This Week In Cyberspace

5 days ago, a strict new anti-LGBTQ+ bill called the Human Sexual rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill was introduced, which threatens to incite a witch hunt against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people fighting for their rights to express themselves and have privacy in Ghana, both online and off. It's part of a disturbing worldwide trend to vilify and control 'the other&#3...

How can we tell if fake news is real when, despite the facts, some people swear by it? And how do we judge the veracity of a artificially generated videos when we see them on Facebook? Two First Amendment cases started in the US Supreme Court yesterday concerning social media laws in Texas and Florida. The State's claim the platforms are exercising “freewheeling censorship”, while they say the...

The ex KGB lieutenant colonel has a Presidential election in just under a month, and aside from silencing dissenters, he’s making sure that any information Russian citizens might find on the internet is singing his praises. With the seriously suspicious death of opposition leader Alexi Navalny four days ago and the arrest of around 400 people who came out to mourn him, Putin is going for gold as a...

2023 has been BIG! We’ve covered the Open AI soap opera, the Internet Governance Forum, the Digital Occupation of Gaza and so much more. So where does all this leave us sensitive receptors as we head into the New Year? We wrap the year in wrapping paper and wish it well as we venture forth into unchartered territory.

Two landmark pieces of international text were agreed upon this week -  the final text of COP28’s first global stocktake calling on countries to transition away from fossil fuels, and the European Union’s provisional Act to put a few guardrails around the development of Artificial Intelligence. With lots of get-out clauses for polluters to lean on, and loopholes for Big Tech to jump through, it&#3...

What kind of a future can the United Nations offer us? As COP28 wraps up, we struggle to find any positives. There's the Loss and Damage Fund but no phase out of fossil fuel extraction on the horizon. In the midst of all the the horse-trading, the Australian Government signs on to the pledge to triple renewables while the opposition backs the nuclear option. Meanwhile, Pacific Island Nations t...

In this episode of TWICS we continue our examination of the UN's climate summit in Dubai. With 2,500 registered delegates connected to the coal, oil and gas industry and the President of COP28 showing a distinct disregard for climate science, the international conference is proceeding on shaky ground. Could it be that snake oil is the biggest commodity being pedalled in the host country this y...

2023 is set to be the hottest year on record. So how will climate justice be achieved at COP28 when climate activists are relegated to a space far away from the conference and actively surveilled by an authoritarian petro-state? The only way to decouple the world economy from fossil fuels is through an active climate movement. So will free speech, independent media and the right to protest be resp...

Not since 1985 when the Apple board got rid of Steve Jobs has there been such an upheaval in the tech sector as there was last Friday when Sam Altman, the 38 year old CEO of Open AI (the not-for-profit that runs CHATGPT), was fired . It was a board coup that also saw the company’s president and three senior researchers resign. Investors were ropeable, especially the CEO of Microsoft who tried to m...

The digital dimension of the conflict in the Middle East is taking a toll as Israel cuts off connectivity to what was already fairly limited access in Gaza. Palestinians are unable to contact family and friends and urgent aid channels are being interrupted. Internet platforms are not making it any easier. Between October 7 and 18, there was over 103,000 cases of hate speech and/or incitement in He...

This Week In Cyberspace we catch up with Brett Solomon in an airport in Ottawa. He’s on his way to Washington DC to find out how human rights online are being factored into Digitalisation Policies by a new breed of Digital Ambassadors. And how do these international policies align with internet freedom?

The Asia Pacific Internet Governance Forum is on in Brisbane with hundreds of delegates from the region gathering to discuss how to govern the unwieldy beast that is the world wide web of things. With many large states wanting to govern the online space on their own right, how can users get a seat at the table and prevent the internet becoming the splinternet? And how can we bring a human rights a...

This year, the climate summit COP28 will be held in one of the richest oil producing Petrostates. But is the United Arab Emirates the best place to be hosting a conference about reducing carbon emissions? As one of the world's biggest emitters per capita, the UAE also has some pretty strict laws against protesting. We look at this and the use of spyware against activists in the first of our CO...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused the 'No' campaign in the referendum on a Voice to Parliament for First Nations Australians of using AI to spread misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms. We look at the forces behind this push and the responsibility of tech giants, governments and individuals to police it.

The blue bird of happiness has been X-communicated. From 7 characters to just one, Twitter has become X - the personal plaything of the richest man in the world. The new brand aligns with Elon Musk's other ventures - Space X, X AI, even his son’s name X Æ A-12 (which his mother Grimes explained "represented the unknown variable, and her elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intel...

This week   we turn our attention to Saudi Arabia where a futuristic megacity called Neom is being built.  Tech giants Google and Microsoft have just signed massive deals to set up data storage facilities there but what are the implications of doing business with a repressive regime?

The digital dimensions of violence against women and girls online is a growing problem. Online gender-based violence ( OGBV ), Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls (CVAWG), Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) - they're all on the rise worldwide. Acronyms aside, how can the rights of women and girls be better defended in the digital space? And why is the internet set up for s...

 While actors are concerned that their image will be used forever in perpetuity by AI, tech workers in Kenya are worried about the mental health impacts of filtering out abusive content so that we can safely use systems like ChatGPT. Content moderators in Kenya are currently suing META for a range of things including lack of mental health support, because they have to review violent and sometimes...

Welcome to series 2 of This Week In Cyberspace where we look at human rights in the digital age through the lens of Artificial Intelligence. For as long as the Internet has been operative, alternative gender expression online has been a thing. But with the use of AI by corporations and governments to collect personal data, and often weaponise it against citizens, this space is no longer as safe as...

In the final episode of Season 1 we take a closer look at Artificial Intelligence, specifically Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Models (or GLLMMMs). These Golem Class AIs have the experts spooked and yet the five giant tech companies are already rolling them out to the public with no safeguards for society. And as we know, an unregulated tech space adversely creates a toxic online environmen...

Digital rights are being eroded in Australia with an Act of Parliament that enables surveillance, modification of data, interception of communications and even account takeovers. Earlier this year, the Attorney-General publicly released the Privacy Act Review of the Identify and Disrupt Bill, otherwise known as the hacking bill. But will this result in changes that are, in the words of Electronic...

It all began as a centre for tech utopia but it’s turned into something quite uncontrollable. Silicon Valley - home of the digitally free and technologically brave - is its own unleashed beast. But with no ethics surrounding the development of this seemingly limitless computer industry, has it now got us all by the short and curlies?

How the hell can we protect ourselves from the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence? As human brains compete with digital minds, The Future for Life Institute is proposing watermarking systems to trace AI provenance, and liability for harm caused by runaway products. But with Microsoft’s decision to ditch its entire AI ethics team this week, and the European Union scheduled to vote on the EU A...

There’s a growing spyware industry that uses human rights-abusing technology to spy on people’s daily business. But on March 27,  just two days before the launch of the 2nd U.S. Summit for Democracy in Washington D.C., there was a major victory for human rights activists when President Biden made an executive order to ban US  federal agencies from using commercial spyware .This is a significant vi...

With 187 Internet shutdowns in 35 countries in 2022, the relationship between democracy and technology is top of mind for many humanitarians. A prime forum to thrash out some of the nuances of this partnership will be the second U.S. Summit for Democracy, which takes place in Washington from March 29-30. Access Now is co-leading the Technology for Democracy Cohort in partnership with the U.K. and...