Negligence, Not Politics, Drives Most Misinformation Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Timmer at Wired: “…a small international team of researchers… decided to take a look at how a group of US residents decided on which news to share. Their results suggest that some of the standard factors that people point to when explaining the tsunami of misinformation—inability to evaluate information and partisan biases—aren’t having as much influence as most of us think. Instead, a lot of the blame gets directed at people just not paying careful attention.

The researchers ran a number of fairly similar experiments to get at the details of misinformation sharing. This involved panels of US-based participants recruited either through Mechanical Turk or via a survey population that provided a more representative sample of the US. Each panel had several hundred to over 1,000 individuals, and the results were consistent across different experiments, so there was a degree of reproducibility to the data.

To do the experiments, the researchers gathered a set of headlines and lead sentences from news stories that had been shared on social media. The set was evenly mixed between headlines that were clearly true and clearly false, and each of these categories was split again between those headlines that favored Democrats and those that favored Republicans.

One thing that was clear is that people are generally capable of judging the accuracy of the headlines. There was a 56 percentage point gap between how often an accurate headline was rated as true and how often a false headline was. People aren’t perfect—they still got things wrong fairly often—but they’re clearly quite a bit better at this than they’re given credit for.

The second thing is that ideology doesn’t really seem to be a major factor in driving judgements on whether a headline was accurate. People were more likely to rate headlines that agreed with their politics, but the difference here was only 10 percentage points. That’s significant (both societally and statistically), but it’s certainly not a large enough gap to explain the flood of misinformation.

But when the same people were asked about whether they’d share these same stories, politics played a big role, and the truth receded. The difference in intention to share between true and false headlines was only 6 percentage points. Meanwhile the gap between whether a headline agreed with a person’s politics or not saw a 20 percentage point gap. Putting it in concrete terms, the authors look at the false headline “Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests.” Only 16 percent of conservatives in the survey population rated it as true. But over half of them were amenable to sharing it on social media….(More)”.

Coming wave of video games could build empathy on racism, environment and aftermath of war

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Snider at USA Today: “Some of the newest video games in development aren’t really games at all, but experiences that seek to build empathy for others.

Among the five such projects getting funding grants and support from 3D software engine maker Unity is “Our America,” in which the player takes the role of a Black man who is driving with his son when their car is pulled over by a police officer.

The father worries about getting his car registration from the glove compartment because the officer “might think it’s a gun or something,” the character says in the trailer.

On the project’s website, the developers describe “Our America” as “an autobiographical VR Experience” in which “the audience must make quick decisions, answer questions – but any wrong move is the difference between life and death.”…

The other Unity for Humanity winners include:

  • Ahi Kā Rangers: An ecological mobile game with development led by Māori creators. 
  • Dot’s Home: A game that explores historical housing injustices faced by Black and brown home buyers. 
  • Future Aleppo: A VR experience for children to rebuild homes and cities destroyed by war. 
  • Samudra: A children’s environmental puzzle game that takes the player across a polluted sea to learn about pollution and plastic waste.

While “Our America” may serve best as a VR experience, other projects such as “Dot’s Home” may be available on mobile devices to expand its accessibility….(More)”.

Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cade Metz at the New York Times: “Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the world’s most important conference on artificial intelligence — row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain.

Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself, all of whom she knew, all of whom were men.

The homogeneous crowd crystallized for her a glaring issue. The big thinkers of tech say A.I. is the future. It will underpin everything from search engines and email to the software that drives our cars, directs the policing of our streets and helps create our vaccines.

But it is being built in a way that replicates the biases of the almost entirely male, predominantly white work force making it.

In the nearly 10 years I’ve written about artificial intelligence, two things have remained a constant: The technology relentlessly improves in fits and sudden, great leaps forward. And bias is a thread that subtly weaves through that work in a way that tech companies are reluctant to acknowledge.

On her first night home in Menlo Park, Calif., after the Barcelona conference, sitting cross-​legged on the couch with her laptop, Dr. Gebru described the A.I. work force conundrum in a Facebook post.

“I’m not worried about machines taking over the world. I’m worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the A.I. community — especially with the current hype and demand for people in the field,” she wrote. “The people creating the technology are a big part of the system. If many are actively excluded from its creation, this technology will benefit a few while harming a great many.”

The A.I. community buzzed about the mini-manifesto. Soon after, Dr. Gebru helped create a new organization, Black in A.I. After finishing her Ph.D., she was hired by Google….(More)”.

Lessons from all democracies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Stasavage at Aeon: “Today, many people see democracy as under threat in a way that only a decade ago seemed unimaginable. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like democracy was the way of the future. But nowadays, the state of democracy looks very different; we hear about ‘backsliding’ and ‘decay’ and other descriptions of a sort of creeping authoritarianism. Some long-established democracies, such as the United States, are witnessing a violation of governmental norms once thought secure, and this has culminated in the recent insurrection at the US Capitol. If democracy is a torch that shines for a time before then burning out – think of Classical Athens and Renaissance city republics – it all feels as if we might be heading toward a new period of darkness. What can we do to reverse this apparent trend and support democracy?

First, we must dispense with the idea that democracy is like a torch that gets passed from one leading society to another. The core feature of democracy – that those who rule can do so only with the consent of the people – wasn’t invented in one place at one time: it evolved independently in a great many human societies.

Over several millennia and across multiple continents, early democracy was an institution in which rulers governed jointly with councils and assemblies of the people. From the Huron (who called themselves the Wendats) and the Iroquois (who called themselves the Haudenosaunee) in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, to the republics of Ancient India, to examples of city governance in ancient Mesopotamia, these councils and assemblies were common. Classical Greece provided particularly important instances of this democratic practice, and it’s true that the Greeks gave us a language for thinking about democracy, including the word demokratia itself. But they didn’t invent the practice. If we want to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our modern democracies, then early democratic societies from around the world provide important lessons.

The core feature of early democracy was that the people had power, even if multiparty elections (today, often thought to be a definitive feature of democracy) didn’t happen. The people, or at least some significant fraction of them, exercised this power in many different ways. In some cases, a ruler was chosen by a council or assembly, and was limited to being first among equals. In other instances, a ruler inherited their position, but faced constraints to seek consent from the people before taking actions both large and small. The alternative to early democracy was autocracy, a system where one person ruled on their own via bureaucratic subordinates whom they had recruited and remunerated. The word ‘autocracy’ is a bit of a misnomer here in that no one in this position ever truly ruled on their own, but it does signify a different way of organising political power.

Early democratic governance is clearly apparent in some ancient societies in Mesopotamia as well as in India. It flourished in a number of places in the Americas before European conquest, such as among the Huron and the Iroquois in the Northeastern Woodlands and in the ‘Republic of Tlaxcala’ that abutted the Triple Alliance, more commonly known as the Aztec Empire. It was also common in precolonial Africa. In all of these societies there were several defining features that tended to reinforce early democracy: small scale, a need for rulers to depend on the people for knowledge, and finally the ability of members of society to exit to other locales if they were unhappy with a ruler. These three features were not always present in the same measure, but collectively they helped to underpin early democracy….(More)”

Biden Creates Road Map for Equitable State and Local Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at GovTech: “On his first day in office, President Biden issued a flurry of administrative actions to reverse a number of President Trump’s policies and address the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. One of these included an executive order to advance racial equity and provide support for underserved communities. Notably, the order recognizes that achieving this goal will be difficult, if not impossible, without better data. This is a lesson that many state and local governments should take to heart by revisiting their collection policies to ensure data is equitable.

The executive order establishes that it is the policy of the Biden administration to “pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” To that end, the order dedicates a section to establishing an interagency working group on equitable data tasked with identifying inadequacies in federal data collection policies and programs, and recommending strategies for addressing any deficiencies.   

An inability to disaggregate data prevents policymakers from identifying disparate impacts of government programs on different populations in a variety of areas including health care, education, criminal justice, workforce and housing. Indeed, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has found that “data collection and reporting are essential to effective civil rights enforcement, and that a lack of effective civil rights data collection is problematic.”

This problem has repeatedly been on display throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, at the outset of the pandemic last year, nearly half of states did not report data on race or ethnicity on those who were tested, hospitalized or died of COVID-19. And while the government has tried to take a data-driven response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lack of data about different groups means that their needs are often hidden from policymakers….(More)”.

Building Digital Worlds: Where does GIS data come from?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julie Stoner at Library of Congress: “Whether you’ve used an online map to check traffic conditions, a fitness app to track your jogging route, or found photos tagged by location on social media, many of us rely on geospatial data more and more each day. So what are the most common ways geospatial data is created and stored, and how does it differ from how we have stored geographic information in the past?

A primary method for creating geospatial data is to digitize directly from scanned analog maps. After maps are georeferenced, GIS software allows a data creator to manually digitize boundaries, place points, or define areas using the georeferenced map image as a reference layer. The goal of digitization is to capture information carefully stored in the original map and translate it into a digital format. As an example, let’s explore and then digitize a section of this 1914 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Eatonville, Washington.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Eatonville, Pierce County, Washington. Sanborn Map Company, October 1914. Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps were created to detail the built environment of American towns and cities through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The creation of these information-dense maps allowed the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company to underwrite insurance agreements without needing to inspect each building in person. Sanborn maps have become incredibly valuable sources of historic information because of the rich geographic detail they store on each page.

When extracting information from analog maps, the digitizer must decide which features will be digitized and how information about those features will be stored. Behind the geometric features created through the digitization process, a table is utilized to store information about each feature on the map.  Using the table, we can store information gleaned from the analog map, such as the name of a road or the purpose of a building. We can also quickly calculate new data, such as the length of a road segment. The data in the table can then be put to work in the visual display of the new digital information that has been created. This often done through symbolization and map labels….(More)”.

Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Clare Birchall: “When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics?

To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public’s right to know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant’s thinking to propose a digital “right to opacity.” As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a “postsecret” society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals.

Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of “the good,” of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data….(More)”.

Far-right news sources on Facebook more engaging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”.

One year into pandemic, federal digital government is largely business as usual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Amanda Clarke: “It’s been a year since the Government of Canada, like every other organization, household and individual, was forced to move its work to the web in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. When this shift first took hold, many predicted that the digital demands of the crisis would provide the push the government needed to finally give its workforce access to modern digital tools (Slack, Google Drive, etc.), to design online services that actually work, and to effectively harness data for public good. By this logic, the pandemic would step in to close the deal on the elusive goal of “digital government transformation,” where digital strategies, chief information officers and high-level political commitments had failed.

Of course, this was a ridiculous prediction. This early enthusiasm was rightfully checked by a series of thoughtful analyses that reminded us that a COVID-induced digital government transformation would not arise simply because the public service faced immediate pressures to shift its workforce online and to expand its digital services. Existing research underscores that digital government transformation requires significant structural and cultural reforms within the public service and a slate of legislative and policy changes. Without this groundwork, any apparent advances ushered in by the pandemic will at best be ephemeral wins, and at worst, shiny distractions that obscure the reality of a federal public service that has been cycling through failed renewal exercises for decades.

With this in mind, now that we are at the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I asked a group of federal public servants leading digital government efforts if COVID-19 is triggering the kinds of administrative reforms needed to meaningfully update the Government of Canada for the realities of the digital age.

The answer, universally, without even a moment of hesitation: No….(More)”.

How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yoshi Sodeoka in The Atlantic: “…With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.

Conversation in this new American public sphere is governed not by established customs and traditions in service of democracy but by rules set by a few for-profit companies in service of their needs and revenues. Instead of the procedural regulations that guide a real-life town meeting, conversation is ruled by algorithms that are designed to capture attention, harvest data, and sell advertising. The voices of the angriest, most emotional, most divisive—and often the most duplicitous—participants are amplified. Reasonable, rational, and nuanced voices are much harder to hear; radicalization spreads quickly. Americans feel powerless because they are.

In this new wilderness, democracy is becoming impossible. If one half of the country can’t hear the other, then Americans can no longer have shared institutions, apolitical courts, a professional civil service, or a bipartisan foreign policy. We can’t compromise. We can’t make collective decisions—we can’t even agree on what we’re deciding. No wonder millions of Americans refuse to accept the results of the most recent presidential election, despite the verdicts of state electoral committees, elected Republican officials, courts, and Congress. We no longer are the America Tocqueville admired, but have become the enfeebled democracy he feared, a place where each person,…(More)”.