Hassan Mustafa

Platform Power and Politics of Information in the Global South

Supervisors: Dr. Markus Luczak-Roesch and Dr. David Johnstone

Profile

Prior to starting his doctorate at the School of Information Management, Hassan worked as a field researcher and research assistant at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and as research impact evidencing officer/research assistant at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI). Additionally, he has also been reportage editor at Papercuts Magazine and is a recipient of Wellington Doctoral Scholarship.

Qualifications

BA in Management with a minor in International Relations (Webster University), MA in Global Political Economy (The University of Sheffield)

Research interests

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the way people access, create, store, retrieve and analyse information. Luciano Floridi refers to the world after digitalization as an “infosphere,” an “informational environment made up of all information entities (including informational agents), their properties, interactions, processes, and relations.”

In this digitalized world, or “infosphere,” information is accessed, retrieved, created, and analyzed through platforms like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. From propaganda blogs to subreddit’s about climate change, from a nation or group’s history to their present political struggle, information is created, a reality is constructed through images, texts, maps, geotagged data, locations, hashtags, comments, likes, and reposts posted on these sites and later accessed and analysed by millions.

In such an informational ecosystem, where platforms are instrumental in shaping our reality, it is crucial to ensure that various actors are not trying to artificially shape public life by suppressing opinions, spreading polarising and misleading information, organising coordinated disinformation campaigns, increasing the spread of abusive and false information into the mainstream informational environment, and targeting individuals based on their beliefs, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other individual characteristic.

Hassan’s research interests include platform and AI governance, algorithmic manipulation, computational propaganda, complex systems, responsible adoption of emergent technologies in the Global South and digital knowledge production

Publications

Hassan’s publications are available at Google Scholar.