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COVID-19 and the Internet: Lessons Learned
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new nor- mal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post- COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future
Weizenbaum Report 2023: Politische Partizipation in Deutschland
Get PDFDer Weizenbaum Report ist eine jährlich erscheinende Publikation zur politischen Partizipation in Deutschland. Er stellt Befunde der bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Befragung der Forschungseinheit Weizenbaum Panel vor, die seit 2019 durchgeführt wird. Im Zentrum steht die Untersuchung verschiedener Formen politischer Partizipation im Zeitverlauf und ihre Entwicklung unter Digitalisierungsbedingungen. Die vierte Welle aus dem Jahr 2022 legte dabei neben der sich wandelnden Rolle digitaler Medien für das politische Handeln einen Schwerpunkt auf autoritäre Einstellungen, die als Treiber antidemokratischer Beteiligung fungieren. Zudem wurde den Auswirkungen sozialer Ungleichheit auf die politische Teilhabe nachgegangen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen die ambivalente Haltung gegenüber den Auswirkungen von KI und sozialen Medien sowie Muster politischer Beteiligung autoritär eingestellter Personen auf.This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“
What the Scientific Community Needs from Data Access under Art. 40 DSA: 20 Points on Infrastructures, Participation, Transparency, and Funding
Get PDFArticle 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) creates for the first time a clear regulation that grants science independence from individual platforms and improved data quality, thus ensuring that socially relevant aspects of digitization can be investigated appropriately, consistently, and independently. It makes it possible to respond more quickly and accurately to new issues and developments in an evidence-based manner, thus contributing to a fair, digital public sphere that considers societal risks and opportunities.
This policy paper aims to inform the expected Delegated Act of the EU Commission as well as the legislative process for the German Digital Services Act (Digitale Dienste Gesetz) and to formulate necessities from the perspective of platform researchers. This perspective is of utmost importance, as research on systemic risks depends on the expertise of scientific actorsThis work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“
In Generative AI we Trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information?
Get PDFThis article presents a comparative analysis of the ability of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots, ChatGPT and Bing Chat, recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot, to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ+ related debates. We compare how the chatbots perform in high- and low-resource languages by using prompts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Furthermore, we explore the ability of chatbots to evaluate statements according to political communication concepts of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theory, using definition-oriented prompts. We also systematically test how such evaluations are influenced by source bias which we model by attributing specific claims to various political and social actors. The results show high performance of ChatGPT for the baseline veracity evaluation task, with 72 percent of the cases evaluated correctly on average across languages without pre-training. Bing Chat performed worse with a 67 percent accuracy. We observe significant disparities in how chatbots evaluate prompts in high- and low-resource languages and how they adapt their evaluations to political communication concepts with ChatGPT providing more nuanced outputs than Bing Chat. Finally, we find that for some veracity detection-related tasks, the performance of chatbots varied depending on the topic of the statement or the source to which it is attributed. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based chatbots in tackling different forms of false information in online environments, but also points to the substantial variation in terms of how such potential is realized due to specific factors, such as language of the prompt or the topic
Employee involvement and participation in digital transformation: a combined analysis of literature and practitioners' expertise
Get PDFThis paper provides a systematization of the existing body of literature on both employee participation goals and the intervention formats in the context of organizational change. Furthermore, degrees of employee involvement that the intervention formats address are identified and related to the goals of employee participation. On this basis, determinants of employee involvement and participation in the context of digital transformation are unveiled
Purple Code – With Renata Ávila
No full textWe talk about Renata’s experiences as a human rights lawyer and her work with regards to massive human rights violations of indigenous people in Latin America. She elaborates on the potentials of technology when in the hands of people and how she dealt with testimony material and archives, with hours and hours of testimonies. The impermanence of the human rights internet and the lack of support of archives when we discuss human rights violations is one central moment in this episode: many of the websites are gone, many of the documentation about human rights abuses and the battle for accountability vanished. Renata elaborates on the accessibility of relevant material for the public interest and the anachronic copyright laws and restrictions due to geo-location and geographic restrictions
Sustainable Digital Sovereignty. Interdependencies Between Sustainable Digitalization and Digital Sovereignty
Get PDFThis study is dedicated to the interdependencies between digital sovereignty and sustainable digitalization, which need to be explicitly linked to an increasing degree in political discourse, aca- demia, and societal debates. Digital skills are the prerequisites for shaping digitalization in the in- terest of society and sustainable development
The digital transformation of knowledge order: a model for the analysis of the epistemic crisis
Get PDFIn a proclaimed age of ‘post-truth,’ scholars have raised concerns about the spread of false information and the questioning of epistemic authorities. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to capture the digital transformation of knowledge order. Drawing on insights from social epistemology, sociology and history of knowledge, and media history, we identify epistemic practices as basic elements of knowledge order. We then analyze how epistemic practices are organized into an overarching structure of knowledge phases, contexts, roles, and hierarchies. Digital media tend to destabilize the traditional knowledge order. This destabilization is characterized by a more flexible order of phases, a dissolution of boundaries between contexts, an opening of professional roles to new actors, and a flattening of hierarchies