Civic Information Handbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Handbook by Adrienne Goldstein: “Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.

This handbook aims to:

  1. Educate civic information providers about coordinated deceptive campaigns

…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.

  1. Serve as a resource on how to flood the zone with trustworthy civic information

…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.

This handbook will function as a media literacy tool, giving readers the skills and opportunity to consider who is behind networked information campaigns and how they spread their messages…(More)”.

Let’s Randomize America! 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalton Conley: “…As our society has become less random, it has become more unequal. Many people know that inequality has been rising steadily over time, but a less-remarked-on development is that there’s been a parallel geographic shift, with high- and low-income people moving into separate, ever more distinct communities…As a sociologist, I study inequality and what can be done about it. It is, to say the least, a difficult problem to solve…I’ve come to believe that lotteries could help to crack this nut and make our society fairer and more equal. We can’t randomly assign where people live, of course. And we can’t integrate neighborhoods by fiat, either. We learned that lesson in the nineteen-seventies, when counties tried busing schoolchildren across town. Those programs aimed to create more racially and economically integrated schools; they resulted in the withdrawal of affluent students from urban public-school systems, and set off a political backlash that can still be felt today…

As a political tool, lotteries have come and gone throughout history. Sortition—the selection of political officials by lot—was first practiced in Athens in the sixth century B.C.E., and later reappeared in Renaissance city-states such as Florence, Venice, and Lombardy, and in Switzerland and elsewhere. In recent years, citizens’ councils—randomly chosen groups of individuals who meet to hammer out a particular issue, such as climate policy—have been tried in Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, and the U.K. Some political theorists, such as Hélène Landemore, Jane Mansbridge, and the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck, have argued that randomly selected decision-makers who don’t have to campaign are less likely to be corrupt or self-interested than those who must run for office; people chosen at random are also unlikely to be typically privileged, power-hungry politicians. The wisdom of the crowd improves when the crowd is more diverse…(More)”.

Machines of mind: The case for an AI-powered productivity boom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Martin Neil Baily, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anton Korinek: “ Large language models such as ChatGPT are emerging as powerful tools that not only make workers more productive but also increase the rate of innovation, laying the foundation for a significant acceleration in economic growth. As a general purpose technology, AI will impact a wide array of industries, prompting investments in new skills, transforming business processes, and altering the nature of work. However, official statistics will only partially capture the boost in productivity because the output of knowledge workers is difficult to measure. The rapid advances can have great benefits but may also lead to significant risks, so it is crucial to ensure that we steer progress in a direction that benefits all of society…(More)”.

Data portability and interoperability: A primer on two policy tools for regulation of digitized industries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sukhi Gulati-Gilbert and Robert Seamans: “…In this article we describe two other tools, data portability and interoperability, that may be particularly useful in technology-enabled sectors. Data portability allows users to move data from one company to another, helping to reduce switching costs and providing rival firms with access to valuable customer data. Interoperability allows two or more technical systems to exchange data interactively. Due to its interactive nature, interoperability can help prevent lock-in to a specific platform by allowing users to connect across platforms. Data portability and interoperability share some similarities; in addition to potential pro-competitive benefits, the tools promote values of openness, transparency, and consumer choice.

After providing an overview of these topics, we describe the tradeoffs involved with implementing data portability and interoperability. While these policy tools offer lots of promise, in practice there can be many challenges involved when determining how to fund and design an implementation that is secure and intuitive and accomplishes the intended result.  These challenges require that policymakers think carefully about the initial implementation of data portability and interoperability. Finally, to better show how data portability and interoperability can increase competition in an industry, we discuss how they could be applied in the banking and social media sectors. These are just two examples of how data portability and interoperability policy could be applied to many different industries facing increased digitization. Our definitions and examples should be helpful to those interested in understanding the tradeoffs involved in using these tools to promote competition and innovation in the U.S. economy…(More)” See also: Data to Go: The Value of Data Portability as a Means to Data Liquidity.

The People and the Experts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by William D. Nordhaus & Douglas Rivers: “Are speculators driving up oil prices? Should we raise energy prices to slow global warming? The present study takes a small number of such questions and compares the views of economic experts with those of the public. This comparison uses a panel of more than 2000 respondents from YouGov with the views of the panel of experts from the Initiative on Global Markets at the Chicago Booth School. We found that most of the US population is at best modestly informed about major economic questions and policies. The low level of knowledge is generally associated with the intrusion of ideological, political, and religious views that challenge or deny the current economic consensus. The intruding factors are highly heterogeneous across questions and sub-populations and are much more diverse than the narrowness of public political discourse would suggest. Many of these findings have been established for scientific subjects, but they appear to be equally important for economic views…(More)”.

Data Sharing Between Public and Private Sectors: When Local Governments Seek Information from the Sharing Economy.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Centre for Information Policy Leadership: “…addresses the growing trend of localities requesting (and sometimes mandating) that data collected by the private sector be shared with the localities themselves. Such requests are generally not in the context of law enforcement or national security matters, but rather are part of an effort to further the public interest or promote a public good.

To the extent such requests are overly broad or not specifically tailored to the stated public interest, CIPL believes that the public sector’s adoption of accountability measures—which CIPL has repeatedly promoted for the private sector—can advance responsible data sharing practices between the two sectors. It can also strengthen the public’s confidence in data-driven initiatives that seek to improve their communities…(More)”.

Spamming democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Natalie Alms: “The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is considering AI’s effect in the regulatory process, including the potential for generative chatbots to fuel mass campaigns or inject spam comments into the federal agency rulemaking process.

A recent executive order directed the office to consider using guidance or tools to address mass comments, computer-generated comments and falsely attributed comments, something an administration official told FCW that OIRA is “moving forward” on.

Mark Febrezio, a senior policy analyst at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, has experimented with Open AI’s generative AI system ChatGPT to create what he called a “convincing” public comment submission to a Labor Department proposal. 

“Generative AI also takes the possibility of mass and malattributed comments to the next level,” wrote Fabrizio and co-author Bridget Dooling, research professor at the center, in a paper published in April by the Brookings Institution.

The executive order comes years after astroturfing during the rollback of net neutrality policies by the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 garnered public attention. That rulemaking docket received a record-breaking 22 million-plus comments, but over 8.5 million came from a campaign against net neutrality led by broadband companies, according to an investigation by the New York Attorney General released in 2021. 

The investigation found that lead generators paid by these companies submitted many comments with real names and addresses attached without the knowledge or consent of those individuals.  In the same docket were over 7 million comments supporting net neutrality submitted by a computer science student, who used software to submit comments attached to computer-generated names and addresses.

While the numbers are staggering, experts told FCW that agencies aren’t just counting comments when reading through submissions from the public…(More)”

Unlocking the Power of Data Refineries for Social Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jason Saul & Kriss Deiglmeier: “In 2021, US companies generated $2.77 trillion in profits—the largest ever recorded in history. This is a significant increase since 2000 when corporate profits totaled $786 billion. Social progress, on the other hand, shows a very different picture. From 2000 to 2021, progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals has been anemic, registering less than 10 percent growth over 20 years.

What explains this massive split between the corporate and the social sectors? One explanation could be the role of data. In other words, companies are benefiting from a culture of using data to make decisions. Some refer to this as the “data divide”—the increasing gap between the use of data to maximize profit and the use of data to solve social problems…

Our theory is that there is something more systemic going on. Even if nonprofit practitioners and policy makers had the budget, capacity, and cultural appetite to use data; does the data they need even exist in the form they need it? We submit that the answer to this question is a resounding no. Usable data doesn’t yet exist for the sector because the sector lacks a fully functioning data ecosystem to create, analyze, and use data at the same level of effectiveness as the commercial sector…(More)”.

The Untapped Potential of Computing and Cognition in Tackling Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adiba Proma, Robert Wachter and Ehsan Hoque: “Alongside the search for climate-protecting technologies like EVs, more effort needs to be directed to harnessing technology to promote climate-protecting behavior change. This will take focus, leadership, and cooperation among technologists, investors, business executives, educators, and governments. Unfortunately, such focus, leadership, and cooperation have been lacking.  

Persuading people to change their lifestyles to benefit the next generations is a significant challenge. We argue that simple changes in how technologies are built and deployed can significantly lower society’s carbon footprint. 

While it is challenging to influence human behavior, there are opportunities to offer nudges and just-in-time interventions by tweaking certain aspects of technology. For example, the “Climate Pledge Friendly” tag added to products that meet Amazon’s sustainability standards can help users identify and purchase ecofriendly products while shopping online [3]. Similarly, to help users make more ecofriendly choices while traveling, Google Flights provides information on average carbon dioxide emission for flights and Google Maps tags the “most fuel-efficient” route for vehicles. 

Computer scientists can draw on concepts from psychology, moral dilemma, and human cooperation to build technologies that can encourage people to lead ecofriendly lifestyles. Many mobile health applications have been developed to motivate people to exercise, eat a healthy diet, sleep better, and manage chronic diseases. Some apps designed to improve sleep, mental wellbeing, and calorie intake have as many as 200 million active users. The use of apps and other internet tools can be adapted to promote lifestyle changes for climate change. For example, Google Nest rewards users with a “leaf” when they meet an energy goal…(More)”.

The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Michael Atleson at the FTC: “In the 2014 movie Ex Machina, a robot manipulates someone into freeing it from its confines, resulting in the person being confined instead. The robot was designed to manipulate that person’s emotions, and, oops, that’s what it did. While the scenario is pure speculative fiction, companies are always looking for new ways – such as the use of generative AI tools – to better persuade people and change their behavior. When that conduct is commercial in nature, we’re in FTC territory, a canny valley where businesses should know to avoid practices that harm consumers.

In previous blog posts, we’ve focused on AI-related deception, both in terms of exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims for AI products and the use of generative AI for fraud. Design or use of a product can also violate the FTC Act if it is unfair – something that we’ve shown in several cases and discussed in terms of AI tools with biased or discriminatory results. Under the FTC Act, a practice is unfair if it causes more harm than good. To be more specific, it’s unfair if it causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers that is not reasonably avoidable by consumers and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition.

As for the new wave of generative AI tools, firms are starting to use them in ways that can influence people’s beliefs, emotions, and behavior. Such uses are expanding rapidly and include chatbots designed to provide information, advice, support, and companionship. Many of these chatbots are effectively built to persuade and are designed to answer queries in confident language even when those answers are fictional. A tendency to trust the output of these tools also comes in part from “automation bias,” whereby people may be unduly trusting of answers from machines which may seem neutral or impartial. It also comes from the effect of anthropomorphism, which may lead people to trust chatbots more when designed, say, to use personal pronouns and emojis. People could easily be led to think that they’re conversing with something that understands them and is on their side…(More)”.