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RESEARCH ISSUE IN FOCUS

How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies

The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!

Further research issues in focus

HIIG Expertise

Ali Aslan Gümüsay

Organizing in times of crisis

Tina Krell, Jörg Pohle and Deniz Erden

Pandemic control through digital media

Matthias C. Kettemann

Five questions on COVID-19, law and regulation

Blog articles

Ali Aslan Gümüsay & Patrick Haack | 8 June 2020

Tackling COVID-19 as a Grand Challenge

Tackling COVID-19 requires coordinated, collaborative, and collective efforts that take into account other grand challenges including climate change. So how does this crisis relate to other grand challenges and how…

Pablo Beytía Reyes & Carlos Cruz Infante | 6 May 2020

Using Google Trends to track social responses to COVID-19

Countries with a high peak in Google searches for the term coronavirus tend to reduce their COVID-19 infection rates. Does it make sense to associate digital information search with the…

Bruna Toso de Alcântara | 4 May 2020

The coronavirus pandemic and its impact on cybersecurity

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted cybersecurity in several ways. The challenges range from the infrastructure of the internet itself to the spread of disinformation online. Nevertheless, not all is lost,…

Frédéric Dubois | 30 April 2020

Open access: critical mass

Marcel Wrzesinski has been Open Access Officer at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society for almost a year. The seasoned journal editor who’s been in academic publishing for about…

João Carlos Vieira Magalhães | 30 April 2020

Digital tech and the pandemic

Perils and Opportunities How will the coronavirus pandemic affect specific kinds of digital technologies and practices? HIIG researchers offer some tentative answers. At this point, we have all been overwhelmed…

Bruna Toso de Alcântara | 29 April 2020

State-sponsored cyber activities in Coronavirus times

The coronavirus pandemic has created a gold mine for cybercriminal activities, including those sponsored by states, generating digital chaos. However, amid this chaos, a light at the end of the…

Alexander Pirang | 23 April 2020

Is the COVID-19 pandemic social media platforms’ chance at redemption?

Faced with an ‘infodemic’ in the wake of COVID-19, social media platforms have ramped up their efforts to address misinformation. Facebook in particular seems to have implemented a surprisingly robust…

Sonja Köhne | 14 April 2020

The potential of digital training strategies in SME

The effects of the corona pandemic currently worry small and medium-sized businesses. At the same time, facing the current crisis, formerly analogue processes are adapted at an impressive speed. Coupled…

Timo Seidl | 6 April 2020

The Techlash in Times of Corona

The Corona pandemic has made us all painfully aware of how dependent we are on tech companies. This should not put an end to critical debates around tech regulation but…

Tanja Fisse & Claudia Haas | 2 April 2020

COVID-19 and true solidarity on the internet

The social relevance of digital spaces for collective action is greater than ever. This article addresses acts of solidarity during corona pandemic and examines in what way they affect norms…

Marie Rosenkranz | 25 March 2020

Corona culture

How COVID-19 is activating the digital society  COVID-19 is teaching us how rapidly things can change. All of a sudden, we are living in a new stay-at-home culture. This entails…

Selected Publications

João Carlos Magalhães and Nick Couldry: Tech Giants Are Using This Crisis to Colonize the Welfare System

In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.

Jörg Pohle et al.: Datenschutz-Folgenabschätzung für die Corona-App

Seit einigen Wochen kreist die Diskussion um die Eindämmung der Corona-Pandemie um den Einsatz technischer Hilfsmittel wie Tracing-Apps für Smartphones. Wir haben es hier mit einem gesellschaftlichen Großexperiment zur digitalen Verhaltenserfassung unter staatlicher Aufsicht zu tun. Doch wie steht es um Wirksamkeit und Folgen entsprechender Apps?

Pablo Beytía & Carlos Cruz Infante: Using Google Trends to Track Social Responses to COVID-19

We need quickly available indicators of how actively populations are responding to the virus: changes in social behaviour could mean significant differences in the spread. This article explores the potential of Google Trends to quickly track social responses to the pandemic: In all the countries that have reached a downward change point, an “information saturation peak” preceded it.

Christian Katzenbach and João Carlos Magalhães: Coronavirus and the frailness of platform governance

Unsurprisingly in an era dominated in many ways by ‘Big Tech’, the pandemic has also helped to foreground how contestable – and, we argue, utterly frail – platform governance is. By this expression we mean the regimes of rules, patterned practices and algorithmic systems whereby companies govern who can see what in their digital platforms.

Björn Scheuermann et al.: Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing of COVID-19 Patients

The current COVID-19 pandemic shows that our modern globalized world can be heavily affected by a quickly spreading, highly infectious, deadly virus in a matter of weeks. It became apparent that manual contact tracing and quarantining of suspects can only be effective in the first days of the spread before the exponential growth overwhelms the health authorities. The authors of this text propose a system for privacy-preserving contact tracing.

HIIG Podcast

Podcast

Insights into our research

Bruna Toso de Alcântara

COVID-19 and its impact on cybersecurity

Tina Krell

Spread of COVID-19 across countries + x

Pablo Beytía & Carlos Cruz Infante

Tracking social responses to COVID-19

Science during COVID-19

Our critical science journal has published a special issue focusing on science and higher education.

Less alone online?

At "Digitaler Salon", we discussed the possible consequences of social distancing – watch the video recording here.

Time for utopias

The anthology for our essay competition "twentyforty" is now available for open access download.