Beside the core funding Civitates provides its anchor grantees, in 2020, the Opportunity Fund was set to increase the capacity of Civitates’ grantee partners to anticipate new challenges ahead and their readiness to address them, by providing additional funding to address critical and emerging issues that intersect with their work.
The following organisations were awarded grants ranging from €30 000 to €40 000 for short terms projects focused on fostering a healthy digital public sphere in Europe.
Civitates supports TI EU’s advocacy efforts for the adoption of policy recommendations that address the current lack of transparency and accountability, focusing on the EU’s proposed policies as part of the proposed regulation on transparency and targeting of political advertising and the Digital Services Act. TI EU is working in conjunction with TI National Chapters and other CSOs.
The grant supports ICCL’s advocacy towards the European Commission for clear guidance on the interpretation of article 5(a) of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Article 5(a) has the potential to limit the use of personal data by Big Tech. The current phrasing of the article is ambiguous, and without clear guidance from the European Commission, it could be interpreted in a way that infringes on privacy and provisions of the GDPR.
Civitates supports SOMO’s project to establish a network of European CSOs and academics to work together to challenge the monopoly power of the Big Tech sector. The network will build on a nascent gathering of a number of European CSOs that came together as a loose coalition to do advocacy on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and will expand the range of actors working on monopoly power, market dominance and competition law issues. Civitates’ contribution represents seed funding for the launch of the network and SOMO will further fundraise to sustain it in the long run.
Civitates supports their work on the implementation process of the Digital Services Act and foster harmonisation of this implementation process across EU Member States. The project entails facilitating discussions between experts and national institutions in the Czech Republic around this topic, interact and feed into the EU networks Frank Bold Society is part of and raise awareness on those issues among the general public.
Civitates supports CDT’s work on the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA). With the support of this grant, CDT will provide legal and technical analysis, coordinate civil society’s input in the implementation process and organise high level events.
Civitates supports WTM’s work on the study of online political advertising and their participation in the discussions around the EU code of practice on disinformation.
Civitates supports BEUC’s project on evidence gathering through a consumer survey to feed into the Commission’s Digital Fairness fitness checks.
DRI has developed a Toolkit to Monitor Social Media for CSOs and journalists with their grant from Civitates in 2020. The current project aims to develop a training module to make the tool more accessible so that civil society organisations can easily implement it at their social media monitoring efforts around electoral processes.
Panoptykon considers data and algorithms a source of power, and – in confrontation with huge asymmetries of this power – strives to defend human rights and open society. With a mix of legal tactics, long-term advocacy, targeted research, and awareness raising campaigns, Panoptykon exposes and tames surveillance practices. including the use of information about people, by both public and private actors, as a tool of control. Panoptykon keeps an eye on all key entities, such as public authorities, intelligence agencies and tech corporations that collect and use personal data in order to influence people. It believes that surveillance measures should only be allowed when necessary, proportionate, and subject to independent oversight, by institutions, free media, and robust civil society.
Total grant amount 2021-2024: 284,000 EUR
Civitates’ grant contributes to CEO’s work focused on Big Tech. CEO aims to collect information on lobbying practices of the latter, which will in turn be used to file complaints with the EU transparency register, produce research reports and advocate for better regulation of lobbying at the EU level.
The overall goal of our initiative is to strengthen EU action to reinforce democracy within EU member states, including through regulating the digital public sphere in ways that are conducive to democratic principles and practices. Through this proposal, EPD will coordinate collective action of a group of civil society organisations around the European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP) and develop a policy knowledge tool that would allow organisations to visualise the impact of digital policies on fundamental principles of democracy.
Improving access to quality, privacy-protecting data about how platforms curate and moderate content or deal with issues such as “political” advertising, is a key priority for academics, civil society, and regulatory authorities who have an interest in preserving the health of the digital public sphere. This was a key conclusion of a stakeholder consultation organised by AlgorithmWatch.
AlgorithmWatch commissioned a study aimed at evaluating and shedding light on how best practices in handling sensitive data for the public interest might be applied in the context of intermediary governance. The study highlights two cases: The first focuses on transparency mechanisms aimed at ensuring corporate accountability in Regulation 166/2006 on the establishment of a European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register. The second focuses on transparency mechanisms for the sharing of (sensitive) personal data, using ‘Findata’, the fairly new Finish health and social data access platform.
In order to respond to challenges arising from the covid-19 global pandemic, BIRN and SHARE Foundation have launched a “Digital Rights in the Time of COVID-19” providing public information on the latest updates and cases of arbitrary arrests, surveillance, phone tapping, privacy breaches and other digital rights violations.
BIRN and Share Foundation expand their current monitoring of digital threats by providing accurate information about digital threats during the COVID-19 pandemic and determining who are the main actors that limit the rights and freedom in the digital environment in Central and South East Europe.
The list of countries monitored has been extended to Kosovo and Montenegro. Additional monitors will be trained in those countries and the violations are uploaded into the current database and on a live blog.
EDRi identified opportunities in the current framing of platform regulation and the AdTech industry at the EU level. EDRi members and their network have observed that beyond dealing strictly with online content moderation, there are ways to put the attention on reining in the monopolistic practices that lead to abuses of digital rights.
With support from the Opportunities Fund, EDRi seeks to pressure decision-makers to put forward regulatory proposals that tackle the abuses of power and exploitative business models that have weaved their way into the heart of the digital ecosystem. This is translated by continuing their engagement with civil society outside of the digital rights sphere and strengthening their advocacy efforts around the upcoming Digital Services Act from the EU Commission.
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