ABSTRACT
The mobility restriction during the COVID-19 pandemic did not stop the public from expressing their opinions. Since they could not go on demonstrations, they moved democracy to the digital sphere, such as on Twitter. Previous research has shown that Twitter users in Indonesia use the platform to express political views and opinions on governmental issues. The issue of the Nationalism Knowledge Test (TWK) at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) was a trending topic on Twitter for a while. The issue spurred discussions on Twitter when 75 employees did not pass the KPK-TWK on May 2021. The discussion then stopped for a moment before picking up again during the official dismissal of the employees on 30 September 2021. This article focuses on the social network analysis of the public's responses to this issue on Twitter. Social network data were collected using Drone Emprit from May to October 2021 and analyzed using Gephi to generate graphical representations of the social networks. The results reveal the structure of the movement was centralized and dynamic. Regarding the dissemination of information, the most central was news media and anti-corruption activists' accounts. These accounts mobilized the community on Twitter to make a critical social movement. This means that the digital sphere can be an evolution of democracy form and activism, especially in the anti-corruption movement. © 2022 Rev. Archai. All rights reserved.
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The chapter analyzes the dynamics of participatory practices and use of digital tools as an enabler of citizens' involvement at the local level in Bulgaria before and post-Covid-19. At the time of the Covid-19 outbreak, the legal framework allowed for quite limited offline citizens' participation and almost no digital forms such as e-voting, e-initiatives, e-public deliberation, and e-assemblies at both the national and local level. At the same time, digital citizen engagement broadens in alternative non-institutionalized forms. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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This essay considers the Italian Parliament's response to the Covid-19 health crisis. The argumentative register is twofold: on the one hand, it follows the internal dimension of the Chambers (especially with reference to organizational and procedural profiles);on the other hand, the external dimension, of relations with the Government (especially with regard to regulatory and control activities). In view of this reconstruction, the research discusses some possible solutions useful to enhance the role of Parliament, also considering, in a problematic way, the results of some doctrinal and institutional debates held during the pandemic emergency, with reference to the limits and potentialities of digitalization hypotheses applied to the life of Parliament. © 2023, Societa Editoriale Federalismi s.r.l.. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: Review, compare and critically assess digital technology responses to the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. The specific point of interest in this research is on predictive, preventive and personalized interoperable digital healthcare solutions. This point is supported by failures from the past, where the separate design of digital health solutions has led to lack of interoperability. Hence, this review paper investigates the integration of predictive, preventive and personalized interoperable digital healthcare systems. The second point of interest is the use of new mass surveillance technologies to feed personal data from health professionals to governments, without any comprehensive studies that determine if such new technologies and data policies would address the pandemic crisis. METHOD: This is a review paper. Two approaches were used: A comprehensive bibliographic review with R statistical methods of the COVID-19 pandemic in PubMed literature and Web of Science Core Collection, supported with Google Scholar search. In addition, a case study review of emerging new approaches in different regions, using medical literature, academic literature, news articles and other reliable data sources. RESULTS: Most countries' digital responses involve big data analytics, integration of national health insurance databases, tracing travel history from individual's location databases, code scanning and individual's online reporting. Public responses of mistrust about privacy data misuse differ across countries, depending on the chosen public communication strategy. We propose predictive, preventive and personalized solutions for pandemic management, based on social machines and connected devices. SOLUTIONS: The proposed predictive, preventive and personalized solutions are based on the integration of IoT data, wearable device data, mobile apps data and individual data inputs from registered users, operating as a social machine with strong security and privacy protocols. We present solutions that would enable much greater speed in future responses. These solutions are enabled by the social aspect of human-computer interactions (social machines) and the increased connectivity of humans and devices (Internet of Things). CONCLUSION: Inadequate data for risk assessment on speed and urgency of COVID-19, combined with increased globalization of human society, led to the rapid spread of COVID-19. Despite an abundance of digital methods that could be used in slowing or stopping COVID-19 and future pandemics, the world remains unprepared, and lessons have not been learned from previous cases of pandemics. We present a summary of predictive, preventive and personalized digital methods that could be deployed fast to help with the COVID-19 and future pandemics.