What's on Digital Medusa's mind? Open Source Digital Governance and Open, Secure Internet
Welcome to DigitalMedusa’s Newsletter. Many things have been happening in the Digital Governance world that DigitalMedusa is trying to tackle or is following. See below, it’s exciting stuff I promise!
Welcome to DigitalMedusa’s Newsletter. Many things have been happening in the Digital Governance world that DigitalMedusa is trying to tackle or is following. See below, it’s exciting stuff I promise!
Mind the gap
There is a wide and deep gap between digital trust and safety and digital infrastructure governance. Recently, a few things happened in the social media realm that showed why we need to know about both infrastructure governance and trust and safety issues. One example of this is BlueSky (the social media app that is built on a decentralized protocol). Digital Medusa published a piece about why domain name registries and registrars might get involved with trust and safety issues on BlueSky. If we do not pay attention to how BlueSky’s governance and domain name registries and registrars governance intersect, we can’t come up with a holistic trust and safety governance structure. So in a nutshell, asking for an expansion to BlueSky’s trust and safety team is not enough.
My first ever Request For Comment (9446 was the lucky number)
I co-authored my first ever RFC, along with Schenier, Farrell and Bellovin. It’s an article about 10 years after the Snowden revelations in which I talk about the state of human rights on the Internet after a decade. The future of human rights and open, interoperable Internet looks bleak. At the end of the day, we need to think beyond design and technical infrastructure to protect human rights and as I keep saying, context matters. We need to contextualize the human rights framework, that way the trade-offs can be more visible and manageable.
Digital Trust and Safety: basic framework and prioritization
There are hundreds of best practices for digital trust and safety. How can we come up with a basic framework that keeps the users safe from the beginning but allows for the digital platform to grow? And on top of that, provide it for free, so that under-sourced platforms can use it. We have undertaken some research on that at Digital Medusa and are working to develop it further.
Under-studied and under-scrutinized platforms
There are some digital platforms that are not in the spotlight as much as others. This does not mean that they don’t have implications for the broader digital system, but due to their relative size or lack of use in Western countries, they’re often overlooked. Digital Medusa had worked on Telegram’s governance before and is now working on a project for the National Democratic Institute on how to hold these platforms accountable and transparent. We convened an informal mailing list to discuss these issues. Join us here: https://groups.google.com/a/digitalmedusa.org/g/contemplatforms/ . We will also publish the recommendations to uphold accountability and transparency across these kinds of platforms.
Open Source AI and Digital Trust and Safety governance
Open source digital governance might sound like a socialist idea, but in many respects it might also be a part of good private governance. The rise of reg-tech is not necessarily good for innovation in any digital field. The third party AI fairness vendors and digital trust and safety sellers market needs an injection of fresh ideas. The basic practices should be available to anybody that wants to innovate. These fresh ideas should be inspired by distributed, decentralized technology, not in response to some government regulation. Digital Medusa is working on advancing open source digital governance. Just imagine if communities around the world could pick up a human rights impact assessment toolkit and assess a digital product without having to pay. Just imagine if any small digital/technology provider could pick up a sanctions compliance toolkit for free, be in compliance with sanctions rules and provide its services to innocent people who happen to be residing in sanctioned countries. This approach could be a game changer for defending the global, interconnected Internet as well.
Let us know if you want to discuss our work at Digital Medusa. Contact us at info@digitalmedusa.org