Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies
Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust
Report of Session 2019-21 - published 29 June 2020 - HL Paper 77
Contents
Box 1: Definition of platforms
Figure 1: Examples of daily activity across social media platforms globally
The Committee’s work and acknowledgements
Box 2: Definition of misinformation and disinformation
Tackling misinformation and disinformation online
Making use of parliamentary expertise
Accountability and the technology platforms
Figure 2: Timeline of progress on the Online Harms White Paper
Freedom of expression in the online world
Platforms’ ultimate responsibility under a duty of care
Appealing platforms’ decisions
Do platforms cause polarisation and degrade democratic discourse?
Algorithmic design and outrage factories
Access for independent researchers
Box 4: How Google’s algorithms work
Transparency in content moderation
Box 5: President Trump and content moderation study
Chapter 5: Inclusive debate across society
The role of technology in tackling the challenges facing democracy
Supporting technological innovation in democracy
Technology as a tool, but not a panacea for problems facing democracy
How Government and Parliament could better use digital tools
Chapter 6: Free and fair elections
Box 6: Definition of campaigner
Figure 4: Timeline of electoral developments throughout modern British history
Outside the formal investigation period
Box 8: Mozilla Guidelines for Effective Advert Archives
Campaigners’ use of personal data
Chapter 7: Active digital citizens
Digital skills and digital media literacy
Box 9: Definition of digital media literacy
Table 1: Digital Media Literacy and Digital Skills in the Curriculum
Table 2: Digital pedagogy in Estonia and Finland
Who has responsibility for digital media literacy?
Teaching digital media literacy
Box 10: JCQ Statistics on take-up of computing GCSE and A-level
Making social media companies understandable to the public
Anonymity as a barrier to understanding content on the internet
Appendix 1: List of Members and declarations of interest
Appendix 4: Note of the Committee Digital Surgeries organised with The Politics Project
Appendix 5: Regulatory Innovation Workshop
Appendix 6: The Seven Principles of Public Life (The Nolan Principles)
Appendix 7: List of definitions used in this Report
Evidence is published online at https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/407/democracy-and-digital-technologies-committee/ and available for inspection at the Parliamentary Archives (020 7129 3074).
Q in footnotes refers to a question in oral evidence.
The prefixes ZDA and DAD refer to items of written evidence. The prefixes are interchangeable and the same evidence will be found under each number in both series.