NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus - an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments' use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this otherwise secretive spyware company publicly legitimizes its surveillance. Based on an empirical analysis of hundreds of public documents across various media, we explore NSO's legitimacy management practices and identify the audiences and contexts of this legitimation. Our analysis identified four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing, and normalization. We argue that these legitimation strategies operate across two interrelated axes of legitimation: a local axis that echoes a particularly Israeli 'security-driven populism'; and a universal axis that follows Silicon Valley's ethics washing. We show that these legitimation axes are designed to simultaneously ensure the company's survivability and to sustain surveillance realism - the perception of surveillance as the only viable option This article contributes to the emerging literature on cyber surveillance firms and to the burgeoning research on the legitimation of surveillance by shedding light on the discursive infrastructures behind contemporary cyber espionage. Moreover, while surveillance is often understood as a global phenomenon, this article highlights the need to focus on the local contexts from which surveillance originates to understand its sustainability, expansion, and vulnerabilities.

Objectives To understand severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission risks, perceived risks and the feasibility of risk mitigations from experimental mass cultural events before coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) restrictions were lifted. Design Prospective, population-wide observational study. Setting Four events (two nightclubs, an outdoor music festival and a business conference) open to Liverpool City Region UK residents, requiring a negative lateral flow test (LFT) within the 36 h before the event, but not requiring social distancing or face-coverings. Participants A total of 12,256 individuals attending one or more events between 28 April and 2 May 2021. Main outcome measures SARS-CoV-2 infections detected using audience self-swabbed (5–7 days post-event) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, with viral genomic analysis of cases, plus linked National Health Service COVID-19 testing data. Audience experiences were gathered via questionnaires, focus groups and social media. Indoor CO 2 concentrations were monitored. Results A total of 12 PCR-positive cases (likely 4 index, 8 primary or secondary), 10 from the nightclubs. Two further cases had positive LFTs but no PCR. A total of 11,896 (97.1%) participants with scanned tickets were matched to a negative pre-event LFT: 4972 (40.6%) returned a PCR within a week. CO 2 concentrations showed areas for improving ventilation at the nightclubs. Population infection rates were low, yet with a concurrent outbreak of >50 linked cases around a local swimming pool without equivalent risk mitigations. Audience anxiety was low and enjoyment high. Conclusions We observed minor SARS-CoV-2 transmission and low perceived risks around events when prevalence was low and risk mitigations prominent. Partnership between audiences, event organisers and public health services, supported by information systems with real-time linked data, can improve health security for mass cultural events.

AbstractIn this chapter we present our own work on developing the idea of Data Literacy and reflect on the potential to develop democratic education for data citizenship. In our work we link ideas from Dewey (New Republic 61:294–296, 1930) and Freire (Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). Continuum, 1970/1996), with ideas from Nussbaum (Int Stud Rev 4(2), 123–135, 2002) and Sen (The idea of justice. Harvard University Press, 2009), to consider how we move towards a more just datafied society (see Carmi E, Yates S, Int J Commun 17:3619–3637, 2023). We argue that Data Literacy and Data Citizenship interventions need to build on a deep understanding of their audience and their journey towards greater data citizenship and awareness of issues in our datafied society. The chapter sets out seven principles for the development of Data Literacy and data citizenship support interventions and explores approaches to their development.

We argue here that data literacies and capabilities are an integral part of data justice. Based on focus group data collected as part of a 3-year empirical project research project, we find that citizens remain unaware of key aspects of the digital ecosystem, which exacerbate the power imbalance between big technology (data processors) companies and citizens ( data subjects). Citizens feel concerned about the way it is operating, they do not feel confident enough to be able to address that. We find that "networks of literacy" among friends, colleagues, and trusted organizations are crucial for citizens' capabilities. These networks influence citizens' ability to convert their available means into capabilities to support civic engagement and their communities.

To counter the fake news phenomenon, the scholarly community has attempted to debunk and prebunk disinformation. However, misinformation still constitutes a major challenge due to the variety of misleading techniques and their continuous updates which call for the exercise of critical thinking to build resilience. In this study we present two open access chatbots, the Fake News Immunity Chatbot and the Vaccinating News Chatbot, which combine Fallacy Theory and Human–Computer Interaction to inoculate citizens and communication gatekeepers against misinformation. These chatbots differ from existing tools both in function and form. First, they target misinformation and enhance the identification of fallacious arguments; and second, they are multiagent and leverage discourse theories of persuasion in their conversational design. After having described both their backend and their frontend design, we report on the evaluation of the user interface and impact on users’ critical thinking skills through a questionnaire, a crowdsourced survey, and a pilot qualitative experiment. The results shed light on the best practices to design user-friendly active inoculation tools and reveal that the two chatbots are perceived as increasing critical thinking skills in the current misinformation ecosystem.

AbstractThe Networked Society has brought about opportunities, such as citizens’ journalism, as well as challenges, such as the proliferation of media distortions. To keep up which such a sheer amount of (mis)information, citizens need to develop critical media literacy. We believe that, even though not enough to guarantee a gatekeeping process, human-computer interaction can help users develop epistemic vigilance. To this sake, we present the Fake News Immunity chatbot, designed to teach users how to recognize misinformation leveraging Fallacy Theory. Fallacies, arguments which seem valid but are not, constitute privileged viewpoints for the identification of misinformation. We then evaluate the results of the chatbot as an educational tool through a gamification experience with two cohorts of students and discuss achieved learning outcomes as well as recommendations for future improvement.

We argue here that data literacies and capabilities are an integral part of data justice. Based on focus group data collected as part of a 3-year empirical project research project, we find that citizens remain unaware of key aspects of the digital ecosystem, which exacerbate the power imbalance between big technology (data processors) companies and citizens (data subjects). Citizens feel concerned about the way it is operating, they do not feel confident enough to be able to address that. We find that “networks of literacy” among friends, colleagues, and trusted organizations are crucial for citizens’ capabilities. These networks influence citizens’ ability to convert their available means into capabilities to support civic engagement and their communities.

While most research using online (video conferencing) focus groups take for granted people’s digital access and skills, in this chapter we consider work we undertook with people who have low digital literacy levels. We conducted the work during the COVID-19 pandemic and under social distancing regulations, shifting from a face-to-face workshop design to online focus groups. Our findings highlight the ways online focus groups can be successfully delivered when considering those with low digital literacy. Factors including smaller group sizes, joining remote sessions using individual devices, considering and categorising user types, pursuing follow-up questions, and providing contextual examples. These insights are useful for designing, developing, and conducting both ethical and considerate remote focus groups. We found that the literacy levels of your participants shape the way the session will run and that moving online adds another layer of complexity requiring constant adjustments and reflections. This work was part of our Nuffield Foundation funded project “Me and My Big Data: Developing Citizens Data Literacies” that was conducted between 2018-2021.

Misinformation constitutes one of the main challenges to counter the infodemic: misleading news, even if not blatantly false, can cause harm especially in crisis scenarios such as the pandemic. Due to the fast proliferation of information across digital media, human fact-checkers struggle to keep up with fake news, while automatic fact-checkers are not able to identify the grey area of misinformation. We, thus, propose to reverse engineer the manipulation of information offering citizens the means to become their own fact-checkers through digital literacy and critical thinking. Through a corpus analysis of fact-checked news about COVID-19, we identify 10 fallacies-arguments which seem valid but are not-that systematically trigger misinformation and offer a systematic procedure to identify them. Next to fallacies, we examine the types of sources associated to (mis-/dis-)information in our dataset as well as the type of claims making up the headlines. The statistical patterns surfaced from these three levels of analysis reveal a misinformation ecosystem where no source type is exempt from flawed arguments with frequent evading the burden of proof and cherry picking behaviors, even when descriptive claims are at stake. In such a scenario, exercising the audience's critical skills through fallacy and semantic analysis is necessary to guarantee fake news immunity.

This paper presents a feminist critique to digital consent and argues that the current system is flawed. The online surveillance adtech industry that funds the web had to use a mechanism that commodifies people, rendering their behaviors into data - products that can be sold and traded for the highest bidder. This was made possible by objectifying, dehumanizing and decontextualizing human engagement and identity into measurable and quantifiable data units. In this way, digital consent serves as an authorizing and legalizing instrument to the business model of spying, selling and trading people in the online ecosystem. Using four key feminist approaches - process, embodiment, network and context - this article shows the way digital consent is a mechanism that transfers responsibility to people and enables an exploitative-extractivist market to exist. The design of digital consent creates a specific interface that teaches people to behave in ways that preserve the asymmetric power relations. Consequently, the article shows the broader educational effects of digital consent which conceives people as products with narrow agency and understanding of what they can do, think and imagine. The article concludes with a refusal to provide an easy solution to a flawed system.

In this paper we present the findings from the third phase of our (redacted) project on citizens data literacies. The data literacies framework we developed - Data Citizenship - stemmed from an analysis of recent literature on data and digital literacy combined with ideas from democratic education. In particular, we focus on the power imbalance between citizens and ‘big-tech’ and government entities who access, process and use data about citizens and their networks. We argue that due to its collective, socially contextualised, and people-centred qualities, democratic education provides a useful foundation for future data literacy education and research interventions. Following an extensive literature review (first phase), and then a UK nationally representative survey (phase 2), we have conducted focus groups during Autumn 2020 and Winter 2021 with citizens.

This paper proposes a feminist critique of the media and communication field by offering a different soundtrack to guide future historical research. By shifting the focus from well-known protagonists, and acknowledging process and community rather than individuals, we aim to amplify 'hidden' domains of gendered labour and layers of media technologies and services. We propose the 'listening in' model as a different way to engage with histories of media and communication, providing four pathways for how the histories of film, radio and internet in particular have been theorised and researched. These pathways focus on multiplicities of expertise, layers of infrastructure, users, and the media canon. For the first pathway, we show how media production has always been a collective work of multiple expertise. The second pathway breaks with the distinction between media and communication and emphasises reciprocal processes of media production. For the third, we demonstrate how media theory and research have tended to assume specific ideal bodies while ignoring others. For the final pathway, we propose a rethinking of how media histories and theories are narrated via the usual protagonists and call for a new canon to achieve a richer and more nuanced understanding within the field.

This article presents preliminary results of the first two research stages of the Me and My Big Data research project: (1) a systematic literature review, and (2) a nationally representative survey of UK citizens’ data literacy. The analysis reveals some contradictions between how citizens think about the truthfulness of online information (e.g., online news) and what they do to verify its accuracy (e.g., fact-checking), and suggests that these contradictions might be related to citizens' limited data literacy levels.

Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in many contexts and takes many forms. Expanding the discussion also changes how we assess the array of proposed policy solutions meant to improve content moderation. Here, nine content moderation scholars working in critical internet studies propose how to expand research on content moderation, with implications for policy.

We use the term networked optimization to emphasize a sustained but changing set of techniques, technologies, and calculations to decide the best life -- the optimal -- through infrastructures, design, mathematics and engineering. Optimization is a vital concept at a time of critical interest in infrastructural power. Usually defined as doing actions to make the best or most effective use of something, our panel highlights the different uses of the term across the internet. Used as a selling point by many technology companies, optimization means different things to different actors. Perhaps the most important question on this is optimized for who? From Facebook to 5G, our panelists work across technical and theoretical literatures as well as computer science and humanities to identify the social implications of networked optimization. Author #1 examines how Facebook’s personalization ideology is engineered into its infrastructure to influence people’s behaviors to maximize its advertising value. Author #2 looks to the discourses and infrastructure of Google’s cloud computing that promise a form of global social engineering. Author #3 takes these questions out of the cloud and into the next-generation of the Internet, 5G. The promised new wireless infrastructure makes a major shift in the meta-governance of communications and re-consolidates power in network operators. Finally, Author #4 looks for forms of resistance through the development of Protective Optimization Technologies that help people counter efforts to nudge and shape their behaviours.