This Week In Cyberspace we catch up with Brett Solomon in an airport in Ottawa. He’s on his way to Washington DC to find out how human rights online are being factored into Digitalisation Policies by a new breed of Digital Ambassadors. And how do these international policies align with internet freedom?

The Asia Pacific Internet Governance Forum is on in Brisbane with hundreds of delegates from the region gathering to discuss how to govern the unwieldy beast that is the world wide web of things. With many large states wanting to govern the online space on their own right, how can users get a seat at the table and prevent the internet becoming the splinternet? And how can we bring a human rights agenda to internet governance going forward? Brett Solomon is on the ground to report back.

This year, the climate summit COP28 will be held in one of the richest oil producing Petrostates. But is the United Arab Emirates the best place to be hosting a conference about reducing carbon emissions? As one of the world's biggest emitters per capita, the UAE also has some pretty strict laws against protesting. We look at this and the use of spyware against activists in the first of our COP editions of This Week In Cyberspace.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused the 'No' campaign in the referendum on a Voice to Parliament for First Nations Australians of using AI to spread misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms. We look at the forces behind this push and the responsibility of tech giants, governments and individuals to police it.

The blue bird of happiness has been X-communicated. From 7 characters to just one, Twitter has become X - the personal plaything of the richest man in the world. The new brand aligns with Elon Musk's other ventures - Space X, X AI, even his son’s name X Æ A-12 (which his mother Grimes explained "represented the unknown variable, and her elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence"). Musk has plans  to transform X into something akin to China’s WeChat. But is that what democracies need?

This week we turn our attention to Saudi Arabia where a futuristic megacity called Neom is being built.  Tech giants Google and Microsoft have just signed massive deals to set up data storage facilities there but what are the implications of doing business with a repressive regime?

The digital dimensions of violence against women and girls online is a growing problem. Online gender-based violence (OGBV), Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls (CVAWG), Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) - they're all on the rise worldwide. Acronyms aside, how can the rights of women and girls be better defended in the digital space? And why is the internet set up for so much abuse of females?

 While actors are concerned that their image will be used forever in perpetuity by AI, tech workers in Kenya are worried about the mental health impacts of filtering out abusive content so that we can safely use systems like ChatGPT. Content moderators in Kenya are currently suing META for a range of things including lack of mental health support, because they have to review violent and sometimes even illegal content so that we don’t have to.

Welcome to series 2 of This Week In Cyberspace where we look at human rights in the digital age through the lens of Artificial Intelligence. For as long as the Internet has been operative, alternative gender expression online has been a thing. But with the use of AI by corporations and governments to collect personal data, and often weaponise it against citizens, this space is no longer as safe as it once was. Uganda has just enacted the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws using discriminatory data sets to identify gender, emotion, and now sexual orientation. These binary codes are discriminatory in nature. So how can they be tackled?

In the final episode of Season 1 we take a closer look at Artificial Intelligence, specifically Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Models (or GLLMMMs). These Golem Class AIs have the experts spooked and yet the five giant tech companies are already rolling them out to the public with no safeguards for society. And as we know, an unregulated tech space adversely creates a toxic online environment. So how to we avert even more severe unintended consequences than doom scrolling, fake news and the breakdown of democracy?