Journal of Digital Media & Policy - COVID-19 and Digital Media Policy, Mar 2021

International and (generally) national law provides for a fundamental human right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom to seek, receive and impart information through any media of one’s choice. The exercise of this right, however, may be subject to restrictions, including for the protection of public health. The specificity of the COVID-19 crisis lies in its global geographical scale and the generally concerted political response to it, which included limitations on freedom of information. Current limitations differ from those triggered by past public health concerns. Taking European countries as case studies, the author singles out and analyses in detail three areas of concern: restraints on access to information; bans on disinformation; and monopolization of the information flow, the latter potentially contributing to establishing a ‘monopoly on truth’.

This article investigates how digital surveillance tools used by East Asian governments against COVID-19 affect privacy and personal data protection. It applies doctrinal legal analysis and case study to compare national regulations of these tools as well as their implementation in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The approaches range considerably from total (China) to selective surveillance, which, however, seems overly excessive towards privacy of certain social groups, exacerbating social stratification and business disruptions in East Asia. The article argues that selective surveillance models vary across the region from voluntary selective (Japan) to compulsory selective surveillance (Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea) and differ in terms of privacy and related rights. Yet, the increased risks of data misuse and leakages in all the East Asian states and territories need effective legal mechanisms for privacy and data protection that pay sufficient attention to public scrutiny and independent regulators.

Drawing on South Korea’s response to COVID-19, this article examines how the digital measures that were implemented by the nation state during the pandemic intensified the dilemma between public safety and information rights. South Korea’s highly praised handling of COVID-19 raises the question of how far digital technology can infiltrate everyday life for the sake of public safety and how citizens can negotiate the rapid digital transformation of a nation state. The South Korean government’s digital measures during the pandemic involved the extensive use of personal data; however, citizens were not allowed sufficient participation in the flow of information. By critically examining the South Korean case, this article reveals that the government coped with the pandemic through digital surveillance as a way to avoid physical lockdown, and in so doing, projected its desire for transition to a digitally advanced state while facilitating nationalism through a digital utopian discourse.

In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, on 9 April 2020, a draft bill was presented to fight against the spread of COVID-19 in Turkey. Eight articles were buried deep in the proposed legislation, which mostly included economic measures and aid packages, directly targeting any social media company that had a platform accessed by over one million users daily. Although the articles on social media were dropped from the parliamentary schedule on 14 April 2020 to make way for more urgent bills on the economy and health, the uncertainty regarding social media companies’ situation in the country remained. Then, on 29 July 2020, the new social media law, officially ‘The Law on Making Amendments to the Law on Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Combating Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publication’, numbered 7253 was adopted by the parliament. This article approaches this issue from the perspective of social media companies, specifically Facebook and Twitter, and analyses the post-Coronavirus digital scene and public policy attempts from the corporate point of view.

Chile, Colombia and Mexico have long been at the heart of neo-liberal experimentation and cybertarian fantasy. The former has denuded their ability to meet the needs of the citizenry in general, the latter to provide a democratic media. The contemporary pandemic has put these deregulated, privatized economies under particular strain – market solutions to social problems have proven dramatically, drastically, predictably inefficient. In the sphere of education, the isolation of school pupils and workers, mandated in the interest of public health, has driven a return to public broadcasting. Combined with mass public agitation and media-reform movements, that provides hope for a new landscape.

This article analyses the digital policies introduced in different Latin American countries during the first three months after the outbreak of COVID-19 reached the region (March–June 2020). This analysis has a three-fold objective: (a) to give an overview of the status of connectivity in five big Latin American countries – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico; (b) to study comparatively the actions and regulations implemented on connectivity matters by the governments of each country to face the pandemic; and (c) to provide insights in relation with telecommunications policies in the context of pandemic emergence at a regional level. To that end, this study will consider legal regulations and specific public policies in this field, official documents from the public and private sectors, and statistics on ICT access and usage in the region.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented demands upon digital infrastructure as large portions of the population work, socialize and attend school online. National regulators worldwide have been struggling to maintain service for all citizens as the essential place of internet access in contemporary life becomes paramount. This article narrows the policy focus from the national to the municipal level. Using the case study of Calgary, Canada, the authors outline a unique and successful private–public partnership where local internet service providers have been able to adapt to the changing demands of the COVID era, supported by forward-thinking municipal policy. The authors draw upon local data sources, municipal reports and interviews with key public and private sector officials to explore how municipalities can best position themselves to provide resilient and sustainable digital service in the face of this global pandemic.

During the first wave of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020, the Hungarian government has increased its control over the flow of official information. Its actions were justified with the aim of stopping the spread of misinformation and rumours that could jeopardize its efforts to successfully tackle the pandemic. However, media practitioners, watchdogs and politicians in Hungary and abroad criticized the measures for their adverse effects on the right to information, the freedom of expression, and especially for their potential chilling effect on the work of journalists. This interview-based study examines how journalists in digital newsrooms have perceived the measures imposed during the pandemic, and how those have impacted their daily work. As evidence from digital newsrooms shows, the malign policy had only limited adverse effects on the work of newsrooms. Media pluralism, however, was further decreased in the country through the governing political elite’s interference in the media economy.

Content moderation was already a highly polarized policy topic before the COVID-19 pandemic. The subsequent onslaught of misinformation and disinformation on COVID-19 has also led to multiple platform policy responses by private US-based companies and beyond. Discussion of these policies has also contributed to a sense that this level of media attention to a formerly somewhat obscure US law – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – could lead to a change in that law. This commentary provides a look into this small piece of legislation that has historically had a big impact on western internet governance. This is framed within a more global view of internet governance, and the impact this may have on the internet more broadly.

Review of: Consumer Identities: Agency, Media, and Digital Culture, Candice D. Roberts and Myles Ethan Lascity (eds) (2019)

Bristol: Intellect, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78320-981-1, h/bk, £72.00

Review of: Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation, Petros Iosifidis and Nicholas Nicoli (2021)

London and New York: Routledge, 172 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36733-210-5, p/bk, $35.96