Human Rights

By Brett Solomon On October 28, 2021, before the United Nations Security Council, Access Now spoke on addressing and countering online hate speech and preventing incitement to discrimination, hostility, and violence on social media. The Security Council is the United Nations’ most powerful body, with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” This ...

Our Cyber Threats Research Centre colleagues couldn’t host an in-person TASM Conference this year, but instead organised a week of virtual events from 21 to 25 June 2021. This post is the third in a three-part series based on overviews of three of the virtual TASM panels . Read parts one and two. [Ed.] By Lucy Brown The Christchurch terrorist ...

By Tech Against Terrorism Support mechanisms, legal certainty, and safeguards needed to avoid negative impact On 28 April the EU Parliament announced that the regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online had been approved. On 7 June, the law, which was initially introduced by the Commission and has gone through several iterations, entered into force and ...

By Hoda Hashem The UK government is proposing a new UK counter-terrorism bill. But can it really strike a balance between liberty and security? The UK has a long history of controversial counter-terrorism measures. The most recent is the proposed Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill 2018. Home Secretary Sajid Javid recently denied that the new ...

Content removal on social media platforms often takes place through semi-automated or automated processes. Algorithms are widely used for content filtering and content removal processes1, including on social media platforms, directly impacting freedom of expression and raising rule of law concerns (e.g. questions of legality, legitimacy and proportionality). While large social media platforms like Google or Facebook have ...

By Dia Kayyali and Raja Althaibani So much of Syria’s history has been purposefully erased by ISIS in recent years. And now, we’re seeing another erasure of history– this time on YouTube. Thousands of videos showing human rights abuses in Syria, as well as the channels that feature these videos, are being removed by YouTube. ...

Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online and Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America, testified on Tuesday before the the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Sub-committee on Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade on ‘The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda: The Paris Attack and Social Media.’ MacKinnon will be speaking at VOX-Pol’s 5 – 6 March workshop at Central ...