state & provincial

A primer on political bots: Part one

Curated on February 26, 2018August 3, 2018 by 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)”.

Data journalism and the ethics of publishing Twitter data

Curated on February 20, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew L. Williams at Data Driven Journalism: “Collecting and publishing data collected from social media sites such as Twitter are everyday practices for the data journalist. Recent findings from Cardiff University’s Social Data Science Lab question the practice of publishing Twitter content without seeking some form of informed consent from users beforehand. Researchers found that tweets collected around certain topics, such as those related to terrorism, political votes, changes in the law and health problems, create datasets that might contain sensitive content, such as extreme political opinion, grossly offensive comments, overly personal revelations and threats to life (both to oneself and to others). Handling these data in the process of analysis (such as classifying content as hateful and potentially illegal) and reporting has brought the ethics of using social media in social research and journalism into sharp focus.

Ethics is an issue that is becoming increasingly salient in research and journalism using social media data. The digital revolution has outpaced parallel developments in research governance and agreed good practice. Codes of ethical conduct that were written in the mid twentieth century are being relied upon to guide the collection, analysis and representation of digital data in the twenty-first century. Social media is particularly ethically challenging because of the open availability of the data (particularly from Twitter). Many platforms’ terms of service specifically state users’ data that are public will be made available to third parties, and by accepting these terms users legally consent to this. However, researchers and data journalists must interpret and engage with these commercially motivated terms of service through a more reflexive lens, which implies a context sensitive approach, rather than focusing on the legally permissible uses of these data.

Social media researchers and data journalists have experimented with data from a range of sources, including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter to name a few. Twitter is by far the most studied of all these networks. This is because Twitter differs from other networks, such as Facebook, that are organised around groups of ‘friends’, in that it is more ‘open’ and the data (in part) are freely available to researchers. This makes Twitter a more public digital space that promotes the free exchange of opinions and ideas. Twitter has become the primary space for online citizens to publicly express their reaction to events of national significance, and also the primary source of data for social science research into digital publics.

The Twitter streaming API provides three levels of data access: the free random 1% that provides ~5M tweets daily and the random 10% and 100% (chargeable or free to academic researchers upon request). Datasets on social interactions of this scale, speed and ease of access have been hitherto unrealisable in the social sciences and journalism, and have led to a flood of journal articles and news pieces, many of which include tweets with full text content and author identity without informed consent. This is presumably because of Twitter’s ‘open’ nature, which leads to the assumption that ‘these are public data’ and using it does not require the rigor and scrutiny of an ethical oversight. Even when these data are scrutinised, journalists don’t need to be convinced by the ‘public data’ argument, due to the lack of a framework to evaluate the potential harms to users. The Social Data Science Lab takes a more ethically reflexive approach to the use of social media data in social research, and carefully considers users’ perceptions, online context and the role of algorithms in estimating potentially sensitive user characteristics.

A recent Lab survey conducted into users’ perceptions of the use of their social media posts found the following:

94% were aware that social media companies had Terms of Service
65% had read the Terms of Service in whole or in part
76% knew that when accepting Terms of Service they were giving permission for some of their information to be accessed by third parties
80% agreed that if their social media information is used in a publication they would expect to be asked for consent
90% agreed that if their tweets were used without their consent they should be anonymized…(More)”.

Just and Unjust Leaks: When to Spill Secrets

Curated on February 20, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Walzer at Foreign Affairs: “All governments, all political parties, and all politicians keep secrets and tell lies. Some lie more than others, and those differences are important, but the practice is general. And some lies and secrets may be justified, whereas others may not. Citizens, therefore, need to know the difference between just and unjust secrets and between just and unjust deception before they can decide when it may be justifiable for someone to reveal the secrets or expose the lies—when leaking confidential information, releasing classified documents, or blowing the whistle on misconduct may be in the public interest or, better, in the interest of democratic government.

Revealing official secrets and lies involves a form of moral risk-taking: whistleblowers may act out of a sense of duty or conscience, but the morality of their actions can be judged only by their fellow citizens, and only after the fact. This is often a difficult judgment to make—and has probably become more difficult in the Trump era.

LIES AND DAMNED LIES

A quick word about language: “leaker” and “whistleblower” are overlapping terms, but they aren’t synonyms. A leaker, in this context, anonymously reveals information that might embarrass officials or open up the government’s internal workings to unwanted public scrutiny. In Washington, good reporters cultivate sources inside every presidential administration and every Congress and hope for leaks. A whistleblower reveals what she believes to be immoral or illegal official conduct to her bureaucratic superiors or to the public. Certain sorts of whistle-blowing, relating chiefly to mismanagement and corruption, are protected by law; leakers are not protected, nor are whistleblowers who reveal state secrets…(More)”.

When citizens set the budget: lessons from ancient Greece

Curated on February 19, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

David M. Pritchard and Lyn Carson in The Conversation: “Today elected representatives take the tough decisions about public finances behind closed doors. In doing so, democratic politicians rely on the advice of financial bureaucrats, who, often, cater to the political needs of the elected government. Politicians rarely ask voters what they think of budget options. They are no better at explaining the reasons for a budget. Explanations are usually no more than vacuous phrases, such as “jobs and growth” or “on the move”. They never explain the difficult trade-offs that go into a budget nor their overall financial reasoning.

This reluctance to explain public finances was all too evident during the global financial crisis.

In Australia, Britain and France, centre-left governments borrowed huge sums in order to maintain private demand and, in one case, to support private banks. In each country these policies helped a lot to minimise the crisis’s human costs.

Yet, in the elections that followed the centre-left politicians that had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate robust discussion about public finances. Without a justification for their generally good policies each of these government was defeated by centre-right opponents.

In most democracies there is the same underlying problem: elected representatives do not believe that voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

For decades, we, independently, have studied democracy today and in the ancient past. We have learned that this assumption is dead wrong. There are more and more examples of how involving ordinary voters results in better budgets.

In 1989, councils in poor Brazilian towns began to involve residents in setting budgets. This participatory budgeting soon spread throughout South America. It has now been successfully tried in Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, the United States, Poland and Australia, and some pilot projects were set up in France too. Participatory budgeting is based on the clear principle that those who will be most affected by a tough budget should be involved in setting it.

In spite of such successful democratic experiments, elected representatives still shy away from involving ordinary voters in setting budgets. This is very different from what happened in ancient Athens 2,500 years ago….

In Athenian democracy ordinary citizens actually set the budget. This ancient Greek state had a solid budget, in spite of, or, we would say, because of the involvement of the citizens in taking tough budget decisions….(More)”.

The Social Media Threat to Society and Security

Curated on February 18, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

George Soros at Project Syndicate: “It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. And there is a real chance that, once lost, those who grow up in the digital age – in which the power to command and shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies – will have difficulty regaining it.

The current moment in world history is a painful one. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish his own mafia-style state but cannot, because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it….

The rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant American Internet platform companies is contributing mightily to the US government’s impotence. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown ever more powerful, they have become obstacles to innovation, and have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware…

Social media companies’ true customers are their advertisers. But a new business model is gradually emerging, based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep more of the benefits that they would otherwise have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further, but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market economy.

Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention, directing it toward their own commercial purposes, and deliberately engineering addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents.

There is a similarity between Internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook customers to the point that they gamble away all of their money, even money they don’t have.

Something similar – and potentially irreversible – is happening to human attention in our digital age. This is not a matter of mere distraction or addiction; social media companies are actually inducing people to surrender their autonomy. And this power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. Once lost, those who grow up in the digital age may have difficulty regaining it.

This would have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential election.

There is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon: an alliance between authoritarian states and large, data-rich IT monopolies, bringing together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with already-developed systems of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined….(More)”.

How Universities Are Tackling Society’s Grand Challenges

Curated on February 15, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michelle Popowitz and Cristin Dorgelo in Scientific American: “…Universities embarking on Grand Challenge efforts are traversing new terrain—they are making commitments about research deliverables rather than simply committing to invest in efforts related to a particular subject. To mitigate risk, the universities that have entered this space are informally consulting with others regarding effective strategies, but the entire community would benefit from a more formal structure for identifying and sharing “what works.” To address this need, the new Community of Practice for University-Led Grand Challenges—launched at the October 2017 workshop—aims to provide peer support to leaders of university Grand Challenge programs, and to accelerate the adoption of Grand Challenge approaches at more universities supported by cross-sector partnerships.

The university community has identified extensive opportunities for collaboration on these Grand Challenge programs with other sectors:

Philanthropy can support the development of new Grand Challenge programs at more universities by establishing planning and administration grant programs, convening experts, and providing funding support for documenting these models through white papers and other publications and for evaluation of these programs over time.
Relevant associations and professional development organizations can host learning sessions about Grand Challenges for university leaders and professionals.
Companies can collaborate with universities on Grand Challenges research, act as sponsors and hosts for university-led programs and activities, and offer leaders, experts, and other personnel for volunteer advisory roles and tours of duties at universities.
Federal, State, and local governments and elected officials can provide support for collaboration among government agencies and offices and the research community on Grand Challenges.

Today’s global society faces pressing, complex challenges across many domains—including health, environment, and social justice. Science (including social sciences), technology, the arts, and humanities have critical roles to play in addressing these challenges and building a bright and prosperous future. Universities are hubs for discovery, building new knowledge, and changing understanding of the world. The public values the role universities play in education; yet as a sector, universities are less effective at highlighting their roles as the catalysts of new industries, homes for the fundamental science that leads to new treatments and products, or sources of the evidence on which policy decisions should be made.

By coming together as universities, collaborating with partners, and aiming for ambitious goals to address problems that might seem unsolvable, universities can show commitment to their communities and become beacons of hope….(More)”.

You weren’t supposed to have to think about politics

Curated on February 14, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bonnie Kristian at The Week: “You were not supposed to have to think about politics.

Not this much, anyway. Good citizenship was not supposed to entail paying obsessive attention to a 24-hour news cycle. It was not supposed to demand conversational knowledge, at any given moment, of at least 15 issues of national importance. It was not supposed to be the task of each American to have An Informed Opinion on What the Government Should Do about every matter of state.

America’s founders never wanted politics to be a major occupation of your mind. It was not supposed to feature prominently among your worries. Most of the time, it was not supposed to be your responsibility.

I know, I know, we learn in grade school that America is a democracy, and each of us must do our part to ensure good governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This may be inspirational for children, but it is not entirely true.

The United States’ government has democratic elements, yes, and, in some ways, it has become more democratic with time. (In other ways, it hasbecome less democratic, and I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the net change is a loss or gain.) To say our country is a republic rather than a democracy is also misleading, but it does remind us of an important point: Our federal system is representational. It is not direct democracy. Each of us does not weigh in on everything. Instead, we periodically vote on representatives who will weigh in on our behalf while we do other, better things.

This is with good reason. At the most practical level, direct democracy was always impossible for a country of the United States’ size. And even now, assuming technology could be secure enough to use without concern over hacking and other malicious manipulation, there is cause to reject direct democracy: A system designed to force every responsible citizen to pay constant attention to politics is not desirable.

We elect representatives to do the great bulk of our politicking for us because we have more important things to do. We have families to raise and jobs to work and homes to maintain. We have our own areas of interest and expertise, our own relationships to cultivate. And, crucially, we have limited time, energy, and mental space. Some of us may choose to make politics our hobby or occupation, but all of us should not have to make that choice.

Politics is one aspect of our society. It is one part of many. We all no more need to be politicos, amateur or professional, than we all need to be philosophers or writers or tailors or dog rescuers or plumbers. Philosophy, books, clothes, rescue dogs, and working toilets are all important, just as politics is, but they are not everyone’s concern all the time. They are some people’s profession and the hobbies of others, but for most of us, these and any other field of work or pastime are only occasionally encountered…(More)”

The People’s Right to Know and State Secrecy

Curated on February 10, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dorota Mokrosinska at the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence: “Among the classic arguments which advocates of open government use to fight government secrecy is the appeal to a “people’s right to know.” I argue that the employment of this idea as a conceptual weapon against state secrecy misfires. I consider two prominent arguments commonly invoked to support the people’s right to know government-held information: an appeal to human rights and an appeal to democratic citizenship. While I concede that both arguments ground the people’s right to access government information, I argue that they also limit this right and in limiting it, they establish a domain of state secrecy. The argument developed in the essay provides a novel interpretation of Dennis Thompson’s claim, who in his seminal work on the place of secrecy in democratic governance, has argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy….(More)”.

Managing Democracy in the Digital Age

Curated on February 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Julia Schwanholz, Todd Graham and Peter-Tobias Stoll: “In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere.

The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation….(More)”.