China’s multi-billion dollar telecommunication...
By Andrea Vega Yudico The Chinese government is making significant investments in telecommunications infrastructure across Africa. According to the Tracking Chinese Development Finance project at AidData, between 2000 and 2013, 38 African countries received $1.7 billion in combined Chinese investm... |
Germany’s Fight Against Fake News: Can it Work...
By Niko Efstathiou and Bebe Santa-Wood The fight against misinformation in media continues to ramp up. We are witnessing an explosion of proposed solutions and approaches in how to best filter “fake news.” Many foundations, NGOs, and tech platforms are putting money into media literacy, fact-c... |
Multistakeholder Internet Governance Under Attac...
Once a shining example of the power of socioeconomic inclusion and the effectiveness of strengthening civic participation, the political upheaval in Brazil over the past two years has destabilized democratic gains once thought to be well established. As a researcher who was first drawn to Brazil bec... |
Duterte adds even more volatility to an already ...
The Philippines has been one of the most dangerous places outside of a war zone to be a journalist – over the past decade, 41 journalists have been killed without the assailants being brought to justice, according the Committee to Protect Journalists. Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of th... |
Building Coalitions for Media Reform in Africa
“Attacks on the media are the starting point of aggression, and a clear indicator that lawyers will be next.” These were the ominous words of Henry Maina, Director of Article 19 in East Africa, at a session of the annual Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) conference in Durban, South Africa that ex... |
The Growing Challenge of Media Capture: Journali...
Beginning last week journalists, media workers, and researchers from around the world gathered in Budapest at the Central European University (CEU) to discuss a large and growing challenge facing each of their unique media environments: media capture. CEU’s Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS... |
Political Bots are Skewing our News Diet
Was one of the news headlines you scrolled past on your social media feed today shared by a bot? Depending on the platform and the country you’re in, the odds are surprisingly high that automated computer scripts – political bots – are shaping the type of content you are seeing online. These b... |
Censorship in the name of security: PakistanR...
Tensions between press freedom and national security came to a head recently in Pakistan when the nation’s most widely read English newspaper, Dawn, published remarks from a closed-door government meeting last fall that offered a glimpse into the increasingly fractious relationship between elected... |
With Mainstream Media Weakened in Bolivia, Socia...
By Raul Peñaranda U. In February 2016, the independent Bolivian news agency ANF, where I work as managing editor, revealed that vice president Alvaro García Linera had not graduated from Mexico’s prestigious UNAM university with a degree in mathematics, as he had been claiming for decades. AN... |
Will media development finally receive the spotl...
By Nicholas Benequista and Kate Musgrave Those who provide support to the development of media around the world have occupied a special, and quite separate, field within the broader realm of international development, and have worked largely in the shadow of larger governance concerns. But that may ... |