Paper by Johann Höchtl et al in the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce: “Although of high relevance to political science, the interaction between technological change and political change in the era of Big Data remains somewhat of a neglected topic. Most studies focus on the concept of e-government and e-governance, and on how already existing government activities performed through the bureaucratic body of public administration could be improved by technology. This paper attempts to build a bridge between the field of e-governance and theories of public administration that goes beyond the service delivery approach that dominates a large part of e-government research. Using the policy cycle as a generic model for policy processes and policy development, a new look on how policy decision making could be conducted on the basis of ICT and Big Data is presented in this paper….(More)”
Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data: Current and Future Research in the Social Sciences
Homero Gil de Zúñiga at Social Science Computer Review: “This special issue of the Social Science Computer Review provides a sample of the latest strategies employing large data sets in social media and political communication research. The proliferation of information communication technologies, social media, and the Internet, alongside the ubiquity of high-performance computing and storage technologies, has ushered in the era of computational social science. However, in no way does the use of “big data” represent a standardized area of inquiry in any field. This article briefly summarizes pressing issues when employing big data for political communication research. Major challenges remain to ensure the validity and generalizability of findings. Strong theoretical arguments are still a central part of conducting meaningful research. In addition, ethical practices concerning how data are collected remain an area of open discussion. The article surveys studies that offer unique and creative ways to combine methods and introduce new tools while at the same time address some solutions to ethical questions….(More)”
The Upside of Slacktivism
Nathan Collins in Pacific Standard: “When you think of meaningful political action, you probably think of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or perhaps ACT-UP‘s 1990 protests in San Francisco. You probably don’t think of clicking “like” or “share” on Facetwitstagram—though a new study suggests that those likes and shares may be just as important as marching in the streets, singing songs, and carrying signs.
“The efficacy of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as ‘slacktivists’ because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button,” writes a team led by Pablo Barberá, a political scientist at New York University, in the journal PLoS One.
In other words, it’s easy to argue that sharing a post about climate change and whatnot has no value, since it involves no sacrifice—no standoffs with angry police, no going to jail over taxes you didn’t pay because you opposed the Mexican-American War, not even lost shoes.
On the other hand, maybe sacrifice isn’t the point. Maybe it’s getting attention, and, Barberá and colleagues suggest, slacktivism is actually pretty good at that part—a consequence of just how easy it is to spread the word with the click of a mouse.
The team reached that conclusion after analyzing tens of millions of tweets sent by nearly three million users during the May 2013 anti-government protests in Gezi Park, Istanbul. Among other things, the team identified which tweets were originals rather than retweets, who retweeted whom, and how many followers each user had. That meant Barberá and his team could identify not only how information flowed within the network of protesters, but also how many people that information reached.
Most original tweets came from a relatively small group of protestors using hashtags such as #gezipark, suggesting that information flowed from a core group of protestors toward a less-active periphery. Geographic data backed that up: Around 18 percent of core tweeters were physically present for the Gezi Park demonstrations, compared to a quarter of a percent of peripheral tweeters…..(More)”
The Internet’s Loop of Action and Reaction Is Worsening
Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton said this week that we should think about shutting down parts of the Internet to stop terrorist groups from inspiring and recruiting followers in distant lands. Mr. Trump even suggested an expert who’d be perfect for the job: “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening, and we have to talk to them — maybe, in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way,” he said on Monday in South Carolina.
Many online responded to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton with jeers, pointing out both constitutional and technical limits to their plans. Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who now spends much of his time on philanthropy, has as much power to close down the Internet as he does to fix Mr. Trump’s hair.
Yet I had a different reaction to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton’s fantasy of a world in which you could just shut down parts of the Internet that you didn’t like: Sure, it’s impossible, but just imagine if we could do it, just for a bit. Wouldn’t it have been kind of a pleasant dream world, in these overheated last few weeks, to have lived free of social media?
Hear me out. If you’ve logged on to Twitter and Facebook in the waning weeks of 2015, you’ve surely noticed that the Internet now seems to be on constant boil. Your social feed has always been loud, shrill, reflexive and ugly, but this year everything has been turned up to 11. The Islamic State’s use of the Internet is perhaps only the most dangerous manifestation of what, this year, became an inescapable fact of online life: The extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible.“The academic in me says that discourse norms have shifted,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Dangerous Speech Project, an effort to study speech that leads to violence. “It’s become so common to figuratively walk through garbage and violent imagery online that people have accepted it in a way. And it’s become so noisy that you have to shout more loudly, and more shockingly, to be heard.”
You might argue that the angst online is merely a reflection of the news. Terrorism, intractable warfare, mass shootings, a hyperpartisan presidential race, police brutality, institutional racism and the protests over it have dominated the headlines. It’s only natural that the Internet would get a little out of control over that barrage.
But there’s also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction.
“Presidential elections have always been pretty nasty, but these days the mudslinging is omnipresent in a way that’s never been the case before,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University, who is the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a study of online “trolling.” “When Donald Trump says something that I would consider insane, it’s not just that it gets reported on by one or two or three outlets, but it becomes this wave of iterative content on top of content on top of content in your feed, taking over everything you see.”
The spiraling feedback loop is exhausting and rarely illuminating. The news brims with instantly produced “hot takes” and a raft of fact-free assertions. Everyone — yours truly included — is always on guard for the next opportunity to meme-ify outrage: What crazy thing did Trump/Obama/The New York Times/The New York Post/Rush Limbaugh/etc. say now, and what clever quip can you fit into a tweet to quickly begin collecting likes?
There is little room for indulging nuance, complexity, or flirting with the middle ground. In every issue, you are either with one aggrieved group or the other, and the more stridently you can express your disdain — short ofhurling profanities at the president on TV, which will earn you a brief suspension — the better reaction you’ll get….(More)”
What Privacy Papers Should Policymakers be Reading in 2016?
Stacy Gray at the Future of Privacy Forum: “Each year, FPF invites privacy scholars and authors to submit articles and papers to be considered by members of our Advisory Board, with an aim toward showcasing those articles that should inform any conversation about privacy among policymakers in Congress, as well as at the Federal Trade Commission and in other government agencies. For our sixth annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers, we received submissions on topics ranging from mobile app privacy, to location tracking, to drone policy.
Our Advisory Board selected papers that describe the challenges and best practices of designing privacy notices, ways to minimize the risks of re-identification of data by focusing on process-based data release policy and taking a precautionary approach to data release, the relationship between privacy and markets, and bringing the concept of trust more strongly into privacy principles.
Our top privacy papers for 2015 are, in alphabetical order:
Florian Schaub, Rebecca Balebako, Adam L. Durity, and Lorrie Faith CranorIra S. Rubinstein and Woodrow HartzogArvind Narayanan, Joanna Huey, and Edward W. Felten
Our two papers selected for Notable Mention are:
Peter Swire (Testimony, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, July 8, 2015)Joel R. Reidenberg….(More)”
Five Studies: How Behavioral Science Can Help in International Development
Dwyer Gunn in Pacific Standard: “In 2012, there were 896 million people around the world—12.7 percent of the global population—living on less than two dollars a day. The World Food Programestimates that 795 million people worldwide don’t have enough food to “lead a healthy life”; 25 percent of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Over three million children die every year thanks to poor nutrition, and hunger is the leading cause of death worldwide. In 2012, just three preventable diseases (pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria) killed 4,600 children every day.
Last month, the World Bank announced the launch of the Global Insights Initiative (GINI). The initiative, which follows in the footsteps of so-called “nudge units” in the United Kingdom and United States, is the Bank’s effort to incorporate insights from the field of behavioral science into the design of international development programs; too often, those programs failed to account for how people behave in the real world. Development policy, according to the Bank’s 2015 World Development Report, is overdue for a “redesign based on careful consideration of human factors.” Researchers have applauded the announcement, but it raises an interesting question: What can nudges really accomplish in the face of the developing world’s overwhelming poverty and health-care deficits?
In fact, researchers have found that instituting small program changes, informed by a better understanding of people’s motivations and limitations, can have big effects on everything from savings rates to vaccination rates to risky sexual behavior. Here are five studies that demonstrate the benefits of bringing empirical social science into the developing world….(More)”
Crowdvoice: tracking voices of protest
“CrowdVoice.org is an open source service that tracks voices of protest by curating and contextualizing valuable data, such as eyewitness videos, photos, and reports as a means to facilitate awareness regarding current social justice movements worldwide.
Despite what is happening today around the world, little hard-research exists for journalists and academics in terms of archives of diverse media reports. CrowdVoice addresses this by curating a wide range of content pulled from across the web on a dedicated page. Content is initially housed in a moderation queue, where it awaits crowdsourced verification.
As a second step, the platform visually communicates social and political issues through hard facts, statistics, interactive infographics, and timelines, which are organized by tags, specific topics, and relevant citations. These engaging educational resources direct users to an archive of relevant footage and reports. Infographics and interactive timelines are an imperative step in providing a frame of reference to the hundreds of under-reported stories pouring in from across the world, and are crucial to putting together nuanced, comprehensive reports reflecting both hard facts and the human face of the issues.”
Why: A Guide to Finding and Using Causes
Book by Samantha Kleinberg: “Can drinking coffee help people live longer? What makes a stock’s price go up? Why did you get the flu? Causal questions like these arise on a regular basis, but most people likely have not thought deeply about how to answer them.
This book helps you think about causality in a structured way: What is a cause, what are causes good for, and what is compelling evidence of causality? Author Samantha Kleinberg shows you how to develop a set of tools for thinking more critically about causes. You’ll learn how to question claims, identify causes, make decisions based on causal information, and verify causes through further tests.
Whether it’s figuring out what data you need, or understanding that the way you collect and prepare data affects the conclusions you can draw from it, Why will help you sharpen your causal inference skills….(More)”
When to Punish, When to Persuade and When to Reward: Strengthening Responsive Regulation with the Regulatory Diamond
Paper by Jonathan Kolieb: “Originally published over two decades ago, ‘responsive regulation’ and its associated regulatory pyramid have become touchstones in the contemporary study and practice of regulation. Influential ideas and theories about regulation and governance have been developed in the intervening years, yet responsive regulation’s simple pyramidal model continues to resonate with policy-makers and scholars alike. This article seeks to advance the vision and utility of responsive regulation, by responding to several key drawbacks of the original design and by offering an update to the pyramidal model of regulation that lies at the centre of the theory. It argues for a ‘regulatory diamond’ as a strengthened, renewed model for responsive regulation. Rooted within the responsive regulation literature, the regulatory diamond integrates into the one schema both ‘compliance regulation’ and ‘aspirational regulation’, thereby offering a more cohesive representation of the broad conception of regulation that underpins responsive regulation theory, and the limited but vital role of law within it….(More)”
Join Campaigns, Shop Ethically, Hit the Man Where It Hurts—All Within an App
PSFK: “Buycott is an app that wants to make shopping ethically a little easier. Join campaigns to support causes you care about, scan barcodes on products you’re considering to view company practices, and voice your concerns directly through the free app, available for iOS and Android.
Ethical campaigns are crowdsourced, and range from environmental to political and social concerns. Current campaigns include a demand for GMO labeling, supporting fair trade, ending animal testing, and more. You can read a description of the issue in question and see a list of companies to avoid and support under each campaign.
Scan barcodes of potential purchases to see if it the parent companies behind them hold up to your ethical standards. If the company doesn’t stand up, the app will suggest more ethically aligned alternatives.
According to Ivan Pardo, founder and CEO of Buycott, the app is designed to help consumers make informed shopping decisions “they can feel good about.”
“As consumers become increasingly conscientious about the impact of their purchases and shop to reflect these principles, Buycott provides users with transparency into the business practices of the companies marketing to them.”
Users can contact problematic companies through the app, using email, Facebook or Twitter. The app traces each product all the way back to its umbrella or parent company (which means the same few corporate giants are likely to show up on a few do-not buy lists)….(More)