Stefaan Verhulst

Stuart W. Shulman et al at Data Driven Journalism: “The rise of political bots brings into sharp focus the role of automated social media accounts in today’s democratic civil society. Events during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election revealed the scale of this issue for the first time to the majority of citizens and policy-makers. At the same time, the deployment of Russian-linked bots designed to promote pro-gun laws in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting demonstrates the state-sponsored, real-time readiness to shape, through information warfare, the dominant narratives on platforms such as Twitter. The regular news reports on these issues lead us to conclude that the foundations of democracy have become threatened by the presence of aggressive and socially disruptive bots, which aim to manipulate online political discourse.

While there is clarity on the various functions that bot accounts can be scripted to perform, as described below, the task of accurately defining this phenomenon and identifying bot accounts remains a challenge. At Texifter, we have endeavoured to bring nuance to this issue through a research project which explores the presence of automated accounts on Twitter. Initially, this project concerned itself with an attempt to identify bots which participated in online conversations around the prevailing cryptocurrency phenomenon. This article is the first in a series of three blog posts produced by the researchers at Texifter that outlines the contemporary phenomenon of Twitter bots….

Bots in their current iteration have a relatively short, albeit rapidly evolving history. Initially constructed with non-malicious intentions, it wasn’t until the late 1990s with the advent of Web 2.0 when bots began to develop a more negative reputation. Although bots have been used maliciously in denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, spam emails, and mass identity theft, their purpose is not explicitly to incite mayhem.

Before the most recent political events, bots existed in chat rooms, operated as automated customer service agents on websites, and were a mainstay on dating websites. This familiar form of the bot is known to the majority of the general population as a “chatbot” – for instance, CleverBot was and still is a popular platform to talk to an “AI”. Another prominent example was Microsoft’s failed Twitter Chatbot Tay which made headlines in 2016 when “her” vocabulary and conversation functions were manipulated by Twitter users until “she” espoused neo-nazi views when “she” was subsequently deleted.

Image: XKCD Comic #632.

A Twitter bot is an account controlled by an algorithm or script, which is typically hosted on a cloud platform such as Heroku. They are typically, though not exclusively, scripted to conduct repetitive tasks.  For example, there are bots that retweet content containing particular keywords, reply to new followers, and direct messages to new followers; although they can be used for more complex tasks such as participating in online conversations. Bot accounts make up between 9 and 15% of all active accounts on Twitter; however, it is predicted that they account for a much greater percentage of total Twitter traffic. Twitter bots are generally not created with malicious intent; they are frequently used for online chatting or for raising the professional profile of a corporation – but their ability to pervade our online experience and shape political discourse warrants heightened scrutiny….(More)”.

Yaniv Reingewertz and Carmela Lutmar at Harvard Business Review: “Are academic journals impartial? While many would suggest that academic journals work for the advancement of knowledge and science, we show this is not always the case. In a recent study, we find that two international relations (IR) journals favor articles written by authors who share the journal’s institutional affiliation. We term this phenomenon “academic in-group bias.”

In-group bias is a well-known phenomenon that is widely documented in the psychological literature. People tend to favor their group, whether it is their close family, their hometown, their ethnic group, or any other group affiliation. Before our study, the evidence regarding academic in-group bias was scarce, with only one studyfinding academic in-group bias in law journals. Studies from economics found mixedresults. Our paper provides evidence of academic in-group bias in IR journals, showing that this phenomenon is not specific to law. We also provide tentative evidence which could potentially resolve the conflict in economics, suggesting that these journals might also exhibit in-group bias. In short, we show that academic in-group bias is general in nature, even if not necessarily large in scope….(More)”.

Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius et al in Utrecht Law Review: “Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people’s online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely used in the US; Europe may not be far behind.

This paper maps microtargeting’s promises and threats to democracy. For example, microtargeting promises to optimise the match between the electorate’s concerns and political campaigns, and to boost campaign engagement and political participation. But online microtargeting could also threaten democracy. For instance, a political party could, misleadingly, present itself as a different one-issue party to different individuals. And data collection for microtargeting raises privacy concerns. We sketch possibilities for policymakers if they seek to regulate online political microtargeting. We discuss which measures would be possible, while complying with the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights….(More)”.

James Bridle in The Atlantic: “In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold….“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Hannah Arendt called citizenship “the right to have rights.” Like any other right, it can be bestowed and withheld by those in power, but in its newer forms it can also be bought, traded, and rewritten. Virtual citizenship is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. And as these options become available, they’re also used, like so many technologies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.

In a world that increasingly operates online, geography and physical infrastructure still remain crucial to control and management. Undersea fiber-optic cables trace the legacy of imperial trading routes. Google and Facebook erect data centers in Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest, close to cheap hydroelectric power and natural cooling. The trade in citizenship itself often manifests locally as architecture. From luxury apartments in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to data centers in Europe and refugee settlements in the Middle East, a scattered geography of buildings brings a different reality into focus: one in which political decisions and national laws transform physical space into virtual territory…(More)”.

Solon Ardittis at the Migration Data Portal: “According to a recent report published by CB Insights, there are today at least 36 major industries that are likely to benefit from the use of Blockchain technology, ranging from voting procedures, critical infrastructure security, education and healthcare, to car leasing, forecasting, real estate, energy management, government and public records, wills and inheritance, corporate governance and crowdfunding.

In the international aid sector, a number of experiments are currently being conducted to distribute aid funding through the use of Blockchain and thus to improve the tracing of the ways in which aid is disbursed. Among several other examples, the Start Network, which consists of 42 aid agencies across five continents, ranging from large international organizations to national NGOs, has launched a Blockchain-based project that enables the organization both to speed up the distribution of aid funding and to facilitate the tracing of every single payment, from the original donor to each individual assisted.

As Katherine Purvis of The Guardian noted, “Blockchain enthusiasts are hopeful it could be the next big development disruptor. In providing a transparent, instantaneous and indisputable record of transactions, its potential to remove corruption and provide transparency and accountability is one area of intrigue.”

In the field of international migration and refugee affairs, however, Blockchain technology is still in its infancy.

One of the few notable examples is the launch by the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in May 2017 of a project in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan which, through the use of Blockchain technology, enables the creation of virtual accounts for refugees and the uploading of monthly entitlements that can be spent in the camp’s supermarket through the use of an authorization code. Reportedly, the programme has contributed to a reduction by 98% of the bank costs entailed by the use of a financial service provider.

This is a noteworthy achievement considering that organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs and that an estimated 30% of all development funds do not reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement.

At least six other UN agencies including the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Women, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Group (UNDG), are now considering Blockchain applications that could help support international assistance, particularly supply chain management tools, self-auditing of payments, identity management and data storage.

The potential of Blockchain technology in the field of migration and asylum affairs should therefore be fully explored.

At the European Union (EU) level, while a Blockchain task force has been established by the European Parliament to assess the ways in which the technology could be used to provide digital identities to refugees, and while the European Commission has recently launched a call for project proposals to examine the potential of Blockchain in a range of sectors, little focus has been placed so far on EU assistance in the field of migration and asylum, both within the EU and in third countries with which the EU has negotiated migration partnership agreements.

This is despite the fact that the use of Blockchain in a number of major programme interventions in the field of migration and asylum could help improve not only their cost-efficiency but also, at least as importantly, their degree of transparency and accountability. This at a time when media and civil society organizations exercise increased scrutiny over the quality and ethical standards of such interventions.

In Europe, for example, Blockchain could help administer the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), both in terms of transferring funds from the European Commission to the eligible NGOs in the Member States and in terms of project managers then reporting on spending. This would help alleviate many of the recurrent challenges faced by NGOs in managing funds in line with stringent EU regulations.

As crucially, Blockchain would have the potential to increase transparency and accountability in the channeling and spending of EU funds in third countries, particularly under the Partnership Framework and other recent schemes to prevent irregular migration to Europe.

A case in point is the administration of EU aid in response to the refugee emergency in Greece where, reportedly, there continues to be insufficient oversight of the full range of commitments and outcomes of large EU-funded investments, particularly in the housing sector. Another example is the set of recent programme interventions in Libya, where a growing number of incidents of human rights abuses and financial mismanagement are being brought to light….(More)”.

Stefaan G. Verhulst at Disrupt & Innovate: “The need for innovation is clear: The twenty-first century is shaping up to be one of the most challenging in recent history. From climate change to income inequality to geopolitical upheaval and terrorism: the difficulties confronting International Civil Society Organisations (ICSOs) are unprecedented not only in their variety but also in their complexity. At the same time, today’s practices and tools used by ICSOs seem stale and outdated. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but new methods for arriving at solutions.

Data will likely become more central to meeting these challenges. We live in a quantified era. It is estimated that 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the last two years. We know that this data can help us understand the world in new ways and help us meet the challenges mentioned above. However, we need new data collaboration methods to help us extract the insights from that data.

UNTAPPED DATA POTENTIAL

For all of data’s potential to address public challenges, the truth remains that most data generated today is in fact collected by the private sector – including ICSOs who are often collecting a vast amount of data – such as, for instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which generates various (often sensitive) data related to humanitarian activities. This data, typically ensconced in tightly held databases toward maintaining competitive advantage or protecting from harmful intrusion, contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for innovation in how we solve public problems. But because of access restrictions and often limited data science capacity, its vast potential often goes untapped.

DATA COLLABORATIVES AS A SOLUTION

Data Collaboratives offer a way around this limitation. They represent an emerging public-private partnership model, in which participants from different areas — including the private sector, government, and civil society — come together to exchange data and pool analytical expertise.

While still an emerging practice, examples of such partnerships now exist around the world, across sectors and public policy domains. Importantly several ICSOs have started to collaborate with others around their own data and that of the private and public sector. For example:

• Several civil society organisations, academics, and donor agencies are partnering in the Health Data Collaborative to improve the global data infrastructure necessary to make smarter global and local health decisions and to track progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• Additionally, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) built Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a platform for sharing humanitarian from and for ICSOs – including Caritas, InterAction and others – donor agencies, national and international bodies, and other humanitarian organisations.

These are a few examples of Data Collaboratives that ICSOs are participating in. Yet, the potential for collaboration goes beyond these examples. Likewise, so do the concerns regarding data protection and privacy….(More)”.

Ramy Ghorayeb: “When it comes to civic tech, there is a clear opposition between the fans, who view the young sector as a key foundation that will change democracy for good, and the haters, who think it is simply a gadget that doesn’t have any weight on political decisions considering its position towards the existing powers/counter-powers.
I view this conflict of opinions as a general misunderstanding on what value civic tech is supposed to bring. There is a huge bias towards civic tech ecosystem. It is commonly presented as a challenger more than a partner for the public sector, because projects are overhyped by the legacy of disruption of tech. But there is no analogy.

Civic tech is failing only when viewed as an ordinary tech disruptor

Taking what French deputy Paula Forteza said last December, after its rebirth ten years ago with the Obama administration, the civic tech ecosystem has reached a dead end compared to its initial expectations as a challenger of the existing institutions. There is indeed a lack of political, economic and social impact:

• Lack of political impact because citizens are becoming very exigent towards democratic initiatives and are less willing to participate without being sure that their contribution will have weight in the final decision. This is amplified by the fact that currently, even with all the collective power in the world, leveraging civic tech still depends on the good will of the elected administrations.
• Lack of economic impact because after few years of overexcitement by investors, believing civic tech was the next big thing, everybody has realized how difficult it is to build a company with both financial and social objectives.
• Lack of social impact because with this new digital tools is emerging a technological elite that can have much more influence than the rest of the population. This representation problem is of course not specific to civic tech but still undermines the positive outcomes.

People want civic tech to disrupt traditional political institutions, like tech did in all the other industries. But many specific issues refrain this ambition, and I already written a lot about it [1][2]. Furthermore, there is too much competition today for civic startups and organizations. The existing actors are continually improving and annihilating any chance civic tech has to become a serious opposed challenger:

• Public administrations are recruiting the best disruptors to help them embracing digital.
• Medias are keeping their counter-power role by being always more scattered and diversified.
• Tech giants are developing their own tools to address civic needs.

So if civic tech failed as disruptors of the existing institutions, the question becomes: What do we want to do with civic tech?…(More)”.

Michael Carolan at GeoForum: “The paper takes a critical look at how food retail firms use big data, looking specifically at how these techniques and technologies govern our ability to imagine food worlds. It does this by drawing on two sets of data: (1) interviews with twenty-one individuals who oversaw the use of big data applications in a retail setting and (2) five consumer focus groups composed of individuals who regularly shopped at major food chains along Colorado’s Front Range.

For reasons described below, the “nudge” provides the conceptual entry point for this analysis, as these techniques are typically expressed through big data-driven nudges. The argument begins by describing the nudge concept and how it is used in the context of retail big data. This is followed by a discussion of methods.

The remainder of the paper discusses how big data are used to nudge consumers and the effects of these practices. This analysis is organized around three themes that emerged out of the qualitative data: path dependency, products; path dependency, retail; and path dependency, habitus. The paper concludes connecting these themes through the concept of governance, particularly by way of their ability to, in Foucault’s (2003: 241) words, have “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” worlds….(More)”.

Paper by Sofia C. Olhede and Patrick J. Wolfe in Statistics & Probability Letters: “The Danish physicist Niels Bohr is said to have remarked: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Predicting the future of statistics in the era of big data is not so very different from prediction about anything else. Ever since we started to collect data to predict cycles of the moon, seasons, and hence future agriculture yields, humankind has worked to infer information from indirect observations for the purpose of making predictions.

Even while acknowledging the momentous difficulty in making predictions about the future, a few topics stand out clearly as lying at the current and future intersection of statistics and data science. Not all of these topics are of a strictly technical nature, but all have technical repercussions for our field. How might these repercussions shape the still relatively young field of statistics? And what can sound statistical theory and methods bring to our understanding of the foundations of data science? In this article we discuss these issues and explore how new open questions motivated by data science may in turn necessitate new statistical theory and methods now and in the future.

Together, the ubiquity of sensing devices, the low cost of data storage, and the commoditization of computing have led to a volume and variety of modern data sets that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. We see four important implications for statistics.

First, many modern data sets are related in some way to human behavior. Data might have been collected by interacting with human beings, or personal or private information traceable back to a given set of individuals might have been handled at some stage. Mathematical or theoretical statistics traditionally does not concern itself with the finer points of human behavior, and indeed many of us have only had limited training in the rules and regulations that pertain to data derived from human subjects. Yet inevitably in a data-rich world, our technical developments cannot be divorced from the types of data sets we can collect and analyze, and how we can handle and store them.

Second, the importance of data to our economies and civil societies means that the future of regulation will look not only to protect our privacy, and how we store information about ourselves, but also to include what we are allowed to do with that data. For example, as we collect high-dimensional vectors about many family units across time and space in a given region or country, privacy will be limited by that high-dimensional space, but our wish to control what we do with data will go beyond that….

Third, the growing complexity of algorithms is matched by an increasing variety and complexity of data. Data sets now come in a variety of forms that can be highly unstructured, including images, text, sound, and various other new forms. These different types of observations have to be understood together, resulting in multimodal data, in which a single phenomenon or event is observed through different types of measurement devices. Rather than having one phenomenon corresponding to single scalar values, a much more complex object is typically recorded. This could be a three-dimensional shape, for example in medical imaging, or multiple types of recordings such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and simultaneous electroencephalography in neuroscience. Data science therefore challenges us to describe these more complex structures, modeling them in terms of their intrinsic patterns.

Finally, the types of data sets we now face are far from satisfying the classical statistical assumptions of identically distributed and independent observations. Observations are often “found” or repurposed from other sampling mechanisms, rather than necessarily resulting from designed experiments….

 Our field will either meet these challenges and become increasingly ubiquitous, or risk rapidly becoming irrelevant to the future of data science and artificial intelligence….(More)”.

Introduction to “Perspective”: “Discussing things you care about can be difficult. The threat of abuse and harassment online means that many people stop expressing themselves and give up on seeking different opinions….Perspective is an API that makes it easier to host better conversations. The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give realtime feedback to commenters or help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, as illustrated in two experiments below. We’ll be releasing more machine learning models later in the year, but our first model identifies whether a comment could be perceived as “toxic” to a discussion….(More)”.