Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor is CEO of Oxford Information Labs. She is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House and is Editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy. She is a founder of ICANN accredited registrar, Oxford Information Labs Limited. A lawyer by training, Emily has worked in the Internet sector for nearly 20 years. Emily is lead author of the annual EURid UNESCO World Report on Internationalised Domain Names. Other research interests include ICANN and internet governance, privacy and social media disinformation, emerging technical standards such as 5G, digital divide issues including gender and language.Emily teaches courses on cybersecurity and internet law and governance at several universities across Europe and provides training on cybersecurity for officials at the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office with Chatham House. Volunteer roles include membership of the ICANN EPDP team, Chair of ICANN WHOIS Review Team, UN Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group, a researcher for the Global Commission on Internet Governance, Director of Legal and Policy for Nominet. Emily is a sought-after public speaker and moderator internationally and has written for the Guardian, Wired, Ars Technica, the New Statesman and the Slate. She is a regular commentator on technology issues in news and broadcast media including the BBC and Sky News.

Research Publications

NET EFFECTS: an evidence-led exploration of IGF impact

NET EFFECTS: an evidence-led exploration of IGF impact

As the Internet Governance Forum nears its twentieth anniversary, this report takes an evidence-based approach to describe the forum's main accomplishments since the last World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) review in 2016. The report introduces direct and indirect impacts of the IGF, and outlines specific wins for the Global South. Entering into the next round of WSIS negotiations the report expects to inform discussions about the forum’s renewal and mandate going forward.

Authors

Carolina Caeiro, Georgia Osborn, Emily Taylor... +4 more
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This is not a Virus, it's Tyranny: Conspiracy and Partisanship about COVID19 on Canadian Youtube News Channels

This is not a Virus, it's Tyranny: Conspiracy and Partisanship about COVID19 on Canadian Youtube News Channels

Social media platforms have come under increasing scrutiny for spreading mis-and-disinformation about COVID-19. Research has shown that citizens who are misinformed about COVID-19, or who consume highly partisan news about the virus, are less likely to adopt preventative measures, like wearing a mask, and are less likely to get vaccinated against the virus. To understand how Canadian audiences find and discuss COVID-19 news on social media, we examine the structure of Canadian news and information networks on YouTube, the most popular social media platform used by Canadians. We examine the differences across local, national, alternative and “junk” news channels on the platform to explore how audiences watching these channels discuss COVID-19, measuring the extent to which conspiracy and partisanship are a part of Canadian discourse about the Coronavirus on YouTube. We found that most citizens watching news on Canadian YouTube channels used neutral frames, discussing the virus without a conspiratorial or partisan tilt. However, the distribution of neutral comments was not even across the dataset, with 77% of comments on junk news channels representing partisan commentary about the virus. Despite early debunking efforts by health authorities and government officials, many conspiracies about the origin of the virus continued to permeate discussion about COVID-19 in local and national news comments on YouTube.

Authors

Mona Elswah, Mark Robertshaw, Samantha Bradshaw... +1 more
COVID 19Coronavirus+3 more
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Security at the frontier: UK–Japan perspectives on cyberspace, outer space, the Arctic and electronic warfare

Security at the frontier: UK–Japan perspectives on cyberspace, outer space, the Arctic and electronic warfare

Increasing global connectivity has brought with it a new range of security threats that were unfathomable just decades ago. Global reliance on the internet and on virtual networks has revealed a range of new cyber vulnerabilities and threats, including to critical infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT). Cyber technology has brought with it a new security focus on outer space, which has become key to the functioning of national and international infrastructure on the ground. Furthermore, technologies using the electromagnetic spectrum, which are increasingly integral to military operations, create new challenges and adversarial threats including the prospect of electronic warfare. These challenges have expanded geographically too, as countries explore new physical frontiers, like the Arctic, as regions of strategic interest. This conference report, comprising of four expert essays and a meeting summary, draws upon Chatham House’s December 2020 conference ‘Security at the Frontier’,1 to examine the latest developments in cyberspace, outer space, the Arctic and electronic warfare, and considers how best the UK and Japan might respond to these challenges.

Authors

Emily Taylor
General
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Featured Publication: The COVID-19 pandemic and trends in technology (with chapter by Emily Taylor)

Featured Publication: The COVID-19 pandemic and trends in technology (with chapter by Emily Taylor)

Emily's chapter on the UK track and trace app has been published today in Chatham House's 'The COVID-19 pandemic and trends in technology', edited by Joyce Hakmeh. The issues encountered during the development of track-and-trace apps as part of the fight against COVID-19 have highlighted significant differences in levels of accountability and transparency between the public and private sectors. This has underlined the areas of tension between corporate power and the authority of democratically elected governments, and the capacity of tech companies not just to deploy ‘soft’ power in the form of lobbying, but also to block access to essential technologies. The fragmented response to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed focus on the lack of internationally agreed technical standards that are both privacy-respecting and secure by design. Such standards could potentially offer interoperability if individuals travel overseas, while at the same time guarding against overreach by some governments.

Authors

Emily Taylor
Chatham HouseCovid-19+1 more
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Follow the Money: How the Online Advertising Ecosystem Funds COVID-19 Junk News and Disinformation

Follow the Money: How the Online Advertising Ecosystem Funds COVID-19 Junk News and Disinformation

The ecosystem of junk news & disinformation around COVID-19 is enabled by search engines and advertising platforms that contribute to their visibility and financial revenue. Sites that consistently publish junk news, including harmful stories relating to COVID-19, show professional SEO strategies tasked with disseminating their content through search engines. They have high levels of domain authority, meaning that their content will rank high in search results for popular keywords.

Authors

Emily Taylor, Stacie Hoffmann
Oxford Internet InstituteCOVID-19+2 more
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Blog Posts

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