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A large number of the world’s population is now living online. Since 2016 especially, there has been a huge increase in people’s connectivity and interest in social media. The year 2016 also witnessed several online controversies and events both globally and locally during the elections in the USA, the Ghana elections and the Gambian elections that happened almost concurrently. About half of the world's population, most of whom are probably women or those not living in urban areas, do not...
In the recent report from Privacy International, From Oppression to Liberation: Reclaiming the Right to Privacy, author Eva Blum-Dumontet frames privacy legislation as a “protector of human dignity and an enabler of autonomy”. Privacy allows women and members of marginalised communities to create safe spaces of expression and makes available tools that challenge norms that restrict equality, access and control. On the other hand, the report provides insight on the ways that privacy has be...
There are so many places to get porn. The online space is awash with naked bodies, a good majority of them on there consensually and a small but disturbing proportion not. The watching of naked bodies is big business, with one porn-based hub stating that in 2018 alone, 111 years (or one million hours) were uploaded onto their platform. This would mean that even if you dedicated your entir...
The sociotechnical infrastructure that determines the way human activity is conducted largely functions within broader structures of surveillance capitalism and biopower. The former recognises the effective monetisation of data and information about people for (economic) activity. When probed, these inherent structures reveal an irreconcilability between modern surveillance states and fundament...
The headline in a media report of 23 March 2017 says “BJP’s social media campaign in Manipur was a hit”. According to the report, the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) kicked off a high-pitched social media campaign in Manipur on more than 100 WhatsApp groups, a number of Facebook pages, Twitter handles and Twitter channels. This proves to be true considering the result. Comparatively, in the 2...
“So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is 'in the past.' This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might kill me. It is a very heavy burden.” These words from Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne Gay are more or less the exact words a victim of...
Every day the term "revenge porn" appears in newspaper headlines around the world and its translations are entering people’s vocabularies everywhere from China to France. Despite its growing popularity, research published in 2018 identified a universal rejection of the term "revenge porn" among activists and researchers. They see it as a misleading term and they have set about developing more...
As corporations and country leaders are propelling the world towards a digital society and information age, a large percentage of the population in the Philippines still does not have access to basic voice and SMS communication, let alone internet connectivity. With just under 70% mobile phone penetration, populations that are isolated geographically and relatively poor are often considered “...
For those with access to the internet, Wikipedia is the benchmark of common knowledge. The processes of knowledge production are inevitably fraught with imbalances of power: Who gets to write and gets written about? Who gets to speak and who among them is heard? What gets illuminated as authoritative and credible knowledge; what gets dismissed as unverifiable or insignificant? Who gets erased f...
![Queerness and privacy [1]: Baby I love It when you never hold back from me](https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/350x350/public/queerness.jpg?itok=8IV4rAPD)
It isn’t the legal definition of privacy that has ever bothered me as a black queer femme man, it has always just been the public practice of it with regards to me and my community. From a time that I can remember, very little of anything has remained exclusively mine. I’m that little kid that went around showing everyone the green mucus on their handkerchief. I knew that it wasn't somethin...
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