Mobile SIM registration linked to digital ID is causing exclusion of marginalised groups, and concerns about privacy in the absence of sufficient legal safeguards, especially in nations with a history of abuse by authorities…
On paper, citizen’s privacy rights are well protected throughout Africa. They are explicitly written into constitutions, international human rights conventions and domestic law. But, in the first comparative review of privacy protections across Africa we found that governments ignore the law to to carry out illegal digital surveillance of their citizens. What’s more, they are doing so with impunity…
State surveillance of citizens extends far beyond Pegasus spyware, the software developed by the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group. There is a multi-million-pound global market in which companies compete to profit from helping states to illegally spy on their own citizens…
During Ethiopia’s June 2021 general election social media platforms became a contested political space, characterised by hate speech, disinformation, fake government accounts, and internet shutdowns…
This is the core of my contribution to a Nethope 2022 seminar at the invitation of Oxfam US: The Abolition of Some Digital Technologies Is Essential to Human Development and Social Justice…
Like so many aspects of our life, democratic debate is increasingly moving online. Yet it seems like every time citizens adopt a new digital tool or enter a new digital space to voice opposition, repressive governments respond with a whole arsenal of tactics to dampen dissent and deny their right to opinion and expression. For every new activist tactic there are three or four state countermeasures. New research has found that this digital game of whack-a-mole is playing out across Africa…
The publication of Digital Rights in Closing Civic Space by the African Digital Rights Network is the first comprehensive analysis of the range of digital technologies and tactics being used across Africa by citizens to open democratic space online and by governments to close it down…
In this episode of the IDS podcast series Between the Lines I discuss with Professor Phillip Howard his latest book ‘Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives’
In 2020 Donald Trump was reportedly the biggest source of political disinformation in the world, fuelling social unrest, voter supression, and distrust in democracy. The US election forced us to stare over the precipice at what happens if the political deployment of digital disinformation is allowed to go unchecked…
In this episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast, I speak to Serena Natile to discuss her book, ‘The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: mobile money, gendered walls’, in which she uses the example of Kenya’s extremely popular mPesa programme to critique mobile money more generally as part of a historical succession of finance solutionism. Serena proposes an alternative strategy for gender equality in the form of a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects…