Towards a human-centric internet: challenges and solutions. Mapping key tech and policy topics with text-mining

The main objective of the report is to present an online tool that facilitates the study of key technological challenges and related policy issues. Using text-mining methodology, the authors investigated and identified topics covered in articles shared on social networks – Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News. The authors focused on six thematic areas: Environment and Sustainability; Decentralization and Alternative Models of Regulation of Digital Markets; Digital Transformation of Public Space; Privacy, Identity and Data Governance; Trustworthy Information Flow, Cybersecurity and Democracy; Access to Inclusive and Ethical Digital Technologies. Interactive maps present related groups of articles for each thematic area, allowing the discovery of key technological and policy challenges, opinions and recommendations for solutions. Through expert analysis, the authors labeled and named clusters on the map, supporting further analysis by users. To present the potential of this tool, the authors prepared an in-depth analysis for the thematic area: “Access to Inclusive and Ethical Digital Technologies”. The report provides insights into challenges and solutions related to: Open Internet (access to the Internet, control over infrastructure, censorship and content moderation) Inclusive technologies (gender and race equality, inclusive education, technologies used in the justice system) Ethical technologies (bias in algorithms, military and surveillance applications of AI, gig economy). More about the study and the report: https://ngitopics.delabapps.eu/index