Tech and Elections

Over 2024-25, through my newsletter, Homo Digitalis, and in collaborations with Tech Policy Press and Digital Action, I analysed the role of digital technologies in elections, and focused on the long election mega-cycle spanning elections and referenda in over 80 countries in 2024. I looked at the broad trends and themes seen across platforms' approaches to trust and safety, and resourcing. Additionally, I also looked at how election management bodies regulated platforms, and the disparities in their power across countries. While also covering elections in the US, the focus of this work was on other parts of the world, particularly Global Majority countries.

Digital Identities: Design and Uses

I led the Centre for Internet and Society’s Digital Identity programme, focusing on the global uptake of digital identity, its problems and solutions. With Vrinda Bhandari, I prepared an evaluation framework for national digital identity programmes, which has since been adapted by civil society actors in five Latin American countries, and ten African countries. Additionally, I conceptualised and co-authored a decision guide for policy and technological design options for digital identity systems. This project was nominated at the #GoodID Community Champions Awards 2021 in the privacy track.

Knowing without Seeing

Knowing without Seeing is a research project, which explores meaningful transparency solutions for opaque algorithms, and privileges understanding over merely accessing information. I critically question the transparency ideal in the context of AI systems employing opaque algorithms. This research views transparency as an instrumental value designed to achieve accountability of systems by empowering individuals. I articulate the contours of this version of transparency and speculate how it may be delivered in practice, and assimilated in regulation. This work was supported through a fellowship awarded by the Mozilla Foundation.

The Networked Public

In this book, I investigate the history of misinformation and the biases that make the public susceptible to it, how digital platforms and their governance impacts the public’s behaviour on them, as well as the changing face of political targeting in this data-driven world. The book weaves sharp analysis with academic rigour to show that while the public can be irrational and gullible, their actions—be it mob violence or spreading fake news—are symptoms of deeper social malaise and products of their technological contexts.

The book is available for sale here.