States, companies, algorithms and crowds: the many new faces of web censorship

Censorship is one of the most mainstreamed tools for repression in the digital age. Sometimes it is abuses of copyright regulation, sometimes just a tool for expression control, sometimes the collaborative effect of a crowd that abuses the blurred definition of hate speech.

The panel will consider the diverse faces of censorship;

1. by using social and political pressures, the content takedown achieved by pressuring a platform or in collaboration with an ISP

2. algorithmic censorship, or the abuse of the daily confusion to make polarizing material less visible on the many platforms in which algorithms decide what you see and what you don't

This diversity of cases pose different threats. We will reflect on the countermeasures, their accessibility, and other challenges in this digital conflict.