In Germany, cash is the only unrestricted legal tender and still the most commonly used means of payment. Compared with non-cash means of payment, cash is an important corrective in payment transactions. No other non-cash means of payment achieves a similarly high level of inclusion and provides comparable protection of privacy. Nevertheless, the use of non-cash means of payment continues to increase in Germany. Card-based payment methods are of particular importance - either directly with the plastic card (debit or credit card) or with the virtual card via which non-cash payment methods are processed in the background, as is common in mobile payment and Internet payment methods.

BigTechs - large companies with established technology platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, and Facebook - are now established players in payments. Given the increasing presence and market power of U.S. card providers and BigTechs, as well as the likely growing influence of Chinese BigTechs in payments, the question of how to preserve the European banking industry's ability to act will arise more strongly in the future.

The TAB report provides an overview of developments in payment transactions up to and including February 2021, examining and comparing the specific characteristics of cash and selected non-cash payment solutions as well as payment behavior in Germany, Sweden, and China. The brief study is rounded off by an examination of the changing power structure in payment transactions as a result of the emergence of new players and the reactions of traditional credit institutions and central banks to this.

The TAB report and the accompanying policy brief TAB-Fokus Nr. 37 (both currently only in German) are available online. An English translation of the TAB-Fokus will follow soon.

On 3 March 2020, AlgorithmWatch launched a project to monitor Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm. Volunteers could install a browser add-on that scraped their Instagram newsfeeds. Data was sent to a database we used to study how Instagram prioritizes pictures and videos in a user’s timeline.

Over the last 14 months, about 1,500 volunteers installed the add-on. With their data, we were able to show that Instagram likely encouraged content creators to post pictures that fit specific representations of their body, and that politicians were likely to reach a larger audience if they abstained from using text in their publications (Facebook denied both claims). Although we could not conduct a precise audit of Instagram’s algorithm, this research is among the most advanced studies ever conducted on the platform. The project was supported by the European Data Journalism Network and by the Dutch foundation SIDN. It was done in partnership with Mediapart in France, NOS, Groene Amsterdammer and Pointer in the Netherlands, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and was covered by dozens of news outlets over the world.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Recommended resources:

• MediaManipulation.Org
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Thank You for Posting: Smoking’s Lessons for Regulating Social Media. MIT Technology Review.
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Covid Hoaxes Are Using a Loophole to Stay Alive—Even after Content Is Deleted.” MIT Technology Review. 2020.
• Donovan, J. 2020. “Trump’s Viral Flu Tweet Proves America Is Losing the Battle against Covid Misinfo.” NBC News.
• Donovan, J., and boyd, d. 2019. “Stop the Presses? Moving From Strategic Silence to Strategic Amplification in a Networked Media Ecosystem” American Behavioral Scientist, September.

Philipp Staab is Professor of “Sociology of the Future of Work” at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). As a sociologist he deals with the topics of technology, work, political economy and social inequality. In his research in recent years, he has focused on the leading companies of the commercial Internet such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as various start-ups.

The event will be held in English.

Award-winning technology reporter Sarah Frier helps bring some clarity to the mysteries surrounding the tech giant in her book No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. The Bloomberg reporter delivers stories taken from the Instagram influencers and celebrities that have helped drive the app to such rapid growth, the employees and executives who have watched from behind the scenes, and the founders of Instagram themselves who give insight into the growth and change of the service.

Join INFORUM as Frier draws from her expertise in technology to navigate through this diverse cast of sources to paint a picture of how Instagram evolved to shape the online experience and fundamentally change how we engage with society.

In this lecture, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen will revisit the history of the first twenty years of relations between platforms and news publishers to identify the underlying dynamics that have shaped the development of our digital society, and will shape it for years to come. He argues that publishers have – sometimes reluctantly, but often actively – fueled the rise of platform companies by embracing the very real opportunities they provide. This is the case even though they also challenge publishers’ historically dominant position by competing for attention and advertising and by controlling key parts of the infrastructure of free expression. In the process publishers, like the rest of us, become increasingly empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and powerful platforms.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. Most of his research deals with news media organisations and their ongoing transformations, changing forms of digital media use in political and news-related contexts, political communication and campaign practices. He is involved in a wide range of different comparative research projects around the future of news, the changing business of journalism and the rise of digital media.

Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. by Rana Foroohar

The case of content moderation by online platforms offers an interesting example. Platforms, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are responsible for mediating much of the public discourse and governing access to speech and speakers around the world. Social media platforms use AI to match users and content, to adjudicate conflicting claims regarding the legitimate use of content on their systems and to detect and expeditiously remove illegal content. AI in content moderation is applied as a practical need to operate in a dynamic, ever growing digital landscape; as an innovative competitive advantage; or simply as measures to ensure legal compliance or to avoid a public outcry.

The use of AI to filter unwarranted content cannot be sufficiently addressed by traditional legal rights and procedures, since these tools are ill-equipped to address the robust, non-transparent and dynamic nature of governance by AI. Consequently, in a digital ecosystem governed by AI, we currently lack sufficient safeguards against the blocking of legitimate content. Moreover, we lack a space for negotiating meaning and for deliberating the legitimacy of particular speech.

Professor Elkin-Koren is the coauthor of The Limits of Analysis: Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (2012) and Law, Economics and Cyberspace: The effects of Cyberspace on the Economic Analysis of Law (2004). She is the coeditor of Law and Information Technology (2011) and The Commodification of Information (2002). Her publications are listed here.

In early 2016, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association known as IEEE, launched a “global initiative to advance ethics in technology.” After almost three years of work and multiple rounds of exchange with experts on the topic, it released last April the first edition of Ethically Aligned Design, a 300-page treatise on the ethics of automated systems.

The general principles issued in the report focus on transparency, human rights and accountability, among other topics. As such, they are not very different from the 83 other ethical guidelines that researchers from the Health Ethics and Policy Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reviewed in an article published in Nature Machine Intelligence in September. However, one key aspect makes IEEE different from other think-tanks. With over 420,000 members, it is the world’s largest engineers’ association with roots reaching deep into Silicon Valley. Vint Cerf, one of Google’s Vice Presidents, is an IEEE “life fellow.”

Because the purpose of the IEEE principles is to serve as a “key reference for the work of technologists”, and because many technologists contributed to their conception, we wanted to know how three technology companies, Facebook, Google and Twitter, were planning to implement them.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril Additional research: Veronika Thiel

Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and New America. She holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where she studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe. Between law school and her time at Yale, she clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York.

Kate has a background in cognitive psychology which she applies to the study of emerging issues in law and technology. Specifically, this has included research and work on the Internet's effect on freedom of expression and private platform governance. She writes and works on issues related to online shaming, artificial intelligence, robotics, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property.

Her work on these topics has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian and numerous other publications. 

Thomas Kadri is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School, a Resident Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a Mellon Fellow. His research looks at the impact of networked technologies on criminal and tort law, with a particular focus on the constitutional implications of cybersecurity and content moderation on online platforms. He is currently working on an article about how platforms are using anti-hacking laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to police “public” parts of the internet. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Maryland Law Review, the New York Times, and Slate. He is also an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches Cybercrime.

In the Global Governance Spotlight 2|2019, Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann examines the successes and deficits of previous norm-building processes and regulatory efforts in the field of social media, particularly at regional and global level. On this basis, five guidelines are named which could help to overcome the shortcomings of previous attempts of regulation.

Kettemann, Matthias C. (2019): Internationale Regeln für Soziale Medien: Menschenrechte wahren und Desinformation bekämpfen [International Rules for Social Media: Safeguarding Human Rights and Fighting Disinformation]. Global Governance Spotlight 2|2019.

This question of whether Facebook gathers information about users who are not signed in or do not have an account was raised in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal by lawmakers in hearings in the United States and in Europe. Discussions, as well as previous fines by Data Protection Authorities about the tracking of non-users, however, often focus on the tracking that happens on websites. Much less is known about the data that the company receives from apps. For these reasons, in this report we raise questions about transparency and use of app data that we consider timely and important.

Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using the free and open source software tool called "mitmproxy", an interactive HTTPS proxy, Privacy International has analyzed the data that 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from 10 to 500 million, transmit to Facebook through the Facebook SDK.

1. Community Standards

2. Proactively Identifying Harmful Content

3. Discouraging Borderline Content

4. Giving People Control and Allowing More Content

5. Addressing Algorithmic Bias

6. Building an Appeals Process

7. Independent Governance and Oversight

8. Creating Transparency and Enabling Research

9. Working Together on Regulation

...

Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment.

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001), and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (2007). Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including The New York Times, Bloomberg View, American Scholar, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, The Guardian, Esquire.com, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation.

For example, potential reviewers belong to Facebook groups (often with names like “deals” to obscure their true purpose) in which they can be contacted by sellers. Sellers offer them a free product, or sometimes even pay, in exchange for positive product reviews. In order to not draw attention to these incentivized reviews—which have already been banned—sellers instruct reviewers to do things like add similar products to their wish lists, and pay upfront, but accept reimbursement via PayPal at a later date. They also seek out reviewers with long-term Amazon accounts, as this adds credibility to their reviews.

Renee DiResta is the Director of Research at New Knowledge, and Head of Policy at nonprofit Data for Democracy. Renee investigates the spread of disinformation and manipulated narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem.