Edri.org Website Review

11.12.2018 Fourte*nth conference e-Society.mk: Media literate citizens for accountable institutions Violations of human rights online, most notably the right to data protection, can pose a real threat to electoral security and societal polarisation. Yet, we are still missing a comprehensive understanding that commercial and political misuse of digital tools are two sides of the same coin – and that we can neither afford weighing digital rights against economic benefits, nor encroaching on citizen’s liberties through ever-new ways of filtering and monitoring. In this series of blogposts, we’ll explain the relationship between digital rights and security objectives. The first part of the series focuses on the role of strong privacy regimes in resilience against The Cambridge An*lytica Scandal, exposed the use of the information from millions of Facebook users for a perverse form of granular revealed that the tracking, monitoring and as*essment of citizens’ online behaviour could not only be used for stalking people with commercial advertising. In a much more sinister twist, we had to realise that targeting individuals with pinpoint displays of advertising based on inferences from their personal data opened the door for election interference and disinformation campaigns on an Moreover, motivating one’s most dedicated followers with glorifying information about the own candidacy or organisation, while simultaneously targeting people more inclined to support another movement to suppress their voting intention, suddenly came into the To a great extent, such practices exploit and amplify the already in itself worrying tendency of social networks and internet platforms to create “echo chambers” in which citizens are only presented with news and content that mirrors their own political views, but does not reflect and balance the diversity of opinions within societal debate. When such echo chambers are targeted with dedicated political messages, their already explosive societal potential is set aflame.