For years, digital rights activists across the Global South have complained about various harms linked to social media platforms; today, several are taking Big Tech to court. In this colloquium, Toussaint Nothias argues that these lawsuits herald a new era in platform accountability characterized by greater professionalization, confrontationality and ever-more complex strategic work across borders.
About the Speaker
Toussaint Nothias is Clinical Associate Professor at NYU. He is a communication scholar researching journalism, digital technologies, and civil society. Broadly, he is interested in how inequalities play out in media systems, and how they can be challenged. He has written on a range of topics from stereotyping in the news to corporate projects providing free connectivity across the Global South. His work has notably appeared in the Journal of Communication; Journalism Studies; Media, Culture, and Society; Boston Review and Public Books. He is the editor of the book AI and Assembly: Coming Together and Apart in a Datafied World (forthcoming with Stanford University Press). Before NYU, he spent 8 years at Stanford University as Research Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. There, he led various collaborative and interdisciplinary projects to explore the social impact of digital technologies.
