A Safer Online World for Women and Girls

Jun. 24 – 9:30 a.m. EDT (UTC–04:00): “Revenge porn” — a colloquial term for the non-consensual distribution online of intimate images (NCIID) — plagues the lives of countless women (as many as one in three) worldwide. Incidents are wide-ranging and involve some of the most difficult problems of our time, involving aspects of sexual trauma, victims’ rights, internet privacy and freedom of expression.

This Thursday, join CIGI as we welcome moderator Ruhiya Seward, senior program officer at the International Development Research Centre, and Grace Mutung’u, Michelle Bordachar and Nonhlanhla Chanza for a virtual panel discussion about NCIID in the Global South. These experts will speak about NCIID as it pertains to Kenya, Chile and South Africa, respectively, and offer recommendations and road maps for further action.

The success of online labour markets has often come at the expense of workers, with platforms that cater to the gig economy maximizing profits while undermining worker benefits. In this policy brief, Wingham Rowan discusses how to create “modern markets for all” through the collaboration of government agencies and tech companies to maximize both growth and opportunity and inclusion.

Apps that enable people to find temporary work have largely benefited the corporations that run them. New labour platforms can be used that retain this functionality but enable greater benefits for the workforce. In this video, Wingham Rowan introduces a concept whereby we can harness the power of online platforms to benefit the worker and corporation equally, using commercially and technologically viable means.

Democracy is articulated in different ways over time and from place to place, and the contexts in which governance occurs differ as well. As Heidi Tworek writes, once we recognize that democracy itself is not a stable concept, we can also consider how the rules we set for social media to shore up democracy in one place may undermine another democratic value elsewhere.

A deadly global pandemic and other unique circumstances present the World Trade Organization with an opportunity to modernize its rules for the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. In this paper, James Bacchus explains that the best place to begin is with a full realization of the negotiated balance between exclusivity and access in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement).

US regulators are now increasingly open to reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in ways that will dramatically change the internet’s role in our society — but, according to Eric Goldman, almost certainly for the worse. Here are five reasons why.

Last week, CIGI’s Robert Fay welcomed six experts to a public panel discussion, part of the Think20 Spring Round Tables, on the challenging but essential task of building trust to fully harness the benefits of digital technologies. This virtual event was co-hosted by CIGI and the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, in cooperation with The GovLab and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. A recording of their discussion is now available on YouTube.