The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
Disinformation-spewing online bots and trolls from halfway around the world are continuing to shape local and national debates by spreading lies online on a massive scale. In 2019, Russia used Facebook to intervene in the internal politics of eight African nations. Read more about The battle against disinformation is global
Can the state tell your favorite local restaurant to close, or tell you that you must stay at home unless it’s absolutely necessary to leave, because of an emergency? The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have closed down bars, movie theaters and dine-in restaurants. Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have imposed a shelter-in-place order that allows people to leave their homes only for essential activities. Read more about Yes, States and Local Governments Can Close Private Businesses and Restrict Your Movement
The new coronavirus is shaping up to be an enormous stress test for globalization. As critical supply chains break down, and nations hoard medical supplies and rush to limit travel, the crisis is forcing a major reevaluation of the interconnected global economy. Not only has globalization allowed for the rapid spread of contagious disease but it has fostered deep interdependence between firms and nations that makes them more vulnerable to unexpected shocks. Now, firms and nations alike are discovering just how vulnerable they are. Read more about Will the Coronavirus End Globalization as We Know It?
Professor Daphne Keller discussed intermediary liability laws, i.e. “the laws that define platforms responsibility for content posted by their users including the DMCA” and noted that international approaches to intermediary liability fall along a broad spectrum, with the DMCA falling somewhere in the middle. Read more about Hearing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act at 22: How Other Countries Are Handling Online Piracy - Statement of Daphne Keller
The internet has been with us for a quarter of a century, but the US has still not passed a law requiring its companies to abide by meaningful data-privacy protections. This matters because most of the western world’s big technology companies are American. In 2020, America’s privacy bill will finally be settled. Read more about Why Europe's GDPR magic will never work in the US
Hacking into voting machines remains far too easy. Read more about US could learn how to improve election protection from other nations
In a landmark ruling earlier this month, India’s Supreme Court held that citizens’ right to freedom of speech and rights to carry out business using the internet are constitutionally protected. The new decision builds in part on an equally important 2015 case, Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, in which the Court defined key rules for the relationship between democratic governments and commercial internet platforms. Read more about Filtering out free speech
The good news is that Facebook is finally taking action against deepfakes. The bad news is that the platform’s new policy does not go far enough. Read more about Facebook Takes a Step Forward on Deepfakes—And Stumbles
Reading this tweet by Maciej Ceglowski makes me want to set down a conjecture that I’ve been entertaining for the last couple of years (in part thanks to having read Maciej’s and Kieran’s previous work as well as talking lots to Marion Fourcade).
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers Andy Greenberg, Doubleday (2019) Read more about When cyberwar struck its first civilian target