Bhaskar Chakravorti, Ajay Bhalla, and Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi at Harvard Business Review: “As economies around the world digitalize rapidly in response to the pandemic, one component that can sometimes get left behind is user trust. What does it take to build out a digital ecosystem that users will feel comfortable actually using? To answer this question, the authors explored four components of digital trust: the security of an economy’s digital environment; the quality of the digital user experience; the extent to which users report trust in their digital environment; and the extent to which users actually use the digital tools available to them. They then used almost 200 indicators to rank 42 global economies on their performance in each of these four metrics, finding a number of interesting trends around how different economies have developed mechanisms for engendering trust, as well as how different types of trust do — or don’t — correspond to other digital development metrics…(More)”.
Far-right news sources on Facebook more engaging
Study by Laura Edelson, Minh-Kha Nguyen, Ian Goldstein, Oana Goga, Tobias Lauinger, and Damon McCoy: Facebook has become a major way people find news and information in an increasingly politically polarized nation. We analyzed how users interacted with different types of posts promoted as news in the lead-up to and aftermath of the U.S. 2020 elections. We found that politically extreme sources tend to generate more interactions from users. In particular, content from sources rated as far-right by independent news rating services consistently received the highest engagement per follower of any partisan group. Additionally, frequent purveyors of far-right misinformation had on average 65% more engagement per follower than other far-right pages. We found:
- Sources of news and information rated as far-right generate the highest average number of interactions per follower with their posts, followed by sources from the far-left, and then news sources closer to the center of the political spectrum.
- Looking at the far-right, misinformation sources far outperform non-misinformation sources. Far-right sources designated as spreaders of misinformation had an average of 426 interactions per thousand followers per week, while non-misinformation sources had an average of 259 weekly interactions per thousand followers.
- Engagement with posts from far-right and far-left news sources peaked around Election Day and again on January 6, the day of the certification of the electoral count and the U.S. Capitol riot. For posts from all other political leanings of news sources, the increase in engagement was much less intense.
- Center and left partisan categories incur a misinformation penalty, while right-leaning sources do not. Center sources of misinformation, for example, performed about 70% worse than their non-misinformation counterparts. (Note: center sources of misinformation tend to be sites presenting as health news that have no obvious ideological orientation.)…(More)”.
Europe’s Digital Decade: Commission sets the course towards a digitally empowered Europe by 2030
European Commission Press Release: “…The Commission proposes a Digital Compass to translate the EUʼs digital ambitions for 2030 into concrete terms. They evolve around four cardinal points:
1) Digitally skilled citizens and highly skilled digital professionals; By 2030, at least 80% of all adults should have basic digital skills, and there should be 20 million employed ICT specialists in the EU – while more women should take up such jobs;
2) Secure, performant and sustainable digital infrastructures; By 2030, all EU households should have gigabit connectivity and all populated areas should be covered by 5G; the production of cutting-edge and sustainable semiconductors in Europe should be 20% of world production; 10,000 climate neutral highly secure edge nodes should be deployed in the EU; and Europe should have its first quantum computer;
3) Digital transformation of businesses; By 2030, three out of four companies should use cloud computing services, big data and Artificial Intelligence; more than 90% SMEs should reach at least basic level of digital intensity; and the number of EU unicorns should double;
4) Digitalisation of public services; By 2030, all key public services should be available online; all citizens will have access to their e-medical records; and 80% citizens should use an eID solution.
The Compass sets out a robust joint governance structure with Member States based on a monitoring system with annual reporting in the form of traffic lights. The targets will be enshrined in a Policy Programme to be agreed with the European Parliament and the Council….(More)“.
Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?
Book by Joshua A. T. Fairfield: “In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology – a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate….(More)”.
Improving Governance by Asking Questions that Matter
Fiona Cece, Nicola Nixon and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Government Partnership:
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions” – Naguib Mahfouz
Data is at the heart of every dimension of the COVID-19 challenge. It’s been vital in the monitoring of daily rates, track and trace technologies, doctors appointments, and the vaccine roll-out. Yet our daily diet of brightly-coloured graphed global trends masks the maelstrom of inaccuracies, gaps and guesswork that underlies the ramshackle numbers on which they are so often based. Governments are unable to address their citizens’ needs in an informed way when the data itself is partial, incomplete or simply biased. And citizens’ in turn are unable to contribute to collective decision-making that impacts their lives when the channels for doing so in meaningful ways are largely non-existent.
There is an irony here. We live in an era in which there are an unprecedented number of methods for collecting data. Even in the poorest countries with weak or largely non-existent government systems, anyone with a mobile phone or who accesses the internet is using and producing data. Yet a chasm exists between the potential of data to contribute to better governance and what it is actually collected and used for.
Even where data accuracy can be relied upon, the practice of effective, efficient and equitable data governance requires much more than its collection and dissemination.
And although governments will play a vital role, combatting the pandemic and its associated socio-economic challenges will require the combined efforts of non-government organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), citizens’ associations, healthcare companies and providers, universities, think tanks and so many others. Collaboration is key.
There is a need to collectively move beyond solution-driven thinking. One initiative working toward this end is The 100 Questions Initiative by The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In partnership with the The Asia Foundation, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Indonesia, and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, the Initiative is launching a Governance domain. Collectively we will draw on the expertise of over 100 “bilinguals”– experts in both data science and governance — to identify the 10 most-pressing questions on a variety of issues that can be addressed using data and data science. The cohort for this domain is multi-sectoral and geographically varied, and will provide diverse input on these governance challenges.
Once the questions have been identified and prioritized, and we have engaged with a broader public through a voting campaign, the ultimate goal is to establish one or more data collaboratives that can generate answers to the questions at hand. Data collaboratives are an emerging structure that allow pooling of data and expertise across sectors, often resulting in new insights and public sector innovations. Data collaboratives are fundamentally about sharing and cross-sectoral engagement. They have been deployed across countries and sectoral contexts, and their relative success shows that in the twenty-first century no single actor can solve vexing public problems. The route to success lies through broad-based collaboration.
Multi-sectoral and geographically diverse insight is needed to address the governance challenges we are living through, especially during the time of COVIDd-19. The pandemic has exposed weak governance practices globally, and collectively we need to craft a better response. As an open governance and data-for-development community, we have not yet leveraged the best insight available to inform an effective, evidence-based response to the pandemic. It is time we leverage more data and technology to enable citizen-centrism in our service delivery and decision-making processes, to contribute to overcoming the pandemic and to building our governance systems, institutions and structures back better. Together with over 130 ‘Bilinguals’ – experts in both governance and data – we have set about identifying the priority questions that data can answer to improve governance. Join us on this journey. Stay tuned for our public voting campaign in a couple of months’ time when we will crowdsource your views on which of the questions they pose really matter….(More)”.
Theories of Choice: The Social Science and the Law of Decision Making
Book by Stefan Grundmann and Philipp Hacker: “Choice is a key concept of our time. It is a foundational mechanism for every legal order in societies that are, politically, constituted as democracies and, economically, built on the market mechanism. Thus, choice can be understood as an atomic structure that grounds core societal processes. In recent years, however, the debate over the right way to theorise choice—for example, as a rational or a behavioural type of decision making—has intensified. This collection therefore provides an in-depth discussion of the promises and perils of specific types of theories of choice. It shows how the selection of a specific theory of choice can make a difference for concrete legal questions, in particularly in the regulation of the digital economy or in choosing between market, firm, or network.
In its first part, the volume provides an accessible overview of the current debates about rational versus behavioural approaches to theories of choice. The remainder of the book structures the vast landscape of theories of choice along three main types: individual, collective, and organisational decision making. As theories of choice proliferate and become ever more sophisticated, however, the process of choosing an adequate theory of choice becomes increasingly intricate, too. This volume addresses this selection problem for the various legal arenas in which individual, organisational, and collective decisions matter. By drawing on economic, technological, political, and legal points of view, the volume shows which theories of choice are at the disposal of the legally relevant decision maker, and how they can be implemented for the solution of concrete legal problems….(More)“
How Humans Judge Machines
Open Access Book by César A. Hidalgo et al : “How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people’s reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly?
Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of AI…(More)”.
Narratives and Counternarratives on Data Sharing in Africa
Paper by Rediet Abebe et al: “As machine learning and data science applications grow ever more prevalent, there is an increased focus on data sharing and open data initiatives, particularly in the context of the African continent. Many argue that data sharing can support research and policy design to alleviate poverty, inequality, and derivative effects in Africa. Despite the fact that the datasets in question are often extracted from African communities, conversations around the challenges of accessing and sharing African data are too often driven by non-African stakeholders. These perspectives frequently employ a deficit narratives, often focusing on lack of education, training, and technological resources in the continent as the leading causes of friction in the data ecosystem.
We argue that these narratives obfuscate and distort the full complexity of the African data sharing landscape. In particular, we use storytelling via fictional personas built from a series of interviews with African data experts to complicate dominant narratives and to provide counternarratives. Coupling these personas with research on data practices within the continent, we identify recurring barriers to data sharing as well as inequities in the distribution of data sharing benefits. In particular, we discuss issues arising from power imbalances resulting from the legacies of colonialism, ethno-centrism, and slavery, disinvestment in building trust, lack of acknowledgement of historical and present-day extractive practices, and Western-centric policies that are ill-suited to the African context. After outlining these problems, we discuss avenues for addressing them when sharing data generated in the continent….(More)”.
Resilience in the Digital Age
Book edited by Fred S. Roberts and Igor A. Sheremet: “The growth of a global digital economy has enabled rapid communication, instantaneous movement of funds, and availability of vast amounts of information. With this come challenges such as the vulnerability of digitalized sociotechnological systems (STSs) to destructive events (earthquakes, disease events, terrorist attacks). Similar issues arise for disruptions to complex linked natural and social systems (from changing climates, evolving urban environments, etc.). This book explores new approaches to the resilience of sociotechnological and natural-social systems in a digital world of big data, extraordinary computing capacity, and rapidly developing methods of Artificial Intelligence….
The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the vulnerability of our healthcare systems, supply chains, and social infrastructure, and confronts our notions of what makes a system resilient. We have found that use of AI tools can lead to problems when unexpected events occur. On the other hand, the vast amounts of data available from sensors, satellite images, social media, etc. can also be used to make modern systems more resilient.
Papers in the book explore disruptions of complex networks and algorithms that minimize departure from a previous state after a disruption; introduce a multigrammatical framework for the technological and resource bases of today’s large-scale industrial systems and the transformations resulting from disruptive events; and explain how robotics can enhance pre-emptive measures or post-disaster responses to increase resiliency. Other papers explore current directions in data processing and handling and principles of FAIRness in data; how the availability of large amounts of data can aid in the development of resilient STSs and challenges to overcome in doing so. The book also addresses interactions between humans and built environments, focusing on how AI can inform today’s smart and connected buildings and make them resilient, and how AI tools can increase resilience to misinformation and its dissemination….(More)”.
Surveillance and the ‘New Normal’ of Covid-19: Public Health, Data, and Justice
Report by the Social Science Research Council: “The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the way nations around the world use technology in public health. As the virus spread globally, some nations responded by closing businesses, shuttering schools, limiting gatherings, and banning travel. Many also deployed varied technological tools and systems to track virus exposure, monitor outbreaks, and aggregate hospital data.
Some regions are still grappling with crisis-level conditions, and others are struggling to navigate the complexities of vaccine rollouts. Amid the upheavals, communities are adjusting to a new normal, in which mask-wearing has become as commonplace as seatbelt use and digital temperature checks are a routine part of entering public buildings.
Even as the frenzy of emergency responses begins to subside, the emergent forms of surveillance that have accompanied this new normal persist. As a consequence, societies face new questions about how to manage the monitoring systems created in response to the virus, what processes are required in order to immunize populations, and what new norms the systems have generated. How they answer these questions will have long-term impacts on civil liberties, governance, and the role of technology in society. The systems implemented amid the public health emergency could jeopardize individual freedoms and exacerbate harms to already vulnerable groups, particularly if they are adapted to operate as permanent social management tools. At the same time, growing public awareness about the impact of public health technologies could also provide a catalyst for strengthening democratic engagement and demonstrating the urgency of improving governance systems. As the world transitions in and out of pandemic crisis modes, there is an opportunity to think broadly about strengthening public health systems, policymaking, and the underlying structure of our social compacts.
The stakes are high: an enduring lesson from history is that moments of crisis often recast the roles of governments and the rights of individuals. Moments of crisis often recast the roles of governments and the rights of individuals.In this moment of flux, the Social Science Research Council calls on policymakers, technologists, data scientists, health experts, academics, activists, and communities around the world to assess the implications of this transformation and seize opportunities for positive social change. The Council seeks to facilitate a shift from reactive modes of crisis response to more strategic forms of deliberation among varied stakeholders. As such, it has convened discussions and directed research in order to better understand the intersection of governance and technologically enabled surveillance in conditions of public health emergencies. Through these activities, the Council aims to provide analysis that can help foster societies that are more resilient, democratic, and inclusive and can, therefore, better withstand future crises.
With these goals in mind, the Council convened a cross-disciplinary, multinational group of experts in the summer of 2020 to survey the landscape of human rights and social justice with regard to technologically driven public health practices. The resulting group—the Public Health, Surveillance, and Human Rights (PHSHR) Network—raised a broad range of questions about governance, social inequalities, data protection, medical systems, and community norms: What rules should govern the sharing of personal health data? How should the efficacy of public health interventions be weighed against the emergence and expansion of new forms of surveillance? How much control should multinational corporations have in designing and implementing nations’ public health technology systems? These are among the questions that pushed members to think beyond traditional professional, geographic, and intellectual boundaries….(More)”.