Big Tech, Society, and Systemic Risk

Big Tech, Society, and Systemic Risk examines the challenges of digital information landscapes exploring their societal impacts and offering methodological and policy insights for understanding and mitigating the risks emerging from today’s digital information environment.This volume explores the digital world’s constantly changing actors, architectures and business models, that are profoundly reshaping the conditions under which people access information and form opinions. This transformation poses growing challenges for democracy and is increasingly difficult to study due to, among other things, unsettled basic concepts and metrics. The authors address issues such as the spread of disinformation and deepfakes, the algorithms of online services and audiences’ media literacy from legal, technological, economic, societal, and political perspectives. Furthermore, the chapters also analyse responses of policymakers, tech platforms, and civil society, and provide tools to assess policy effectiveness of these responses.A valuable and interdisciplinary addition to the literature on technology and society, this book will appeal to students and scholars of digital media, media and communication studies, technology studies, sociology, political science, and political economy of media.