where an attempt to regulate harmful content online can inadvertently amplifies it. The social media platforms often serve as breeding grounds for disinformation. This chapter discusses the inherent difficulties in moderating content at a large scale, different responses of these platforms and potential solutions.

Platform governance and regulation have been salient political issues in Brazil for years, particularly as part of Congress’ response to democratic threats posed by former President Bolsonaro. The question became even more important after the January 8th attempted insurrection in Brasília, which many blame on social media. This includes the newly installed Lula administration. In a letter read on the February 2023 UNESCO “Internet for Trust” global conference, the President, now in his third (non-consecutive) term in office wrote that the attack on the nation’s seats of power was “the culmination of a campaign, initiated much before, and that used, as ammunition, lies and disinformation,” which “was nurtured, organized, and disseminated through several digital platforms and messaging apps.” The new administration has made platform regulation a policy priority, with regulatory and administrative pushes across the board. Brazil has been a battleground where proposals for platform responsibility have been advanced — and disputed.

Global platforms present novel challenges. They serve as powerful conduits of commerce and global community. Yet their power to influence political and consumer behavior is enormous. Their responsibility for the use of this power – for their content – is statutorily limited by national laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. National efforts to demand and guide appropriate content moderation, and to avoid private abuse of this power, is in tension with concern in liberal states to avoid excessive government regulation, especially of speech. Diverse and sometimes contradictory national rules responding to these tensions on a national basis threaten to splinter platforms, and reduce their utility to both wealthy and poor countries. This edited volume sets out to respond to the question whether a global approach can be developed to address these tensions while maintaining or even enhancing the social contribution of platforms.

Ever since the 1960s, Russophone professional and lay authors have been leaving the printed page and climbing onto other – and, with time, online – platforms, and pairing words with (moving) images with fervour. How should we define their activities? How should we assess their visual and digital experiments? Can a social-media entry in verse by a poet be considered literature? To what extent can the text-oriented tools of traditional literary studies help us unpack GIF-laden online stories? And how do understandings of literature as a highbrow cultural practice help us to understand social-media odes to classics by teenagers? This chapter follows the forms that Russophone literary activities have taken beyond print outlets, paying special attention to digital-writing forms. It surveys literary production across websites, social media, and other digital platforms from the mid−1990s to the early 2020s by authors including Olia Lialina, Roman Leibov, Linor Goralik, Dmitrii Vodennikov, and Galina Rymbu.

It has long been argued that digital textuality fundamentally alters familiar conceptions of literary authorship. Critics such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Mark Poster have articulated a conception whereby the interactive affordances of digital textuality level the playing field between author and reader. Rather than consuming the text passively, readers become “coauthors,” actively creating a unique narrative through their interactions and narrative choices. While these bold prophesies may not have materialized, digital textuality has worked to challenge the model of individual authorship. This chapter looks at two contemporary practices that serve to promote and “normalize” group authorship: fanfiction and social reading. It provides a literary history of collective authorship and analyzes the pressure that fan sites like FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are putting on our conventional means of evaluating literary excellence, notably by challenging conceptions of originality and distinctiveness. It also considers how another facet of digital reading – social reading, as practiced on sites like Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter – is creating new feedback loops between authors and readers, facilitating the development of new “interpretive communities,” and working to undermine the centrality of the solitary genius and the solitary reader to literary production and reception.

The foundations of the separation of powers principle and those of antitrust present an actual and renewed interest, as we are currently witnessing a resurgence of non-economic concerns in the antitrust literature. This observation especially relates to the United States, but many issues raised in this country are also relevant in other jurisdictions. Several key provisions of antitrust national laws or European treaties are rather vague, leaving broad room for interpretation, and have remained unchanged in substance for decades, which may open a connection between the political content of antitrust viewed historically and prospectively; to a certain extent, the ball is now in the court of agencies and courts. The concentration of power in the digital era constitutes the starting point of the analysis, which continues with the observation that some digital platforms have significant political power and ends with the idea that such platforms have become important or even fundamental parts of the digital infrastructure of democracy.

This essay approaches David Tracy’s theme of conversation (‘which animates … the whole posture and method of Tracy’s career’) primarily as social and civil practice. Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity (1987) is brought into conversation with present-day cultural critic Sherry Turkle regarding how digitalised communications magnify the ‘interruptions’ of plurality and ambiguity that Tracy suggested mark all conversation. Some early critics suggested that Plurality and Ambiguity: (1) insufficiently considered the ambiguities of one’s interlocutors in conversation; and (2) ignored imperatives for some participants to resist powerful others’ framings of the rational task. Here, our digital situation can help highlight how deep down plurality and ambiguity stretch within any given conversation; as well as how socially fragile and crucial this phenomenon of conversation is. The world of deliberately designed digital platforms highlights how there is always some particular design to ‘the table’ at which conversation participants convene. Theology must learn the necessity of building a culture of genuine theological conversation by means of deliberate and detailed design decisions.

The separation of powers principle and antitrust both relate to power and, notably, deal with the concentration of power. However, they are usually conceptualized, analyzed, and promoted separately. Separation of powers primarily refers to branches of government or to the main functions of the state and, in this respect, to public or state power or powers, while the economic power of private or, to a lesser extent, public firms is at the core of antitrust. Though appealing, this distinction is not clear-cut. These powers interact with one another. The concentration of politico-economic power in one or a few hands also raises fundamental issues in a democracy. Currently, and in the future, special attention must be given to the fact that a few digital platforms contribute to the digital infrastructure of democracy.

The digital economy raises important concerns relating to the concentration of economic-political power and, consequently, to the separation of powers in a broad sense, or more narrowly to checks and balances. Several recent or proposed pieces of legislation, especially in Australia, the European Union, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States aim at tackling some issues posed by large digital platforms. These recent or proposed pieces of legislation all address important issues in the digital economy, and some of them could contribute to reduce entrenched market concentration, however, to a degree that remains to be defined. The most comprehensive set of bills from this perspective was introduced in the U.S. Congress during the last two years. However, even in this country, the concentration of politico-economic power in a few firms and the control of the digital infrastructure of democracy by them would remain widely unregulated, as in other countries, should Congress pass the proposed bills.

Describes the characteristics of digital platforms and the debates about the need for regulation of such platforms. Also sets out the policies that have been introduced in different jurisdictions

I introduce the question of what digital technology is – why it is so powerful, why it is different in kind from other media – by focusing on the convergence of two themes. First: Regarded as a tool, digital technology does not really do anything; it does not straightforwardly act on the material world. Unlike steam engines or wheels, it performs no particular physical task. Its scope of action is unspecified and unrestricted. Second: It is a social technology. Its appeal does not reside only in its instrumental means and uses, but in its power to connect us into a single global nervous system. This is in part because information technology is a technology of intentional responses. By responding to us in terms of information and by making our responses themselves the subject of measurement, digital devices engage us personally and in kind. These features thus represent the twin promises of total effectiveness and total responsiveness; that is, digital technology is both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others. It is this synthesis of measurement with medium – of quantitative analysis with social reality – that is most distinctive and transformative about it.