*CFP* “TRUST AND DIGITAL PLATFORMS”, SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES JOURNAL

As online activities and experiences are increasingly mediated through digital platforms, a series of scandals and ‘public shocks’ (Ananny & Gillespie, 2017)have raised concerns about privacy and security, the misuse of user data, algorithmic biases, and the public distribution of objectionable and sometimes abhorrent content through the internet (Flew, Martin, & Suzor, 2019). Legislators and regulators in many countries are now engaged in public enquiries and the development of new laws to apply public interest standards to digital platforms, as First Amendment arguments about freedom of online expression and claims that the platforms are simply intermediaries are increasingly under challenge (Napoli, 2019).

This special issue proposes to view such questions from the perspective of trust. International surveys have documented a decline in trust in social, political institutions over time, including rising distrust of the media (Edelman, 2019). Manifestations of declining public trust are variously seen in the rise of populist political movements (Norris & Ingelhart, 2019), concerns about ‘fake news’ and ‘deepfakes’ (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), and scandals surrounding leading public institutions, from financial institutions and digital platform companies to political parties and religious organizations. Trust is a multifaceted concept, and important contributions have been made to the field from philosophy, political science, sociology and economics, as well as communication and media studies. To take one example, the concept of a public sphere rests upon an underlying degree of trust in journalists and the organizations involved in the production and distribution of news and information (Coleman, 2012).

Amidst talk about whether the concerns about the power of digital platforms and ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019)points towards ‘the end of trust’(McSweeney’s, 2019), this special issue poses questions such as:

• Do communication scholars have original insights into questions of trust, and how can they draw upon other fields of scholarship around trust issues?
• Is trust or distrust a concept that is empirically measurable? Are there lessons from earlier ‘social capital’ debates about how to understand relations of trust, and what is the relationship of digital technologies to trust issues?
• Can government regulation address the power of digital platforms and contribute to better relations of trust between platform users and providers? What lessons can be learnt from laws passed in other jurisdictions (e.g. European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, Germany’s Online Hate Speech laws, Singapore’s anti-Fake News laws)?
• Does the global and decentralized nature of such platforms necessitate that the lead be taken by non-governmental organizations, or that the solutions will be essentially technological in nature (e.g. a combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies)?
• Is regulation of digital platforms best understood as being within the remit of communications policies, or are the most appropriate measures primarily related to economic policies, such as anti-trust and consumer protection laws, or by regarding digital platforms as ‘information fiduciaries’ (Balkin, 2018; Dobkin, 2018)?

Practicalities

Please submit a 500-word abstract to Terry Flew (t.flew@qut.edu.au) and Sora Park (sora.park@canberra.edu.au) before 1 December 2019.

The special collection will be published as part of the Communication and Media Section of the Global Perspectives journal. The special issue will publish full paper submissions of 6.000-8.000 words. 

Publication guidelines can be found here.

1 February 2020 - notification of invitation to submit full papers (6000-8000 words)

1 August 2020- submission of full papers

1 December 2020 - review process complete

1 May 2021 - publication of articles

About the journal

Global Perspectives (GP) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal seeking to advance social science research and debates in a globalizing world, specifically in terms of concepts, theories, methodologies, and evidence bases. Work published in the journal is enriched by invited perspectives, through scholarly annotations, that enhance its global and interdisciplinary implications.

GP is devoted to the study of global patterns and developments across a wide range of topics and fields, among them trade and markets, security and sustainability, communication and media, justice and law, governance and regulation, culture and value systems, identities, environmental interfaces, technology-society interfaces, shifting geographies and migration.

GP sets out to help overcome national and disciplinary fragmentation and isolation.  GP starts from the premise that the world that gave rise to the social sciences in their present form is no more. The national and disciplinary approaches that developed over the last century are increasingly insufficient to capture the complexities of the global realities of a world that has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time.  New concepts, approaches and forms of academic discourse may be called for.