Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Ebooks have emerged as one of the popular means of reading, but little is known about how ebook usage by the general public and the ability of public lending libraries to serve their patrons are being constrained by various sociocultural factors such as restrictive licensing agreements that publishers demand. This study identifies the various constraints through the lens of Lessig's four modalities to better understand how the ecosystem of ebooks that includes legal and economic conditions is affected by the modalities. In doing so, this study examines the shift towards the licensing of ebooks and the proprietary schemes of digital rights management with a particular focus on the diminishing capability of public lending libraries to advance the public interest in a democratic society. In the age of licensing, the mission of public libraries as 'equalizing institutions' should be upheld to the fullest.

AbstractBuilding upon previous studies that divide the governance of digital platforms into three eras (Flew, 2021; Bowers & Zittrain, 2020), this study investigates how one of the most influential digital platforms, Google, has handled removal requests from governments. By sketching the regulatory terrain of Google, the current study seeks a more balanced understanding of content moderation. This study selected an exploratory case study approach using Google's Transparency reports and accompanying public data sets relating to governments' content removal requests filed for all Google products from 2009 to 2021. The findings reveal a growing influence of nation states on moderating online content, delineating the surging point as occurring in 2016. In addition to the sheer increase of take‐down requests raised in various areas, since 2016 the trend of government interventions has outpaced those of courts; during the same period, Google, which had been more compliant with court decisions than with governmental entities' requests, showed similar compliance with government requests. The results also demonstrate how the practices of requesting content removal differed by political system while singling out Russia's distinctive characteristics. This study sheds light on our understanding of the role of nation states in shaping online environments in the era of platformization.

Growing political distrust in digital platforms has galvanized policy debates about how to best address issues associated with their market power and ad-run business models—including the proliferation of misinformation, privacy threats, and electoral interference. The range of proposed solutions includes growing calls for public-private policy regimes, such as co-regulation. Such proposals envision a role for digital platforms in addressing platform-related problems, whose contours need to be defined. In this article, we examine how platform companies attempt to influence these debates and define this role, focusing on the biggest U.S. digital platform companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. We conduct a content analysis of a sample of 2019 public policy blogs, statements, and testimonies by key personnel at these companies to gain insight into (a) the policy issues they engage, (b) the policy preferences they communicate, and (c) what these communications reveal about their regulatory philosophies and visions of platform governance. The findings shed light on the politics underlying the debates over platform governance and provide insight into what co-regulatory approaches might look like in practice. We call these policy paradigms "frictionless regulation": light and narrow regulatory oversight confined to baseline standard-setting, receptive to the private sector's ongoing feedback, and prioritizing fast responsiveness to market needs over the slow and deliberative responsiveness to the public that is typical of democratic governance.

Drawing on the concept of information subsidy, this study explores the network neutrality debate in the context of Twitter. Content analysis of the top 150 most retweeted URLs demonstrates that the composition of information subsidizers on Twitter was more or less evenly divided among stakeholders, including government, industry, nonprofit/advocacy, and experts. Despite the diversity of sources, there was a clear lack of diversity in stance. The majority of sources displayed a favorable attitude toward net neutrality. Our findings highlight the potential of Twitter to represent the position of resource-poor information subsidizers, including advocacy groups, entrepreneurs, and race-based online communities, as they seek to uphold the neutrality of the Internet.

This study employs content and network analysis techniques to explore the predictors of opinion leadership in a political activism network on Twitter. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using user-generated content to measure user characteristics. The characteristics were analyzed to predict users' performance in the network. According to the results, Twitter users with higher connectivity and issue involvement are better at influencing information flow on Twitter. User connectivity was measured by betweenness centrality, and issue involvement was measured by a user's geographic proximity to a given event and the contribution of engaging tweets. In addition, the results show that tweets by organizations had greater influence than those by individual users.

This study investigates the features of fake news networks and how they spread during the 2020 South Korean election. Using actor–network theory (ANT), we assessed the network's central players and how they are connected. Results reveal the characteristics of the videoclips and channel networks responsible for the propagation of fake news. Analysis of the videoclip network reveals a high number of detected fake news videos and a high density of connections among users. Assessment of news videoclips on both actual and fake news networks reveals that the real news network is more concentrated. However, the scale of the network may play a role in these variations. Statistics for network centralization reveal that users are spread out over the network, pointing to its decentralized character. A closer look at the real and fake news networks inside videos and channels reveals similar trends. We find that the density of the real news videoclip network is higher than that of the fake news network, whereas the fake news channel networks are denser than their real news counterparts, which may indicate greater activity and interconnectedness in their transmission. We also found that fake news videoclips had more likes than real news videoclips, whereas real news videoclips had more dislikes than fake news videoclips. These findings strongly suggest that fake news videoclips are more accepted when people watch them on YouTube. In addition, we used semantic networks and automated content analysis to uncover common language patterns in fake news, which helps us better understand the structure and dynamics of the networks involved in the dissemination of fake news. The findings reported here provide important insights on how fake news spread via social networks during the South Korean election of 2020. The results of this study have important implications for the campaign against fake news and ensuring factual coverage.