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"We may be only just starting to understand how digital democracy can help address the crisis of legitimacy that is affecting different levels of the political process."

"In past months, an AI-generated image of an explosion at the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the stock market. AI audio parodies of US presidents playing video games became a viral trend. AI-generated images that appeared to show Donald Trump fighting off police officers trying to arrest him circulated widely on social media platforms. The Republican National Committee released an entirely AI-generated ad that showed images of various imagined disasters that would take place if Biden were re-elected, while the American Association of Political Consultants warned that video deepfakes present a "threat to democracy"."

"Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the "infodemic" are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan's first transgender government minister and a self-described "civic hacker", has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus. Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 "humour over rumour" strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking."

"Anybody who uses digital equipment is put under some form of surveillance. It seems to me that that cannot happen without consent, it cannot happen without the consent of populations. So, my message to the lawmakers is: please protect us.""

"Under the oxymoronic rubric of "self-regulation", Facebook, Twitter and Google are already considering ways to appear responsible and protective of the integrity of those two elections. Twitter has pledged to stop running political ads, and both Google and Facebook are considering suspending precise targeting of political ads."

"But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. The software is freely available and cheap. It is being distributed all over the internet of things, from intercoms to "home assistants". Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw."

"A report by investigators from the Digital Forensic Lab, a global network of digital forensic researchers run by US-based thinktank the Atlantic Council, reveals how pro-Russian Facebook pages in Mali coordinated support for anti-democracy protests and the Wagner group, a controversial Russian private military contractor that was invited into the unstable country last year after the overthrow of President Bah N'daw by the military."

"The piece is meant to be a commentary on the collection and use of private data by tech companies, as Posters explained. "The fact that citizens' data - including intimate knowledge on political leanings, sexuality, psychological traits and personality - are made available to the highest bidder shows that the digital influence industry and its associated architectures pose a risk not only to individual human rights but to our democracies at large.""

"The Digital Services Act marks the end of the platforms' vast liability exemptions and their seeming impunity. It will impose more transparency on the platforms' content moderation and set rules on so-called dark patterns, design features that can trick users into doing things they didn't mean to."