TIP’s February Newsletter: So where have we been then? Alongside what to do when grandma is sharing disinformation, and member news.
Inside: Some of the lesser known stories of 2025 so far, what to do when grandma is sharing Covid memes, and our regular members news, jobs and calls for papers.
Good morning TIPers!
Go grab yourself a coffee (and maybe a biscuit) and enjoy your TIP newsletter, where we decode some of the relevant news related to technology, the internet, platforms and politics/policy. If you’re a member of the group, we’re pretty sure we’ve got something to pique your interest this addition.
Although, it has to be said, we’ve been a little sneaky and took a small break, so this is our first edition for 2025! I’m sure we didn’t miss anything? Right?
In this issue we’ve got three pieces of TIP news, including a fantastic blog by Lauren Scott, including some news you might have missed, alongside our regular selection of news and research, jobs, and more!
Enjoy!
Liam
If you’re reading this and not a member of TIP, make sure to sign up through the PSA’s website. It helps with our funding, and we can keep you up to date with all our events, news, and more!
TIP News
AI Regulation in Practice: Compliance and Governance in the EU and UK
In December we hosted a round table which explored the evolving landscape of AI regulation, focusing specifically on the implementation timeline and compliance requirements of the EU AI Act, which aims to establish a harmonized framework for the safe and trustworthy use of AI across Europe. We also discussed the ongoing procedures for setting up the AI Act governance framework (AI Pact, GPAI Code of Practice, AI Office, national authorities). The discussion touched on the ongoing debates surrounding the UK’s AI Bill, which seeks to craft an AI regulatory approach distinct from the EU while balancing innovation and governance.
We’ve finally got the recording of the meeting online – which you can now watch here:
New Blog: “Help! Gran is sharing conspiracy memes on Facebook!” How should we respond to misinformed family members?
Dr Lauren Scott explores how to counter misinformation between family members and exposes the difficulties in navigating family hierarchies. It’s a really interesting read!
TIP At PSA25 Birmingham
If you’ve not seen the full schedule has been released for PSA25 at Birmingham, you should. TIP is hosting 6 panels across the conference. If you joined us at PSA24, you’ll know we’ve had some absolutely cracking papers in the past, and this conference certainly looks no different! So if you’ve not registered already, get on it! https://www.psa.ac.uk/events/psa-annual-conference
Monday 14th April
AI in Public Services & Government
AI solutionism: opportunities and pitfalls for health policy. Dr. Inga Ulnicane, Dr. Marija Antanaviciute, Prof. Jessica Pykett
Uncovering AI in government and policy decisions. Dr. Anuradha Sajjanhar
Editor, Commissioner or Colleague: how generative AI mediated communication is reshaping the public encounter. Dr. Stephen Jeffares, Mr. Luke Bradbury
Encryption in the Online Safety Regime: Unpacking the Techno-Legislative Object of “Accredited Technology”. Ms. Cynthia Ng
AI policy & Governance across Countries
Shall We Tango in the Digital Sky?: Sino-Saudi Cloud Computing Cooperation and Entrepreneurial Developmental State. Dr. Steven Hai
AI, Politics, and Governance: Comparative Insights from Germany, Turkey, and the UK. Dr. Sebnem Yardimci Geyikci
Disinformation & Memes
The Participatory Memesphere: Third Place Dynamics in Meme Communities. Ms. Mimi Mihailescu
Digital Immunization: Gamifying Detection of AI-Generated Visual Misinformation. Dr. Ganit Richter
Does the Electoral Clock go TikTok? The use of short form video platforms by political parties in the 2024 UK General Election. Dr. Liam McLoughlin, Dr. Rosalynd Southern, Ms. Niamh Cashell
Visualguard of democracy: Multimodal framework for detecting AI-generated visual disinformation in political campaigns. Dr. Kun He, Dr. Jiapan Guo
“If This Is True, Then All Hell Is About to Break Loose”: Information Disorder and the UK 2024 Riots. Ms. Anna Gaudet
Tuesday 15th April
NLP Methods in Researching Technology & Society
Caught Between Predicting Sexism in Online Political Discourse: An Analysis of the Forms of Sexism Which Exist Online and How Well Language Models Predict Them. Ms. Aditi Dutta
Exploring China’s Cyber Sovereignty Concept and Artificial Intelligence Governance Model: A Machine Learning Approach. Mr. Ho Ting Hung
Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling of COVID-19 News Coverage in India: Integrating Facebook Reactions and Textual Content. Mr. Sawood Anwar
Platform Regulation & Cyber Governance in the Global South
Cyber Governance, Policy Challenges and Opportunities Post-conflict in Somalia. Ms. Ramsha Ashraf
Authoritarianism within Democracies: A Framework for the Dynamics among Political Actors in the Digital Age. Ms. Sahngmin Shin
Tactics of disconnection: How netizens navigate China’s censorship system. Dr. Kun He.
Philosophy of AI: making sense of its (potential) impacts
Mapping Actors in Digital Public Policy. Ms. Grace Piddington
Pivoting Around Capital in Silicon Valley: Alternative Approaches to Tech Policy. Mrs. Michelle Venetucci
Victor or Victim? Rethinking the Metaverse’s Political Economy. Ms. Katayoon Salehi
From Pulpit to Algorithm: The Ethical Intersection of AI and Catholic Values. Ms. Manoela Mayrink
What is Digital Politics? Defining a Poly-Field of Study: A Systematic Literature Review. Dr. Alejandro fdz-del-Río, Dr. Marco Guglielmo.
So what did we miss while we’ve been away?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Much of it pretty depressing, or a bit Musky. You’ve probably already heard of all that, so let’s give you some stories you might not have seen while other things have spammed your headlines.
Policy making by AI. The UK Civil Service has launched a series of AI tools for Civil Servants to use in the making and assessment by policy. Dubbed ‘Humphrey' AI. In Civil Service World, BBC and Global Government Forum. The hopes are that AI can be used to improve the NHS services and reduce costs. We will probably come back to this when we’re able to cut back the initial hype and see some results. Although anyone who attended my talk on the use of OpenAI’s GPT4o in content analysis at Bournemouth (I know there was at least 7 of you there!) will probably be a little pessimistic.
Meta has been a little cheeky with it’s feed: From Dec onwards audiences on Instagram started to sprout Meta alternative platforms following Mark Zuckerberg donating $1m to the Donald Trump inauguration fund. One such alternative was Pixelfed.social. 404Media (who are great btw) reported that suddenly links to the decentralised platform where being removed for spam. Meta later claimed that it was a mistake after being called out – but the timings were a little suspicious… we know how virality works, so seems the large platform cut off links to a competing platform during the hype-cycle.
Obviously Meta isn’t the first company to seek to limit competitors by playing with social media feeds. In 2023, X was punishing websites which where being suggested as X alternatives – with links to Masodon, Bsky, Threads, and Substacks being de-ranked or hidden from recommendation feeds.
Everyone is looking at U.S Federal policy changes, but there’s some interesting goings on within the states themselves. Five US states currently have AI-policy that we might see introduced in 2025. This round up by Max Greenwood at Campaigns & Elections goes though them all. But they range from generalised AI transparency laws, banning deepfakes, and disclosure notices for political campaigns that use synthetic media.
Romanian court cancels presidential election amid Russian influence fears. “Romania’s top constitutional court on Friday dramatically cancelled high-stakes presidential elections after security services warned Russia was mounting “aggressive” hybrid attacks against the Eastern European country”. Report in Politico, and TechRadar
The ICO has provided their response to the consultation on Generative AI. You can read it here.
Tech Bytes
Booth, R. (2025). Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content
Dave, P., & Burgess, M. (2025). Microsoft Hosted Explicit Videos of This Startup Founder for Years. Here's How She Got Them Taken Down. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/deepfake-survivor-breeze-liu-microsoft/
Lomas, N. (2025). Study of TikTok, X ‘For You’ feeds in Germany finds far-right political bias ahead of federal elections. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/study-of-tiktok-x-for-you-feeds-in-germany-finds-far-right-political-bias-ahead-of-federal-elections/
Sajjanhar, A. (2025). The UK’s Big Pitch: AI Innovation Over Accountability. Tech Policy Press. https://www.techpolicy.press/the-uks-big-pitch-ai-innovation-over-accountability/
Your TIP News
TIP member highlights & Publications
Stafford, T. (2025). Do Community Notes work? LSE Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/01/14/do-community-notes-work/
CEPS Launches New Tech Podcast. The CEPS Tech Podcast. https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-news/ceps-launches-new-tech-podcast/
Murry, C. (2024). How we were deepfaked by election deepfakes. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/62d81e6c-eec0-4d09-a71f-6aba579912dd?accessToken=zwAGKlLvrQc4kc9i2B5s7sBNCdOnH2q6V5kS3Q.MEUCIEHgbN4RzjKGFhAeiBLTo531R2-ztvfz1llmAxliubK0AiEAy9Sl9AuGXb_N7fQPH2UDxosDVbwGk25TFbz6APAUlS0&sharetype=gift&token=bd0582da-d0f0-4007-8f7f-9bd4352eaee1
LFGSS and Microcosm announce they are shutting down their forums a day before the Online Safety Act is enforced. https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/
Sáenz-Leandro, R., & Fernández-Ardèvol, M. (2024). The politics of policy change in platform capitalism: A systematic review of the literature on the regulation of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs). Platforms & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/29768624241304599
Divon, T., Are, C. & Briggs, P. (2025). Platform gaslighting: A user-centric insight into social media corporate communications of content moderation. Platforms & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/29768624241303109
Jobs & Opportunities
Call for papers & Grants
Call for Papers: Empirical AI Ethics. Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society. (Deadline 1st March). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-forum-on-ai-culture-and-society/announcements/call-for-papers/empirical-ai-ethics
Call for Papers: CCR Special Issue on Digital Communication in Social Movement. (Deadline 8th March) https://journal.computationalcommunication.org/announcement/view/179
Digital Democracy: Bridging Theory and Practice. 2nd Conference of the European Network for Digital Democracy, Paris. (Deadline 1st March) https://eddy-2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/4
MA studentship grant to support a Master’s student in the Ethics of AI, University of Cambridge. https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/news/a-gift-to-support-a-masters-student-in-the-ethics-of-ai
Call for papers - Amsterdam Trust Summit 2025, University of Amsterdam. August 28-29. (Deadline 28th Feb) https://digitaltrust.uva.nl/amsterdam-trust-summit-2025/call-for-papers-ats-2025.html?cb
Jobs/Fellowships
PhD studentship in Creative Industries (multiple), University of Stirling. (24th March). https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/institute-for-advanced-studies-studentships/creative-industries/
PhD studentship in ethical implications of natural language processing, University of Edinburgh. (Deadline 15th March). https://informatics.ed.ac.uk/study-with-us/our-degrees/postgraduate-research-and-cdts/postgraduate-research-funding/phd-ethical-implications-natural-language-processing
Visiting Researcher/Scholar (EU Law). Institute for Law & AI. Fixed/full time. https://law-ai.org/career/visiting-researcher-scholar/Media Literacy Associate. Ofcom. (end date 26th Feb) https://ofcom.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Ofcom_Careers/details/Media-Literacy-Associate_JR1954
Fellowships, CAIS – Research for the Digital Age. Berlin. https://www.cais-research.de/en/cais-college/fellowships/
Community & Communications Officer, Campaign Lab. (Deadline 21st Feb). https://apply.workable.com/campaign-lab/j/F628E31B18/
Data & AI Governance Lead, SBS Software. https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/SopraSteria1/744000031207952-data-ai-governance-lead
Ad Astra Fellow - Lecturer/Assistant Professor in AI and Digital Cultural Heritage, UCD School of information and Communication. https://www.ucd.ie/ics/vacancies/staffvacancies/adastrafellow-inaianddigitalculturalheritage/
That’s all for this months newsletter. As always if you have any questions, comments, or something to add to the newsletter, please do get in touch!