This Week In Cyberspace (Nell Schofield and Brett Solomon)

Brett Solomon joins us from a noisy cafe in Amsterdam for a chat ahead of the 17th Internet Governance Forum in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia. The big irony is that the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray is currently under a two-year internet blackout and this is not on the IGF's agenda yet. Nor is the situation in China nor Russia. There's a battle for control of the internet going on globally and this will be played out in Addis. As will the issue of content governance in conflict zones.

This Week In Cyberspace we take a look at how the release of China’s new Artificial Intelligence model DeepSeek has knocked the socks off Silicon Valley’s techbros. It’s just as powerful as ChatGPT, made for a tenth of the cost and its release knocked a cool trillion off US tech stocks.

How will this new battle for supremacy in the AI space play out?

Elon Musk wants to “authenticate all real humans", so why is he dressing up in red samurai gear and posing as the ‘Devil’s Champion’? The Tesla founder’s recent halloween outfit, with its inverted cross and goat’s head breastplate, seems to have inflamed conspiracy theorists who think his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is part of a global battle against evil. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. 

One of the featured thought leaders at the opening ceremony of RightsCon 2025 was Htaike Htaike Aung.

She’s the Executive Director at Myanmar Internet Communication Technologies for Development Organization  or MIDO, and she spoke with us about some of the challenges faced by citizens in a country that has endured four years of a military coup and 83 internet shutdowns.

It's V-Day - Tuesday Nov 5 - the day America votes. But is the US election really coming down to a stand off between men and women? Trump is telling women that he’ll be their protector, while at the same time saying former congresswoman Liz Cheney should have guns trained at her face for critisising the storming of the Capitol last time. It’s a monumental shit show in the Republican Camp with Harris rising above the hateful rhetoric being hurled her way. But is morality going to win this election? And what about the impact of AI on democracy? 

Lavender. Sounds pretty vanilla right? But it’s actually the name of the Artificial Intelligence machine allegedly targeting Israel’s bombs at Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza. The system has generated  “mass target creation and lethality”, especially in the first six weeks of the conflict. But with a 10% error rating,  the fallout for Gazan civilians has been horrific.

On the back of a report by +972 Magazine, we probe into the interplay between technology and conflict.

On the 76th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights  we explore how human rights intersect with digital rights.

Our rights, our Future. Right Now. That's the clarion call around the globe on this day for us all to embrace and trust the full power of human rights as the path to the world we want to live in - a more peaceful, equal and sustainable world.

With just three weeks to go before the US election, all eyes are on the two major candidates - one, a vibrant 59 year-old woman of the people, and of colour; the other a 78 year- old white male billionaire who has just got a massive leg up from the richest man in the world. Elon Musk is using his powerful social media platform X to trumpet his support of the Republican candidate to his  201 million followers. So will Musk’s support of  Trump be enough to beat the beacon of hope that is Vice President Kamala Harris?

There are over 100 conflicts happening right now all over planet Earth, wars that most of us would  like to see an end to. But the battlefields of today are a very different to the ones of last century; the white flag coming out of the trenches is no longer enough to stop bullets.
Wars are being controlled by satellites and fibre optic cables. 
In March this year a supposedly ‘invincible’ US Abram tank worth a cool $10 mill was destroyed in mere minutes by an unmanned Russian drone that cost its owner $500. When warlords have digital capability, a digital ceasefire is called for.

Things are hotting up as COP27 enters its final days and human rights defenders demand the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. The Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist has been on a six month hunger strike and has refused water since the climate conference began ten days ago. British Parliament is up in arms over it. Lady Boycott is concerned about human rights abuses, Lord Purvis of Tweed wants to pause the 4 billion pound trading partnership.  Khalid Abdalla, the Egyptian-British actor who’ll play Dodi al-Fayed in the upcoming season of Netflix's The Crown, is also concerned. So has Alaa cornered Egypt?

This Week In Cyberspace we take a look at hate speech online in the context of conflict. With the UN calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and the horrific human toll of Palestinian civilian lives still rising, certain words are coming under intense scrutiny.

META is reviewing the use of the word 'Zionist' on its platforms, while the Arabic term 'Saheed' - the word for martyr - is responsible for the most content takedowns across all of its platforms.

But what are the implications for free speech and rational debate online?

It’s been 2 years since the military took over rule in Myanmar. Playing from the authoritarian's playbook, the regime is  using CCTV's and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) registration to control their citizens. It's a digital dictatorship where people think that Facebook IS the Internet, and human rights abuses are hidden behind internet shutdowns. But dictatorships always fall. We explore how this one could.

Did Kate Middleton actually doctor her own family photograph? Or has she actually been abducted by aliens? How fake images can ignite a bonfire of wild conspiracy theories.

And turncoat Donald Trump once wanted TikTok banished from the USA. Now that he's banned from Facebook for telling lies and inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, he wants the legislation he introduced to be reversed. But with Biden poised to sign off on it, is it all too late for him and TikTok's 150 million American users?

We have set up in the Media Room at RightsCon 2025 Taipei and are getting ready for an amazing few days of interviews with some of the best brains in the biz. These are people working at the forefront of human rights in the digital age.

Stay tuned to meet some amazing activists over the coming days.

Satellite internet technology is go! But does it, as promised, help to close the digital divide? At least 2.6 billion people worldwide are still unable to access high-quality, open, secure internet, despite all the satellites up there. SpaceX’s Starlink has nearly 7k satellites circling the Earth with plans for another 23,000!! And astronomers are concerned because the sunlight reflecting off them is interfering with sensitive telescopes investigating the origins of the universe.

So what’s more important - connectivity on Earth, or more knowledge about deep space?

What kind of a future can the United Nations offer us? As COP28 wraps up, we struggle to find any positives. There's the Loss and Damage Fund but no phase out of fossil fuel extraction on the horizon. In the midst of all the the horse-trading, the Australian Government signs on to the pledge to triple renewables while the opposition backs the nuclear option. Meanwhile, Pacific Island Nations threaten to boycott the entire process as their homes are claimed by rising sea levels. All in a day's work on the good ship COP.

2023 is set to be the hottest year on record. So how will climate justice be achieved at COP28 when climate activists are relegated to a space far away from the conference and actively surveilled by an authoritarian petro-state? The only way to decouple the world economy from fossil fuels is through an active climate movement. So will free speech, independent media and the right to protest be respected at COP28?

The 17th Internet Governance Forum has just wrapped up in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, with a call to urgently connect the 2.7 billion who are unconnected by increasing infrastructure investment, fostering digital literacy, harnessing advanced technologies, and building a safe and secure digital space where fundamental human rights are realised. Our regular guest and CEO of the digital rights organisation accessnow.org Brett Solomon was there in the flesh and reports back on the elephant inside the dinosaur.

Rainbow flags are flapping from police stations, shop fronts and Surf Rescue buggies thanks to Sydney WorldPride. Inclusivity and diversity is the mantra of the Rainbow Tribe, but globally, identity wars ares raging. We discuss how the LGBTIQmmunity is enhanced by digital platforms in some countries, and targeted by them in others. 

Welcome to series 2 of This Week In Cyberspace where we look at human rights in the digital age through the lens of Artificial Intelligence.

For as long as the Internet has been operative, alternative gender expression online has been a thing. But with the use of AI by corporations and governments to collect personal data, and often weaponise it against citizens, this space is no longer as safe as it once was.

Uganda has just enacted the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws using discriminatory data sets to identify gender, emotion, and now sexual orientation. These binary codes are discriminatory in nature. So how can they be tackled?

This Week In Cyberspace, Julian Assange was brought back home to Australian soil in Canberra after a 14 year trial.

The following morning, Senator David Shoebridge organised a press conference in Parliament House with Assange's wife Stella Assange, legal team Jennifer Robinson and Barry Pollock, Senators Zoe Daniel, Murray Watt, Peter Wish-Wilson, and former Senator Scott Ludlam.

TWICS was on the sidelines - 27.6.24

One week on from the American election and the progressive world is still reeling. How could a racist sexist autocratic felon have scored the top job? What has happened to the actual culture of the United States to allow Donald Trump to win the popular vote? For the Republicans, who supported an insurrection, and promoted crazy conspiracy theories and spread misinformation and disinformation, for them to be rewarded by the majority of the public? What are the global ramifications? And how do we move forward from this?

10 days to go until lift off and land down in Taiwan for RightsCon Taipei 2025. We are trialling our tech and our FACES!

Check the program list out and let us know who you want us to interview: https://www.rightscon.org/program/#list

There are potentially dangerous experiments taking place in the Artificial Intelligence sphere that could shape the way we all live. The latest one is Tik Tok’s Focused View, an emotional recognition feature that targets ads to the user based on your reactions to various videos. But there are serious questions about whether it actually violates European Union laws. We attempt to get our real live intelligence around the issue.

Millions of people are exploring their artificially generated, inner iridescent, cartoon essence. That’s right, with the recent release of  the “magic avatar” by the photo-editing app Lensa, we can all be fantasy stars in our own lunchtime. But concerns are mounting about how it not only collects massive amounts of personal data, often sexualises your image while potentially breaching artistic copyright.

In  the world’s largest democracy, censorship has been running rampant around a BBC documentary that the Indian Foreign Ministry has called a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” When students in New Delhi organised screenings of the two-part series, authorities called in the riot police, cut off electricity and detained the organisers. ‘India - the Modi Question’ explores the Prime Minister’s  involvement in an actual riot in which 1,000 mostly Muslims were killed back in 2002. So how successful have authorities been in using their emergency powers to censor clips from the doco on social media platforms?

Shutting down the internet is a powerful digital weapon used by autocrats the world over. It’s currently being used by Putin in his war against Ukraine. In the past 10 months, Russia has also managed to block nearly 3,000 news websites and make civilians in occupied parts of the country pay for SIM cards with Rubels. So how can the rest of the world help restore some sense of interconnectedness in a country under such intense “Russification”?

AI is not only harvesting original music to generate it’s own cheap versions but taking away revenue from creatives. For the first time that amount has been calculated at about a quarter of the income of the creator within the next 5 years.

The study on the global economic impact of Generative AI in the Music and Audio Visual Industries was released earlier this month in Paris. The study was put out by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), representing more than 5 million audio visual creators worldwide.

And it’s president, former ABBA band member Björn Ulvaeus, said that all eyes are on Australia and NZ because of our strong policy making to protect creatives.

A defining moment of the past year has been the massive data breach that left millions asking the question, "Who Am I?". This question wont go away in 2023 as we try to define ourselves not only in physical spaces but online ones too. As governments around the world ramp up their use of cyber warfare, internet shutdowns like the 180 plus we saw in 2022, will continue to occur. What the world needs now, apart from love, sweet love, is more governance around data. Will it happen? Stay tuned for TWICS 2023.  

We're in Taiwan where thousands of human rights activists are gathering for RightCon2025. This is a conference started by TWICS co-host Brett Solomon and this will be the first time that he's attending not as CEO of the organising body AccessNow but as a podcaster!

He and Nell Schofield will be talking with around 25 global leaders who are defending and extending human rights in the digital age, and it seems like there’s never been a more important time to work on this issue.

What do you do when your identity is stolen? Laugh. There are bigger problems, like Israel and Palestine.....still. Facebook's Oversight Committee has brought down its first report and it's fascinating! 

How can we tell if fake news is real when, despite the facts, some people swear by it? And how do we judge the veracity of a artificially generated videos when we see them on Facebook?

Two First Amendment cases started in the US Supreme Court yesterday concerning social media laws in Texas and Florida. The State's claim the platforms are exercising “freewheeling censorship”, while they say they just want to stop conservatives posting lies like they did about the last US Federal election being stolen.

Meanwhile the new text to video AI model SORA is causing waves with its ability to create visuals that can replicate one minute of fiction that looks uncannily like the real thing.

Both of these developments have the potential to transform the internet in ways we can't even imagine. But will it be good for humanity?

In this special extended edition of TWICS, co-host Brett Solomon reflects on his 15 years as Executive Director of Access Now.

When he started in the job Facebook and Twitter were just emerging as social media platforms. Since then we've seen the rise of both as powerful tech tools and the internet as a force for good, evil and all the grey areas in between.

What are the challenges ahead for digital rights defenders and how can citizens get involved to protect their data online?

Putin is locked in for a 5th term, largely through the control of information on the internet, while Elon Musk’s quest for world domination also continues apace with the release of the raw computer code behind his new xAI Chatbot.

On top of all that, the Chinese owned company behind TikTok is being forced to sell up in the US, and over in the EU, the AI Act has come into law essentially enabling developers to go for broke. 

It's been a busy week in cyberspace!

Right now in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, delegates are gathered from all over the world for the 20th United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum.

The aim of the five day event is to inspire “a global commitment to responsible digital governance and [foster] a future where digital technologies serve the entire global community equitably and sustainably”

But with people currently serving up to 45 years in prison in the host country for expressing dissent online, some civil society groups have decided to boycott the Forum altogether.

Is this the line in the sand for big tech and humanity?

 The rise of the authoritarian right in the USA was actively facilitated by the algorithms of certain social media platforms. This sinister digital development has sent tremors through the progressive left. But some organisations are fighting back. 

In the final episode of Season 1 we take a closer look at Artificial Intelligence, specifically Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Models (or GLLMMMs). These Golem Class AIs have the experts spooked and yet the five giant tech companies are already rolling them out to the public with no safeguards for society. And as we know, an unregulated tech space adversely creates a toxic online environment. So how to we avert even more severe unintended consequences than doom scrolling, fake news and the breakdown of democracy?

 While actors are concerned that their image will be used forever in perpetuity by AI, tech workers in Kenya are worried about the mental health impacts of filtering out abusive content so that we can safely use systems like ChatGPT.

Content moderators in Kenya are currently suing META for a range of things including lack of mental health support, because they have to review violent and sometimes even illegal content so that we don’t have to.

Mohammed al-Maskati is one of the 3,200 people participating live at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei. He is a Bahraini human rights activist who worked as a digital security consultant for the Middle East and North Africa. He founded the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights (BYSHR), and currently works with AccessNow as the Digital Security Helpline Director.

This year, the climate summit COP28 will be held in one of the richest oil producing Petrostates. But is the United Arab Emirates the best place to be hosting a conference about reducing carbon emissions? As one of the world's biggest emitters per capita, the UAE also has some pretty strict laws against protesting. We look at this and the use of spyware against activists in the first of our COP editions of This Week In Cyberspace.

A new study has revealed that Americans are deeply concerned about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the election. Nearly 40% of those polled reckon AI will be used for evil with only 5% believing it is a force for good. 

And then there’s the money issue. Elon Musk has started giving away $1m a day to a voter who signs up to his America Political Action Committee petition, and he says he’s going to keep it up until election day.  This strictly capitalist competition is intended to get Trump into office and is open to voters in key battleground states but is a lottery like this even legal?

“The country was a construction site. It has become a cemetery.” wrote one journalist in the wake of the mega earthquake that rocked Turkey on February 6 killing nearly 50,000 people, many of them buried beneath the rubble of poorly built apartment blocks. A further two earthquakes destroyed even more buildings weakened by the previous quake. In the midst of this natural disaster, Twitter and Tik Tok (the main modes of communication) were blocked. Survivors are pointing fingers at the Erdogan government which allowed the dodgy dwellings to go up. In return, the state is detaining people who post about it on their social media accounts. 

We’re in Taipei speaking with some incredible people working to advance human rights in the digital age. One of those at the forefront of this is Henri Verdier the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs within the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. 

Since 2018, he has led and co-ordinated French digital diplomacy and he was instrumental in last week’s AI Action Summit in Paris hosted by President Macron.

2024 was a big year, especially for elections with no less 2 billion people casting their votes. We’ve seen the impact of internet shutdowns in many countries and the influence of social media platforms, especially on the US election. In Russia Putin secured a 5th term and in Syria we saw a shift from digital control to digital freedom.
We cast our eyes back on the year that was in cyberspace.

In this episode of TWICS we continue our examination of the UN's climate summit in Dubai. With 2,500 registered delegates connected to the coal, oil and gas industry and the President of COP28 showing a distinct disregard for climate science, the international conference is proceeding on shaky ground. Could it be that snake oil is the biggest commodity being pedalled in the host country this year?

The mass layoffs in the tech sector include human rights experts, specialist rights and ethics teams, and content moderators that speak local languages in places like Asia and Africa. Twitter has shed 90% of employees in India and only has one marketing person left  in Japan, its second largest market. So what do these changing priorities mean and is this a reckoning for the industry?

The Asia Pacific Internet Governance Forum is on in Brisbane with hundreds of delegates from the region gathering to discuss how to govern the unwieldy beast that is the world wide web of things. With many large states wanting to govern the online space on their own right, how can users get a seat at the table and prevent the internet becoming the splinternet? And how can we bring a human rights agenda to internet governance going forward? Brett Solomon is on the ground to report back.

Taiwan has endured the world’s longest Marshall Law - 37 years - under Chinese rule.

Kuan-Ju Chou is from the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and she is at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei.

It's the first time in a decade that the conference has been held in South East Asia and activists are building connections and solidarity.

This Week In Cyberspace we catch up with Brett Solomon in an airport in Ottawa. He’s on his way to Washington DC to find out how human rights online are being factored into Digitalisation Policies by a new breed of Digital Ambassadors. And how do these international policies align with internet freedom?

Antonio Zappulla is CEO at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and in 2022 he was knighted as an Officer of the Italian Republic for “merit acquired in the fields of public service, and social, philanthropic and humanitarian activities” under the OMRI order, the highest-ranking honour of the Italian Republic.

We talk with him about LGBTQ rights in the digital age and how to protect NGOs from legal challenges at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei.

Digital rights are being eroded in Australia with an Act of Parliament that enables surveillance, modification of data, interception of communications and even account takeovers. Earlier this year, the Attorney-General publicly released the Privacy Act Review of the Identify and Disrupt Bill, otherwise known as the hacking bill. But will this result in changes that are, in the words of Electronic Frontiers Australia; "balanced against the ever growing interests and insatiable data appetites of business and its further subordination to what is administratively convenient and expeditious for the government". Stay tuned.

The United Nations is currently holding its 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women and the main theme for this 12-day think fest is: “Innovation and technology for gender equality”. It’s the first time that digital gender inequalities have been highlighted by the Commission and high time too because there are 238 million more men on line than women. At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hilary Clinton famously said "Human rights are women's rights, once and for all". Now women's rights are also digital rights. We unpack some of the key issues that disproportionately affect women and girls and non-binary people online.

This Week In Cyberspace, we investigate spyware. It’s just been found to have been used by the Mexican army to spy on citizens. So what exactly is it, and how can we protect ourselves from it? Tune in for some digital details.

5 days ago, a strict new anti-LGBTQ+ bill called the Human Sexual rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill was introduced, which threatens to incite a witch hunt against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people fighting for their rights to express themselves and have privacy in Ghana, both online and off. It's part of a disturbing worldwide trend to vilify and control 'the other', and while it might appease the largely conservative Christian majority, it also threatens $5.8 million in foreign investments in the country. Right now, it's all in the hands of President Nana Akufo-Addo.

The digital dimensions of violence against women and girls online is a growing problem.

Online gender-based violence (OGBV), Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls (CVAWG), Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) - they're all on the rise worldwide.

Acronyms aside, how can the rights of women and girls be better defended in the digital space? And why is the internet set up for so much abuse of females?

The Prime Minister of Australia has called him an “arrogant billionaire” who’s “chosen ego and violence over common sense”. In return, Elon Musk has sarcastically thanked the PM for informing the public that his platform "is the only truthful one”. 

The battle lines are clearly drawn with the eSaftey Commissioner issuing a court order for X to remove a video of the stabbing of a bishop in Sydney last Monday. It’s a contest between what Musk sees as the right to free speech and what the Australian government claims is a duty to protect its citizens from “extreme violent content”,

So, what goes up? And what comes down? And who decides?

It's the biggest year of voting in global history. Seventy countries will decide their governance including citizens of no less than twenty-one African nations. But with many of those already on the Election Watchlist for internet interference, how many will claim to be bastions of democracy?

With a humanitarian crisis of apocalyptic proportions underway in the African heartland of Sudan, what role do tech-cos have in navigating a way through this?

The US election has hit a new low with Donald Trump’s rally in Maddison Square Garden on Sunday Night turning into a real hate fest. Parallels have been made between the event and a Nazi rally in Maddison Square Garden back in 1939. The Republican nominee vowed to “Launch the largest deportation program in American history” and denounced the press “the enemy of the people”.

Meanwhile in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris held a much smaller rally in Philadelphia and focused on the future and women’s right to choose. Brett Solomon was there.

We all know that governments like to censor the internet in times of crises, particularly authoritarian governments around election times to control the sort of information that voters have access to. Last Thursday, in a world first, the Australian Government introduced a bill to ban non-voters (all those under the age of 16) from accessing social media platforms because they’re not considered to be safe places for children.

With bi-partisan support it looks set to sail through parliament. But what are the implications for kids? And what is really behind this moral push back?

As Trump cracks down on illegal immigration, reports have emerged that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Citizen and Immigration Services have dished out $7.8 billion on immigration technologies since 2020.

That's a lot of money on what the World Economic Forum reports is not the problem. So what's the deal?

It all began as a centre for tech utopia but it’s turned into something quite uncontrollable. Silicon Valley - home of the digitally free and technologically brave - is its own unleashed beast. But with no ethics surrounding the development of this seemingly limitless computer industry, has it now got us all by the short and curlies?

The ex KGB lieutenant colonel has a Presidential election in just under a month, and aside from silencing dissenters, he’s making sure that any information Russian citizens might find on the internet is singing his praises. With the seriously suspicious death of opposition leader Alexi Navalny four days ago and the arrest of around 400 people who came out to mourn him, Putin is going for gold as a digital dictator.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused the 'No' campaign in the referendum on a Voice to Parliament for First Nations Australians of using AI to spread misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms. We look at the forces behind this push and the responsibility of tech giants, governments and individuals to police it.

Natalia Krapiva is the tech-legal Counsel with Access Now. Prior to that she worked as a prosecutor at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. She's been fighting NSO Group to try to limit the sale and use of spyware for many years and  last December set a precedent with a win against this Israeli cyber-intelligence firm in the California court.

We talk to her about this and the state of digital forensics. As she says "it's a game of cat and mouse."

This week we look  to Finland for tips on how to protect human rights online and be happy. Turns out this involves some schizophrenic thinking and lots of forests. Brett Solomon from accessnow.org has been speaking with top officials in the happiest Scandanavian country, and says that instability and policy confusion means that we may just be at a tipping point where we can have some significant influence.

The digital dimension of the conflict in the Middle East is taking a toll as Israel cuts off connectivity to what was already fairly limited access in Gaza. Palestinians are unable to contact family and friends and urgent aid channels are being interrupted.

Internet platforms are not making it any easier. Between October 7 and 18, there was over 103,000 cases of hate speech and/or incitement in Hebrew on X and other platforms. 

Can the Declaration of principles for content and platform governance in times of crisis help?

The blue bird of happiness has been X-communicated. From 7 characters to just one, Twitter has become X - the personal plaything of the richest man in the world. The new brand aligns with Elon Musk's other ventures - Space X, X AI, even his son’s name X Æ A-12 (which his mother Grimes explained "represented the unknown variable, and her elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence"). Musk has plans  to transform X into something akin to China’s WeChat. But is that what democracies need?

How the hell can we protect ourselves from the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence? As human brains compete with digital minds, The Future for Life Institute is proposing watermarking systems to trace AI provenance, and liability for harm caused by runaway products. But with Microsoft’s decision to ditch its entire AI ethics team this week, and the European Union scheduled to vote on the EU AI Act at the end of this month, what sort of disruptions to democracy are forecast? More importantly, how can they be averted?

We reboot in 2023 with Brett Solomon  (CEO of accessnow.org) fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos where he’s been on a panel with the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine. He also took selfies with Will I Am who loves CHAT GPT, the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer owned by Microsoft. Nick Cave calls it ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’. Is this the end of humanity as we know it? Or are we on the brink of a brave new world?

Two landmark pieces of international text were agreed upon this week -  the final text of COP28’s first global stocktake calling on countries to transition away from fossil fuels, and the European Union’s provisional Act to put a few guardrails around the development of Artificial Intelligence.

With lots of get-out clauses for polluters to lean on, and loopholes for Big Tech to jump through, it's a game of horse-trading behind smoke and mirrors. But in the end, it's all we've got.

With 187 Internet shutdowns in 35 countries in 2022, the relationship between democracy and technology is top of mind for many humanitarians. A prime forum to thrash out some of the nuances of this partnership will be the second U.S. Summit for Democracy, which takes place in Washington from March 29-30. Access Now is co-leading the Technology for Democracy Cohort in partnership with the U.K. and Estonian governments. It’s  an impressive coalition of over 150 civil society, government, and private sector organisations across 40 countries. And Brett Solomon will be there.

Not since 1985 when the Apple board got rid of Steve Jobs has there been such an upheaval in the tech sector as there was last Friday when Sam Altman, the 38 year old CEO of Open AI (the not-for-profit that runs CHATGPT), was fired . It was a board coup that also saw the company’s president and three senior researchers resign. Investors were ropeable, especially the CEO of Microsoft who tried to mediate his return to the company. When that failed, Microsoft made Altman an offer he couldn’t refuse. Is this best tech soap opera to date?

There’s a growing spyware industry that uses human rights-abusing technology to spy on people’s daily business. But on March 27,  just two days before the launch of the 2nd U.S. Summit for Democracy in Washington D.C., there was a major victory for human rights activists when President Biden made an executive order to ban US  federal agencies from using commercial spyware.This is a significant victory for activists in this space but does it mean the end of spyware globally?

We examine the growing battle between tech giants and governments around the world.

In the US, Biden has signed off on an ultimatum to Tik Tok to divest or be banned. In Australia, the eSafety Commissioner has issued an ultimatum to X to either take down the video of the stabbing of a bishop in Sydney or pay a daily fine of $785,000 per day. And then there's the European Union where the digital commissioner says a new ‘task and reward program’ on TikTok Lite could be as ‘addictive as cigarettes’.

It's the age of global digital brinkmanship.

 We kick off This Week In Cyberspace 2025 with a look at the inauguration of Donald Trump and how his American tech bros are falling over themselves to be part of the new world order/disorder.

It's a laugh a minute as we get our heads around what just happened with over 100 Executive Orders signed, Trumpian memecoins launched, all against the backdrop of 170 million US Tik Tok users being kicked on and off the platform as the biggest deals in history are being negotiated.

Facial Recognition is now so embedded in our lives that we forget how this data is being used. The securitisastion and corporatisation of everything has led to a point where our identity could be owned by a private company without our consent. How can mere mortal small fry like us reclaim our basic human rights? Hear how regulatory frameworks to govern surveillance capitalism are progressing in places like San Fransisco and Europe.

This week we turn our attention to Saudi Arabia where a futuristic megacity called Neom is being built.  Tech giants Google and Microsoft have just signed massive deals to set up data storage facilities there but what are the implications of doing business with a repressive regime?

2023 has been BIG! We’ve covered the Open AI soap opera, the Internet Governance Forum, the Digital Occupation of Gaza and so much more. So where does all this leave us sensitive receptors as we head into the New Year? We wrap the year in wrapping paper and wish it well as we venture forth into unchartered territory.