In  the world’s largest democracy, censorship has been running rampant around a BBC documentary that the Indian Foreign Ministry has called a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” When students in New Delhi organised screenings of the two-part series, authorities called in the riot police, cut off electricity and detained the organisers. ‘India - the Modi Question’ explores the Prime Minister’s  involvement in an actual riot in which 1,000 mostly Muslims were killed back in 2002. So how successful have authorities been in using their emergency powers to censor clips from the doco on social media platforms?

We reboot in 2023 with Brett Solomon  (CEO of accessnow.org) fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos where he’s been on a panel with the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine. He also took selfies with Will I Am who loves CHAT GPT, the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer owned by Microsoft. Nick Cave calls it ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’. Is this the end of humanity as we know it? Or are we on the brink of a brave new world?

A defining moment of the past year has been the massive data breach that left millions asking the question, "Who Am I?". This question wont go away in 2023 as we try to define ourselves not only in physical spaces but online ones too. As governments around the world ramp up their use of cyber warfare, internet shutdowns like the 180 plus we saw in 2022, will continue to occur. What the world needs now, apart from love, sweet love, is more governance around data. Will it happen? Stay tuned for TWICS 2023.  

Shutting down the internet is a powerful digital weapon used by autocrats the world over. It’s currently being used by Putin in his war against Ukraine. In the past 10 months, Russia has also managed to block nearly 3,000 news websites and make civilians in occupied parts of the country pay for SIM cards with Rubels. So how can the rest of the world help restore some sense of interconnectedness in a country under such intense “Russification”?

Millions of people are exploring their artificially generated, inner iridescent, cartoon essence. That’s right, with the recent release of  the “magic avatar” by the photo-editing app Lensa, we can all be fantasy stars in our own lunchtime. But concerns are mounting about how it not only collects massive amounts of personal data, often sexualises your image while potentially breaching artistic copyright.

The 17th Internet Governance Forum has just wrapped up in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, with a call to urgently connect the 2.7 billion who are unconnected by increasing infrastructure investment, fostering digital literacy, harnessing advanced technologies, and building a safe and secure digital space where fundamental human rights are realised. Our regular guest and CEO of the digital rights organisation accessnow.org Brett Solomon was there in the flesh and reports back on the elephant inside the dinosaur.

Brett Solomon joins us from a noisy cafe in Amsterdam for a chat ahead of the 17th Internet Governance Forum in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia. The big irony is that the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray is currently under a two-year internet blackout and this is not on the IGF's agenda yet. Nor is the situation in China nor Russia. There's a battle for control of the internet going on globally and this will be played out in Addis. As will the issue of content governance in conflict zones.

The mass layoffs in the tech sector include human rights experts, specialist rights and ethics teams, and content moderators that speak local languages in places like Asia and Africa. Twitter has shed 90% of employees in India and only has one marketing person left  in Japan, its second largest market. So what do these changing priorities mean and is this a reckoning for the industry?

Things are hotting up as COP27 enters its final days and human rights defenders demand the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. The Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist has been on a six month hunger strike and has refused water since the climate conference began ten days ago. British Parliament is up in arms over it. Lady Boycott is concerned about human rights abuses, Lord Purvis of Tweed wants to pause the 4 billion pound trading partnership.  Khalid Abdalla, the Egyptian-British actor who’ll play Dodi al-Fayed in the upcoming season of Netflix's The Crown, is also concerned. So has Alaa cornered Egypt?

Elon Musk wants to “authenticate all real humans", so why is he dressing up in red samurai gear and posing as the ‘Devil’s Champion’? The Tesla founder’s recent halloween outfit, with its inverted cross and goat’s head breastplate, seems to have inflamed conspiracy theorists who think his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is part of a global battle against evil. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.