Free Speech in the Filter Age
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act – according to which social-media platforms like Facebook and YouTube could be fined €50 million ($63 million) for every “obviously illegal” post within 24 hours of receiving a notification – has been controversial from the start. After it entered fully into effect in January, there was a tremendous outcry, with critics from all over the political map arguing that it was an enticement to censorship. Government was relinquishing its powers to private interests, they protested.
So, is this the beginning of the end of free speech in Germany?
Of course not. To be sure, Germany’s Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (or NetzDG) is the strictest regulation of its kind in a Europe that is growing increasingly annoyed with America’s powerful social-media companies. And critics do have some valid points about the law’s weaknesses. But the possibilities for free expression will remain abundant, even if some posts are deleted mistakenly.
The truth is that the law sends an important message: democracies won’t stay silent while their citizens are exposed to hateful and violent speech and images – content that, as we know, can spur real-life hate and violence. Refusing to protect the public, especially the most vulnerable, from dangerous content in the name of “free speech” actually serves the interests of those who are already privileged, beginning with the powerful companies that drive the dissemination of information.
Speech has always been filtered. In democratic societies, everyone has the right to express themselves within the boundaries of the law, but no one has ever been guaranteed an audience. To have an impact, citizens have always needed to appeal to – or bypass – the “gatekeepers” who decide which causes and ideas are relevant and worth amplifying, whether through the media, political institutions, or protest.
The same is true today, except that the gatekeepers are the algorithms that automatically filter and rank all contributions. Of course, algorithms can be programmed any way companies like, meaning that they may place a premium on qualities shared by professional journalists: credibility, intelligence, and coherence.
But today’s social-media platforms are far more likely to prioritize potential for advertising revenue above all else. So the noisiest are often rewarded with a megaphone, while less polarizing, less privileged voices are drowned out, even if they are providing the smart and nuanced perspectives that can truly enrich public discussions….(More)”.
Regulatory sandbox lessons learned report
Financial Conduct Authority (UK): “The sandbox allows firms to test innovative products, services or business models in a live market environment, while ensuring that appropriate protections are in place. It was established to support the FCA’s objective of promoting effective competition in the interests of consumers and opened for applications in June 2016.
The sandbox has supported 50 firms from 146 applications received across the first two cohorts. This report sets out the sandbox’s overall impact on the market including the adoption of new technologies, increasing access and improving experiences for vulnerable consumers as well as lessons learnt from individual tests that have been, or are being, conducted as part of the sandbox.
Early indications suggest the sandbox is providing the benefits it set out to achieve with evidence of the sandbox enabling new products to be tested, reducing time and cost of getting innovative ideas to market, improving access to finance for innovators, and ensuring appropriate safeguards are built into new products and services.
We will be using these learnings to inform any future sandbox developments as well as our ongoing policymaking and supervision work….(More)”.
An AI That Reads Privacy Policies So That You Don’t Have To
Andy Greenberg at Wired: “…Today, researchers at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan announced the release of Polisis—short for “privacy policy analysis”—a new website and browser extension that uses their machine-learning-trained app to automatically read and make sense of any online service’s privacy policy, so you don’t have to.
In about 30 seconds, Polisis can read a privacy policy it’s never seen before and extract a readable summary, displayed in a graphic flow chart, of what kind of data a service collects, where that data could be sent, and whether a user can opt out of that collection or sharing. Polisis’ creators have also built a chat interface they call Pribot that’s designed to answer questions about any privacy policy, intended as a sort of privacy-focused paralegal advisor. Together, the researchers hope those tools can unlock the secrets of how tech firms use your data that have long been hidden in plain sight….
Polisis isn’t actually the first attempt to use machine learning to pull human-readable information out of privacy policies. Both Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia have made their own attempts at similar projects in recent years, points out NYU Law Professor Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, who has focused her own research on user interactions with terms of service contracts online. (One of her own studies showed that only .07 percent of users actually click on a terms of service link before clicking “agree.”) The Usable Privacy Policy Project, a collaboration that includes both Columbia and CMU, released its own automated tool to annotate privacy policies just last month. But Marotta-Wurgler notes that Polisis’ visual and chat-bot interfaces haven’t been tried before, and says the latest project is also more detailed in how it defines different kinds of data. “The granularity is really nice,” Marotta-Wurgler says. “It’s a way of communicating this information that’s more interactive.”…(More)”.
Is full transparency good for democracy?
Austin Sarat at The Conversation: “Public knowledge about what government officials do is essential in a representative democracy. Without such knowledge, citizens cannot make informed choices about who they want to represent them or hold public officials accountable.
Political theorists have traced arguments about publicity and democracy back to ancient Greece and Rome. Those arguments subsequently flowered in the middle of the 19th century.
For example, writing about British parliamentary democracy, the famous philosopher Jeremy Bentham urged that legislative deliberation be carried out in public. Public deliberation, in his view, would be an important factor in “constraining the members of the assembly to perform their duty” and in securing “the confidence of the people.”
Moreover, Bentham noted that “suspicion always attaches to mystery.”
Even so, Bentham did not think the public had an unqualified “right to know.” As he put it, “It is not proper to make the law of publicity absolute.” Bentham acknowledged that publicity “ought to be suspended” when informing the public would “favor the projects of an enemy.”
Well into the 20th century, the U.S. and other democracies existed with far less public transparency than Bentham advocated.
Push for transparency
The authors of a 2016 U.S. Congressional report on access to government information observed that, “Throughout the first 150 years of the federal government, access to government information does not appear to have been a major issue for the federal branches or the public.” In short, the public generally did not demand more information than the government provided….
For at least the last 50 years, American legal and political institutions have tried to find a balance between publicity and secrecy. The courts have identified limits to claims of executive privilege like those made by President Nixon during Watergate. Watergate also led Congress in 1978 to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That act created a special court, whose procedures were highlighted in the Nunes memo. The FISA court authorizes collection of intelligence information between foreign powers and “agents of foreign powers.”
Finding the proper balance between making information public in order to foster accountability and the government’s concern for national security is not easy. Just look to the heated debates that accompanied passage of the Patriot Act and what WikiLeaks did in 2010 when it published more than 300,000 classified U.S. Army field reports.
Americans can make little progress in resolving such debates until they can get beyond the cynical, partisan use of slogans like “the public’s right to know” and “full transparency” by President Trump’s loyalists. Now more than ever, Americans must understand how and when transparency contributes to the strength and vitality of our democratic institutions and how and when the invocation of the public’s right to know is being used to erode them….(More)”.
Crowdfunding site aims to get homeless back into work
Springwise: “Beam is a new crowdfunding website that has been launched to try and help homeless people based in London get back into work. The idea behind the website is that people donate money online to homeless individuals, which will then be used to give them the qualifications and training that they will need to become fully employed and therefore able to also get themselves secure in their own accommodation.
A new member of Beam is allocated a Member Manager, who works with them to find the best employment avenue for them to take based on their likes and experience. The Member Manager helps them prepare their fundraising campaign, and even helps members with childcare costs while they’re training.
Beam was founded by Alex Stephany, who is also board advisor of car parking app, JustPark, with a pilot scheme in September 2017 and has the full support of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, and the innovation promotors, Nesta.
There are many ways that technology is helping the homeless. Recently, blockchain tech has been used to connect the homeless in New York with valuable services. And new keycard-accessed vending machines are to be installed in safe spaces to provide the homeless with 24-hour access to essential items….(More)”.
Studying Migrant Assimilation Through Facebook Interests
Antoine Dubois, Emilio Zagheni, Kiran Garimella, and Ingmar Weber at arXiv: “Migrants’ assimilation is a major challenge for European societies, in part because of the sudden surge of refugees in recent years and in part because of long-term demographic trends. In this paper, we use Facebook’s data for advertisers to study the levels of assimilation of Arabic-speaking migrants in Germany, as seen through the interests they express online. Our results indicate a gradient of assimilation along demographic lines, language spoken and country of origin. Given the difficulty to collect timely migration data, in particular for traits related to cultural assimilation, the methods that we develop and the results that we provide open new lines of research that computational social scientists are well-positioned to address….(More)”.
U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging
Liz Sly at Washington Post: “An interactive map posted on the Internet that shows the whereabouts of people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit also reveals highly sensitive information about the locations and activities of soldiers at U.S. military bases, in what appears to be a major security oversight.
The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the locations and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity.
Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit and Jawbone, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.
Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as blazes of light because there is so much activity.
In war zones and deserts in countries such as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.
The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State said on Monday it is revising its guidelines on the use of all wireless and technological devices on military facilities as a result of the revelations….(More)”.
Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?
Essay by Cass R. Sunstein, as part of a series by Facebook on social media and democracy: “On balance, the question of whether social media platforms are good for democracy is easy. On balance, they are not merely good; they are terrific. For people to govern themselves, they need to have information. They also need to be able to convey it to others. Social media platforms make that tons easier.
There is a subtler point as well. When democracies are functioning properly, people’s sufferings and challenges are not entirely private matters. Social media platforms help us alert one another to a million and one different problems. In the process, the existence of social media can prod citizens to seek solutions.
Consider the remarkable finding, by the economist Amartya Sen, that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections. A central reason is that famines are a product not only of a scarcity of food, but also a nation’s failure to provide solutions. When the press is free, and when leaders are elected, leaders have a strong incentive to help.
Mental illness, chronic pain, loss of employment, vulnerability to crime, drugs in the family – information about all these spread via social media, and they can be reduced with sensible policies. When people can talk to each other, and disclose what they know to public officials, the whole world might change in a hurry.
But celebrations can be awfully boring, so let’s hold the applause. Are automobiles good for transportation? Absolutely, but in the United States alone, over 35,000 people died in crashes in 2016.
Social media platforms are terrific for democracy in many ways, but pretty bad in others. And they remain a work-in-progress, not only because of new entrants, but also because the not-so-new ones (including Facebook) continue to evolve. What John Dewey said about my beloved country is true for social media as well: “The United States are not yet made; they are not a finished fact to be categorically assessed.”
For social media and democracy, the equivalents of car crashes include false reports (“fake news”) and the proliferation of information cocoons — and as a result, an increase in fragmentation, polarization and extremism. If you live in an information cocoon, you will believe many things that are false, and you will fail to learn countless things that are true. That’s awful for democracy. And as we have seen, those with specific interests — including politicians and nations, such as Russia, seeking to disrupt democratic processes — can use social media to promote those interests.
This problem is linked to the phenomenon of group polarization — which takes hold when like-minded people talk to one another and end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. In fact that’s a common outcome. At best, it’s a problem. At worst, it’s dangerous….(More)”.
Is There Something Wrong with Democracy?
After 200 years of expansion, democracy’s growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms.
That has left us and scholars who study democracy obsessed with a set of questions. Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble? Are the oldest and sturdiest democracies, like those of Europe and the United States, really as safe as they seem? And why would people voluntarily dismantle their own democracy from within?
No one knows the answers for sure. But we’re starting to figure them out and it’s not all good news. Here, in the first of what will become a regular series of videos exploring big questions and ideas about the world, we explain what we know about democracy’s troubles, what’s causing them and where it leads….(See VIDEO)”.
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)”.