Increasingly, the use of technologies such as the internet, smartphones and social media is amplifying the power of local community action and knowledge. This brief addresses the need for policy change to overcome key barriers in this space.

This briefing highlights key details of whistleblower revelations about Facebook’s unprecedented tactical response to the development of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code in February 2021, and the concurrent reforms that were made to the Code, all of which handed significant power to Facebook.

As Australia starts to implement much needed digital regulation on a number of issues, there is a need to ensure policy initiatives are joined up and coherent. This document presents five overarching policy principles that could assist policy-makers.

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has launched the Understanding Global Disinformation and Information Operations website, alongside this companion paper. The site provides a visual breakdown of the publicly-available data from state-linked information operations on social media.

This report looks at the increasing use of WhatsApp and other messaging apps in government, and their associated risks and benefits. These apps are useful but need to be used carefully to ensure the downsides – including a lack of transparency, poor communication and poor...

This study examines how and where Australians are getting information about COVID-19, which sources they find trustworthy and their experiences with misinformation. The report extends the understanding around the access, consumption and critical engagement with news and misinformation during the ongoing global pandemic.

Three decades after Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server, the technologies that once promised to usher in a new era of democracy are now also being used to spread disinformation and sow distrust. Amid a global pandemic and the contentious political events surrounding...

In 2021, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) organised a working group of its Global Platform Governance Network to focus on the issues of transparency and accountability of digital platforms, especially social media networks. This report attempts to synthesise and summarise the discussions at...

This research debunks speculation that a major state-backed campaign was deployed to influence political discourse in Australia on social media. The research analysed more than 69,000 tweets, from two low-points in Australia-China relations in 2020, and found no evidence the CCP was using bots to...

Many women face online abuse simply because they have an active online presence as part of their working life. This research highlights women’s lived experiences of online abuse, and points to the need for greater action by online platforms and employers to prevent and respond...

Disinformation has fundamentally altered the functioning of our public square and our democracy. Increasingly, fair and factual debate is a rarity. The experiment outlined in this report sought to test Facebook’s ad review system by attempting to approve advertisements that explicitly promoted election disinformation narratives...

This report unpacks the main methods of manipulation that internet platforms engage in that harm fundamental rights and provides a set of policy recommendations addressed to lawmakers in the European Union.

This report includes summaries of the evidence received about the motivations for foreign interference, the forms that it can take, the elements of social media platforms and their usage that foreign interference attempts often seek to exploit, and the social and cultural features that foreign...

This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses foreign social media influencers to shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang that are aligned with its own preferred narratives.

This report analyses two Chinese state-linked networks seeking to influence discourse about Xinjiang across platforms including Twitter and YouTube. This activity targeted the Chinese-speaking diaspora, as well as international audiences, sharing content in a variety of languages.

In light of current conversations about the need to rethink and redesign online public spaces, researchers from the Pew Research Center and Elon University asked experts how they expect the digital public sphere to evolve by 2035. This report outlines the findings.

Operation Turon was an investigation by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) into the alleged police misconduct of then Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner, Brett Guerin.

This publication documents a timeline of major events over the course of Facebook’s history that demonstrate the unprecedented power the platform wields over politics and information systems globally. The authors argue that Australia remains vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and does not have effective safeguards...

The approach recommended in this report will need to be regularly reviewed to ensure that it is effective and appropriate. Government funding for research into the impact of social media on elections would assist future policy reviews, as would several of the transparency measures recommended...