The inequalities of some disruptive technologies

Rosa Maria Ricoy

Universidad de Vigo, Spain

Abstract: Citizens today, we are the perfect target for an unscrupulous political campaign, post-truth, fake news, manipulation, voter profiling based on the illicit processing of personal data, micro-targeting, etc. Numerous disruptive technological developments are also being used such as artificial intelligence, algorithms (also in public administrations, – some with added risks such as the judiciary, or the police sphere-) and other proposals and applications related to social credit and metaverse, which can undermine crucial aspects of our democracies. This work aims to reflect on the violation of fundamental rights that is currently taking place, through numerous examples worldwide and in Europe. 

 The relationship between social media platforms and hybrid conflicts

Captain Ádám Farkas

Roland Kelemen

 The method of hybrid threats and the underlying conceptual framework have been widely investigated again since the second half of the 2000s, following Hezbollah’s tangible military success in Lebanon against the Israel Defense Forces in 2006. This was exacerbated by the activities of the Islamic State, which conducted a sophisticated and rather aggressive marketing campaign, and developed psychological warfare in cyberspace to a high level. Various operations in the context of the Ukrainian crisis and the Russian annexation of Crimea have once again brought hybrid warfare into the spotlight. The hybrid equipments are not new in history, but their success has been obviously enhanced by the development of technology, especially cyberspace and the wide range of opportunities cyberspace offers. Following the Russian–Ukrainian crisis, it has also become clear that hybrid instruments can not only appear as parts of a complex interstate conflict but that some of their elements can be used on their own. Clear examples of this include various disinformation campaigns. In this paper, the authors highlight, through a characterisation of hybrid conflicts, the extent to which the use of soft assets is an immanent part of contemporary military operations. The filtering practices and mechanisms, economic and market perceptions of social media platforms can be used to conduct disinformation campaigns.

 Right to education in Brazil: for all children and adolescents? 

Cristina Lourenço

Monique Falcão 

St. Ursula University, Brazil

With the worsening of the health crisis and the schools caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, children and adolescents in vulnerable situation have been left without access to education and food at home, highlighting a digital exclusion and worsening other socioeconomic inequalities. 

Among a variety of impacts of the public calamity on the education two have been more frequently pointed out by the survey TIC Educação 2020 carried out in partneship with school managers in Brazil: digital exclusion and food insecurity. 

The survey indicates that 86% of respondents mentioned that a lack of devices – such as computers and cell phones – and lack of internet access at students’ residences have been a major challenge during the pandemic period. Such adversity was even greater in municipal schools and those located in rural areas. According to 65% of the participants, another important obstacle faced by vulnerable students was related to food insecurity. 3 

Considering the structural violation of rights, this article aims to demonstrate the normative problematization of labels such “child” and “adolescent”, applied to diverse “subjects” in a country marked by social inequality and plurality of demands. 

The article presents a critical analysis of the «being-child» and «being-teenager» under the light of Erving Goffman’s stigma concept, and defends, based on Nancy Fraser’s theory, the recognition of socially marginalized groups as an indispensable factor to the success of the public education policies aimed at childhood and adolescence. 

Minorities, hate speech and the Net

Oscar Pérez de la Fuente

Carlos III Universoty of Madrid, Spain

There is a connection between the target groups of hate speech and the anti-discrimination law categories. While this relationship is not always present, when it is, it can be useful when analysing certain phenomena. 

The Internet offers a fresh perspective on human rights. This does not mean that the traditional perspective views human rights as inapplicable online; rather, it calls for a new interpretation. One intriguing issue is whether there are new minorities online or if the reasons for harassment and discrimination are the same as they are offline. 

Combating hate speech on the Internet is challenging from a legal and technological standpoint. To combat hate speech, international and national laws should be enforced following the human rights approach on the Internet. What is freedom really, and how should we exercise it online?

 The Digital Divide in Education & Judiciary in India: A Case study of SC/ST in Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh.

Dr.D.Ravindra Satish Babu,

Yogi Vemana University, Kadapa.

Indian society in 21^st century has observed the emergency need in transformation of technology in education system and Judiciary. Since pandemic, global society have also  awakened in increasing the usage of internet or online as a centre to our daily life, work, education, play, job, networks etc at all levels. The article tries to understand the status of Scheduled Caste (SC) & Scheduled Tribe (ST) after the initiatives of ICT’s in New Indian Education Policy 2020.Secondly the article tries to study the initiatives of a new paradigm of e-justice which evolved with a vision of how technology might result in the delivery of E-Justice system since from the initiation of the information communication technology (ICT) in India. However this article aims to study the culture of online transformation of education system and Judiciary for Scheduled Caste and scheduled Tribe in connection with there ability, accessibility, affordability. Secondly this article focused on evaluation of digital divide of online education advancement and Judiciary goals and practices, techniques and methods in both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. 

Does Nationality of Refugees Matter? Inequality in EU Digital Public Sphere

Zühal Ünalp Çepel

Dokuz Eylül University, Turkey

The European Union (EU) has been trying to have a common asylum and migration policy since the 1970s. However, differentiated interests and policies of member states prevent the Union to produce a functioning asylum and migration policy. From the perspectives of refugees, the uncommon policies create inequality between the host community and refugees in terms of the protection of human rights. In addition to that, the nationality of refugees seems to matter for the EU, and this results in inequality among refugees. This paper seeks to identify the unequal treatments of the EU for refugees, with a comparison between the perceptions for Syrians and Ukrainians in the eyes of European political elites. Digital public sphere has been an important instrument of this preferred standpoint. The paper argues that discourses of European political elites in the digital platforms show that Ukrainians are regarded as the victims of Russian attacks, but Syrians are potential terrorists. The EU has searched for third states, namely safe third countries like Turkey to send back the Syrians; but Ukrainians are welcomed and granted with temporary protection status. Methodologically the paper will follow discourse analysis over the speeches of political elites in the EU member states and bureaucrats of the Union. It is aimed to make an analysis over the speeches given between 2015 and 2022, since the migration flows from Syria to Europe has been more intensive since 2015 and the war in Ukraine started in 2022.

Digital revolution to inequalities resolution?

Lilian Castiglione Felix Silva
Masters degree in Development Economy and Public Policies for Poverty Eradication
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 – IHEAL

Social inequalities are existing in the world as we know, the irreversible and undeniable reality of digital revolution and the advanced stage of the dawn of the 4th Industrial Revolution are shaking our current way of living.

While the impending technological changes hold great promise, the patterns of production, consumption and employment created by it also pose major challenges requiring proactive adaptation by corporations, institutions, governments and individuals in order to avoid a social disaster. Great advancement and the need to adapt quickly are two forces of equal magnitude preparing the next-generation and current workforce for a Fourth Industrial
Revolution world.

This digitalization process with no regularization can increase social inequalities and is hazardous for the equality of chances, poverty vicious circle and create a bigger gap in education for children, teenagers and young adults in Universities, mostly in emerging economies.

A case study of a Public Policy implemented during Covid-19 pandemics to grant internet access and electronic devices (computers) to graduate students in a situation of socio-economic vulnerability in the Federal University of São Paulo (Brazil) and labor market evidence, shows us how people are facing a dangerous situation of exclusion from their daily activities and a big risk of being left behind in life.

Combining the case study with the World Bank reports, OECD reports, evidence of implemented public policies and the transgenerational poverty circle concept (Piketty: 2000), this paper seeks to answer the following questions: How the fast digitalization of all life spheres is interfering in the already existing inequalities? Is digitalization creating new types of inequalities? Will people with no access to the internet and electronic devices be setted to misery? Are we witnessing a (not very) silent imminent social disaster? How accelerated digitalization can contribute to inequalities increase or diminution in the fields of education in Universities and consequently in the labor market?

The Digital Divide from the Human Rights perspective – case of Poland on the European background. 

Jedrzej Skrzypczak

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan

Faculty of Political Science and Journalism

According to the OECD definition, digital exclusion is a phenomenon of social inequalities between individuals, households, enterprises, and regions at the socio-economic development level related to access to information and communication technologies and their use in all spheres of activity.

With the growing importance of various digital services, it seems that the digital divide has become one of human rights violations. It became evident and painful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The presentation will discuss the digital inequalities in the human rights concept in the contemporary world. Secondly, it will examine the situation in Poland in this area, one of the EU members, from the European perspective.

In search of linguistic justice? Ukrainian language in the Polish electronic mediasphere after 24 February 2022

Dr hab. Bartosz Hordecki

Faculty of Political Science and Journalism

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in February 2022 has triggered significant demographic phenomena. They reshape the communication reality in Central and Eastern Europe.

As a result of the Russian aggression, millions of Ukrainians have left their country, seeking security and safety for themselves and their families. The largest number of refugees have come to Poland. These people need material basis but also adequate information to find balance and adapt to new conditions.  

Polish electronic media are trying to meet the demand of the Ukrainian-speaking audience. Their activity manifests primarily in producing various content in Ukrainian. This offer concerns a wide range of topics: local, regional, national, international or global. 

This phenomenon encourages in-depth analysis of the axiological motivation of Polish electronic media publishers.

Therefore, the paper’s central question is: ‘Does the introduction of Ukrainian in the Polish electronic mediasphere manifest a theoretically embedded and coherent concept of linguistic justice?’

If so, what are the intellectual sources of this concept? What are its main principles? How do they interfere with the most popular approaches to linguistic justice? What is their contribution to contemporary theoretical and practical discourses on achieving this quality or value?

Technological determinism of Generation «C» and online exclusion.

Piotr Jablonski

Monika Jablonska

Adam Mickiewicz University

In the paper, the authors reflect on the issue of online exclusion and attempt to answer the question whether in the 21st century, digital exclusion can affect the generation raised in the spirit of technological determinism – do called Generation «C», and if so, what its contemporary facets are and what consequences it entails. 

After all, it is expected that acctually for the specifity of a society, whose main stages of the secondary socialization process have been centered around technology and unrestricted exposure to information online, it will easily navigate the depths of the commonly prevailing information excess.

The results presented here are an excerpt from a broader study focusing on the measurement of competence in the area of critical analysis of media communications based on the method of a three-stage verification of competence – a standardized declaration sheet, a self-assessment and a practical test of competence. 

 Algorithms, Status Hierarchies, and Discrimination in a Perfect Luck Egalitarianism 

Jesús Mora 

University of Valencia

In the last two decades of the 20th Century, luck egalitarianism became the dominant current in Anglo-Saxon academic egalitarianism. Building on the influence of proposals such as Dworkin’s (1981), egalitarians began to attribute an ever-growing importance to the idea that we should redistribute welfare, capabilities, or resources —or a combination of those— so that individuals’ life prospects are only affected by the consequences of their own responsible choices and, under no circumstances, by morally arbitrary contingencies like their social origin or their natural talent. The core of the egalitarian project merged with that idea up to the point that philosophers like Cohen (1989) argued that “the primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence on distribution of both exploitation and brute luck”. 

Implementing luck egalitarianism in real-world societies demands, first, theoretical foundations establishing that some circumstances belong to the realm of individual choice and others to the realm of luck (Olsaretti 2009; Stemplowska 2009), so that institutions can develop policies that tailor public investment to the unequal opportunities available for each population sector as a result of unchosen contingencies (see Roemer 2002). But, second, it also demands technical devices that allow institutions to discern the likelihood of an outcome arising from accidental circumstances more precisely. In this regard, algorithms could help authorities determine more exactly when, for instance, someone’s genetic inheritance makes it harder for her to find a job no matter how hard she tries. In this regard, and relying on different variables about each individual’s skills, algorithms could calculate the chances (see Fazelpour & Dansk 2021) that someone achieves a certain position and identify those subjects that require help through public resources, thus taking us closer to a more perfect luck egalitarianism in which public investment is truly channelled towards the least fortunate. 

Nevertheless, a perfect luck egalitarianism would also deploy undesirable features. Firstly, effective algorithms should rely on detailed information about aspects such as our physical capacity or our intelligence; a kind of information that most of us would desire to keep private and that, in such scenario, would be in the hands of social institutions (Wolff 1998). Secondly, using algorithms to classify individuals according to their capabilities would give rise to status hierarchies (Anderson 1999) that could undermine social respect towards those identified as less fortunate in the natural lottery. 

Through luck egalitarianism’s example, our intention is to reflect on the limits of the use of algorithms and on whether it is desirable to apply them in terms that allow authorities to classify citizens relying on intimate information. Algorithms can help optimise the distribution of public resources but, at the same time, their use can prompt undesired hazards regarding privacy, equal respect, and discrimination. As a consequence, we should inquire whether the potential that these new technologies can enclose justifies sacrificing fundamental values such as privacy or equal respect.