Big Tech's harmful impact on civic dicourse and civil society organizations
Civil society organizations need to be able to partake in civic discourse. We regularly receive signals indicating that organizations' and activists' freedom of communication online isn't sufficiently protected. So we decided to investigate how big this problem actually is. Over the past months, more than twenty civil society organizations active in the Netherlands came together to discuss the impact of large online platforms on their work. We facilitated the conversations with PILP and in March we shared our initial outcomes.
Activists and organizations participated from movements fighting for women's rights, climate justice, anti-racism, and the rights of migrants and undocumented people. The conversations surfaced a clear, but also troubling, picture. And the similarities between movements were striking. The four most pressing issues are the impact of recommender systems, content moderation, online hate, and a high degree of dependency. Find out more here.
In the coming year we will continue to explore avenues of change, including strategic litigation, campaigning and enforcement.