Category: Entries

Authors: Yasmin Curzi and Cynthia Khoo Harm is the result of words, actions (or even inactions) that cause physical, emotional, or psychological damage to someone, including violence, defamation, or economic loss. This extends to potentially non-tangible damage, including driving a person or group of people to fear for their physical, emotional, or psychological safety, experience anxiousness, limit their… Continue reading Harm (Online Harm)

Authors: Yasmin Curzi and Terri Harel This entry presents: (I) a brief history of the concept of harassment; (II) some of its variations – e.g., harassment in the workplace, in the streets; and (III) the concept of online harassment or cyberharassment. (i) The initiative of feminist lawyers in the US, in the 1980s, for the… Continue reading Harassment

Author: Paddy Leerssen The concept of governance offers a ‘decentered’ perspective on regulation, which does not emanate solely from the state but instead emerges from (complex, interactive) constellations of public and private stakeholders. In the words of Julia Black, “‘[g]overnance’ is a much-debated term, but most definitions revolve around the observation that both public and… Continue reading Governance

Nicolo Zingales Digital gatekeepers are the equivalent of the guardians of critical infrastructure (e.g., highway, railway, utilities, and telecommunications) in the digital world. Thus, the focal element of this definition is the critical nature of the services they provide, in enabling both the enjoyment of services that are considered essential for digital citizenship and the provision… Continue reading Digital Gatekeeper

Author: Vittorio Bertola This entry (i) introduces the concept and classification of Internet filters, (ii) provides a more detailed (but very general) analysis of network filters, and (iii) provides a similar analysis of endpoint filters. (i) An introduction to Internet filters An Internet (content) filter is a piece of software (and, sometimes, of specialized hardware)… Continue reading Filter

Author: Cynthia Khoo ‘Flagging’ is a common “mechanism for reporting offensive content to a social media platform” (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016) or other digital platforms, and refers to the act itself of clicking or otherwise demarcating that a specific social media post, link, video, or other content should be removed or reviewed by the platform.… Continue reading Flagging

Author: Yasmin Curzi Federation refers to a group of individuals, servers or applications that operate in a decentralized manner, following a common protocol. It typically involves the exchange of data and services between two or more cloud service providers, sometimes for security reasons (logging into a website through another service’s more secure protocols), but also… Continue reading Federated Services

Author: Luca Belli Fact-checking has gained prominence as a concept, in light of the global proportions gained by the divulgation of fabricated and misleading content, frequently categorized as ‘fake news’ or misinformation/disinformation. The term ‘fact-checking’ however can refer to two different types of activities depending on whether it is performed as parts of editorial responsibility, before… Continue reading Fact-checking

Author: Catalina Goanta and Vittorio Bertola End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is the use of cryptography implemented through the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS) for the protection of a message so that it can only be read by the communicating users (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2020; W3C, 2015) , and not by third parties acting as intermediaries in… Continue reading End-to-End Encryption

Author: Chris Wiersma In legal dictionaries, the term ‘duty of care’ has been put either as a (general) principle of “prudence, meticulousness, care” or an obligation thereto (Le Docte Legal Dictionary in Four Languages, 2011). It is generally defined as “having regard to interests” (id.) while it could refer to a specific and closed type… Continue reading Duty of Care