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Malta Business Review
ERC STORY
ERC STORY
Malta Business Review
WHEN TECHNOLOGY EMPOWERS
MIGRANT WOMEN
CAN ALGORITHMS STEAL
ELECTIONS?
PROJECT DETAILS
PROJECT DETAILS
Researcher (PI): Phil Howard
Social networking platforms and other
online activities can enable women
migrants to maintain the links with their
home countries, but also to connect
to each other, thus encouraging their
emancipation. Digital media could hence
be rethought as a tool for participation
and integration. These are preliminary
findings of Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi’s study
focusing on migrant women in three
different European countries.
In recent decades, the migration of women
to and within Europe has increased.
In specific waves - for instance, those
connected to family reunion, arranged
marriages, and care demand - women are
more numerous than men to migrate.
While they are often autonomous migrants,
they are underrepresented in the news
or perceived as victims of the migration
process, which is usually portrayed as
violent and men-dominated.
New communication technologies not only
help migrant women overcome isolation
and distance from their home countries, but
they seem to provide them with novel tools
of active participation and emancipation.
With the project CONNECTINGEUROPE
a team of researchers based at Utrecht
University, aims to understand if and how
digital technologies enhance European
integration or foster segregation.
To do so, Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi, who leads
the project, is analysing the online activities
of migrant women aged 18-40 from Somali,
Turkish and Romanian backgrounds, living
in London, Amsterdam and Rome. The
internet is not always a safe space for
women and according to the researcher,
it can reflect, if not magnify, dynamics
of exploitation and racism, most notably
through racist hashtags on social networks.
At the same time though, digital platforms
allow women to connect around specific
topics that identify them as an online
community and to share information to
which they would otherwise not have
access.
The internet is not always a safe
space for women and according
to the researcher, it can reflect,
if not magnify, dynamics of
exploitation and racism
Prof. Ponzanesi, for example, has examined
with her team the feminist poetry of
Somali-British writer Warsan Shire. After
going viral for being quoted in pop singer
Beyonce’s latest album Lemonade, her
work has connected and mobilized women
from African and Somali diasporas in
digital media platforms worldwide, on
issues of race and womanhood, but also of
immigration and refugees.
By combining media and communication
studies with gender and postcolonial
studies, Prof. Ponzanesi will further examine
how digital connectedness influences the
interaction among and between different
Researcher (PI): Sandra Ponzanesi
Title:
CONNECTINGEUROPE
Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender,
Diaspora and Belonging
Host Institution:
UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT,
Netherlands
ERC call details:
ERC-2014-CoG, SH5
Max ERC Funding:
1 992 809 €
diasporic groups, as well as new forms of
participation and citizenship in postcolonial
Europe. Her research will thus contribute
to the development of postcolonial digital
humanities.
Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Gender
and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht
University (The Netherlands), and Head
of Department Humanities at University
College Utrecht. She specialises in gender
and postcolonial studies, cinema, and
digital media studies, among other fields.
Prof. Ponzanesi is also founder and director
of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI),
a platform for research into postcolonial
issues.
Find more examples of projects in the
brochure: Migration and asylum: The
contribution of frontier research to the
understanding of human mobility across
frontiers. MBR
The effect social media have on political
discourse has been subject of intense
discussion, especially since the UK
referendum and US elections in 2016.
A researcher funded by the European
Research Council (ERC) is trying to shed
light onto the ways politicians use online
social networks and the murky world of
political algorithms.
"The majority of young people these days get
their political news over the social media,"
says Phil Howard, Professor of Internet
Studies and ERC grantee at the Oxford
Internet Institute. "It's very difficult to grow
up without developing so political opinion
that has been shaped by the content you
see from your friends and family over a social
network platform."
Social media offer a medium where everyone
can express and distribute their views,
changing the way we share and absorb
information.
(View Computational propaganda and fake
news from European Research Council on
Vimeo: https://erc.europa.eu/projectsfigures/stories/can-algorithms-stealelections)
But for all the benefits these platforms bring,
they do have their drawbacks. Professor
Howard, who leads an ERC-funded research
project on computation propaganda, studies
how politicians manipulate people on
internet. His team, consisting of IT experts and
social scientists, specialises in the processes of
using algorithms to deliver messages to large
numbers of people over social media.
Algorithms and fake news go hand in hand
Hoaxes and misinformation cause harm
because of the automatic distribution by
social media bots. Automated political bots,
unlike human beings, are able to disseminate
information and opinions throughout the
day quickly, strategically and without rest.
They can influence public opinion and drive
political agenda. "Algorithms and fake news
go hand in hand," says Prof. Howard.
The consequences of online
misinformation are serious and
spill over also outside politics
The team at Oxford Internet Institute has
monitored three major votes in the UK, US
and France and collected data from the weeks
leading up to them. In a recently published
paper they showed for example that French
voters share less fake news than voters in the
US or Germany.
The consequences of online misinformation
are serious and spill over also outside politics,
according to Professor Howard. For instance,
the number of people who think climate
change may not be so real is increasing, as
the number of people who are not sure that
tobacco causes cancer, explains Howard.
Title:
COMPROP
Computational Propaganda:
Investigating the Impact of
Algorithms and Bots on Political
Discourse in Europe
Host Institution:
THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND
SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
OXFORD, United Kingdom
ERC call details:
ERC-2014-CoG, SH2
Max ERC Funding:
1 980 112 €
"In part this is because of very effective social
media campaigns that erode the contributions
of science. There are very important public
health issues that are being impacted by the
combination of fake news and social media."
In April 2017, Professor Howard received a
top-up funding from the ERC through a Proof
of Concept grant. Using the data his team has
collected over the last few years, Howard's
next project is to design an online tool that
would allow social media users to evaluate
the authenticity of suspicious social media
accounts. MBR
Courtesy: European Research Council
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