Overcome the challenges of a digital society

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How can we assist you in the challenges you face?

VSC Media provides research, analysis and strategic insight to help our clients to understand and respond successfully to a dynamic and complex array of digital challenges.

Scroll down to see a selection of issues that our research and advisory services can help with. Questions, requests for proposals, or requests for quotations can be directed to our digital society advisory team by email at digital.society@vscmedia.com.

Fake news

From late 2016 onwards, our discussion of media and journalism has been peppered with this term, but it has a variety of different meanings and is a lot more complicated than it may first appear.

It may refer to inaccurate rumours, inconventient facts, manufactured falsehoods for clickbait, or just bad journalism, but one thing is for sure: it's not going away.

How can genuine factual media cut through, demonstrate its veracity and avoid being dismissed? That's where we can help.

Online extremism and hate speech

For all the wonderful things digital media technologies enable, they are also useful to those who cause harm.

Bullying, hate speech, organised crime and terrorist recruitment have all found a natural home on social and digital media.

Our advisory and research services help to make detailed analysis of how these individuals and organisations make use of digital technologies, so that they can be counteracted more easily.

Protecting democracy

In 2018 the world woke up to new, digital ways that democracy could be undermined.

Technologies designed for advertising consumer products were surreptitiously repurposed to target people with political messages, and propaganda took on a data-driven character.

Whether the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica and its parent group SCL (now superceded by Emerdata Ltd.), shady Russian outfits like Internet Research Agency, or morally bankrupt PR companies like Definers Public Affairs or the shuttered Bell Pottinger, we know what these companies do. More importantly however, we know how to fight back.

Digital cities

As of 2014, over half the world's population now lives in cities, and the UN predicts that by 2050, 68% will do.

As cities become more and more technologised, new debates emerge about the role of technology in the lives of ordinary citizens.

Besides the understandable concerns over civil liberties and surveillance, digital cities also offer greater potential to promote civic participation, social welfare, efficient transport and increased prosperity.

Our researchers have studying these patterns for years, and provide advisory to local government and private sector on all aspects of the digital city.

Digital & network regulation

Numerous scholars, entrepreneurs and politicians have highlighted the challenges in regulating technologies such as the internet that have decentralisation and anonymity built into their core.

At the same time, many onerous attempts have been made to pass regulation that limit our fundamental freedoms.

Digital regulation is often a game of cat and mouse. Whether you're a government trying to produce sensible policies, or a content maker trying to get paid fairly for your work, our advisory service can help you to navigate these complexities.

Data protection

Data is everywhere. As our lives are increasingly technologised, a corresponding increase has occurred in the proportion of that data that is both private and personal.

As above, regulation usually lags behind, but as with 2018's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in European jurisdictions, changes do occur, and data protection remains a dynamic and complicated area, without much room for error.

Our digital society advosry services help clients to make choices that work for both data controller organisations and the subjects of the data themselves.