These are a bunch of topics I am specifically interested in and some of the primary sources of information and expertise I prefer to use and rely on:
- media literacy (MIL, media education/monitoring/critical thinking, media studies)
- media freedom/bias (ownership/advertising/ideology/political pressure)
- algorithms (AI and in particular machine learning in content moderation – the false assumption that AI is neutral and unbiased)
- public interest journalism (public media mission, new monetization models for independent media)
- tech journalism (tech coverage in the last 15-20 years and the negative effect of being too slow to spot how things have changed and to cover the sector as the corporate behemoth it is)
- digital privacy rights (digital breadcrumbs – the data trail we leave behind us; GDPR)
- communication rights (ECHR – the balance of rights)
- ECJ practice (preliminary rulings, Schrems class action lawsuit, safe harbor privacy principles)
- free speech (first amendment, case-law of the ECHR – judgments and decisions, case-law translations)
- disinformation & propaganda online (fake news – a symptom not disease)
- social platforms liability (to regulate or not to regulate) – the roles and terms of power/responsibilities of legislators (policymakers) > private companies > public (participatory culture/MIL)
- media convergence (medium is the message)
- identifying bad actors, understanding influence campaigns and implementing online political ad rules
- next-gen video games[*] (virtual & augmented reality, emerging technologies)
Primary sources of information: newsletters from online media (BBC, The Guardian, NYT, Recode, The Verge etc), research centres (EC’s Joint Research Centre, EAVI, Oxford Internet Institute, Ofcom etc), Google Alerts on some of the aforementioned topics (eventually article 11 will kill these); also Twitter (public figures’ like journalists and experts in political sciences profiles); podcasts (the Daily, the Ezra Klein Show, The Kicker, Recode Decode, Government vs the Robots etc)
[*] With The role of video games for the development of media literacy being the subject of my master thesis