What is the role of public servants and policymakers in the battle against mis- and disinformation in our democratic systems?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elsa Pilichowski: “Recent health, economic and geopolitical crises have highlighted the urgency for governments to strengthen their capacity to respond to the spread of false and misleading information, while simultaneously building more resilient societies better prepared to handle crises. The challenges faced demand a whole-of-society-approach. 

First, governments should help citizens become more digitally literate so that they can identify false information before they spread it, intentionally or not. Increasing societal resilience also means supporting a diverse and independent media sector which can give voice to all viewpoints. Finally, new partnerships between civil society, the media, social media platforms and governments need to be built to help pre-bunk and de-bunk mis- and disinformation.

While not the ultimate actor in information provision, governments themselves will have to step up their capacities in the information space by strengthening inter-agency coordination mechanisms, developing innovative strategies and tools, and working with international partners to build knowledge of the origins and pathways of mis- and disinformation. Another specific avenue is to help ensure the role of public communication in reinforcing an information space conducive to democracy. Breaking down internal silos to facilitate collaboration; building partnerships with external stakeholders like fact-checkers; and focusing on efforts to reach all segments of society with accurate information will all be important.

Regulatory responses that help establish effective transparency frameworks around content moderation processes and decisions, build understanding of the role of algorithms in the spread of mis- and disinformation and promote a fairer and more responsible business environment are all key priorities. Such constructive and process-based regulation is all the more critical to safeguard against government interference in the free flow of information and impingement upon one of the foundational values of democracy—the right to free and open speech…(More)”

Science and Ethics of “Curing” Misinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Isabelle Freiling et al: “A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to “cure” public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences’ agency over what to do with it…(More)”.

Elon Musk Has Broken Disaster-Response Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Juliette Kayyem: “For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

That’s why Musk-era Twitter alarms so many people in my field. The platform has been downgraded in multiple ways: Service is glitchier; efforts to contain misleading information are patchier; the person at the top seems largely dismissive of outside input. But now that the platform has embedded itself so deeply in the disaster-response world, it’s difficult to replace. The rapidly deteriorating situation raises questions about platforms’ obligation to society—questions that prickly tech execs generally don’t want to consider…(More)”

The Future of Human Agency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Pew Research: “Advances in the internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and online applications have allowed humans to vastly expand their capabilities and increase their capacity to tackle complex problems. These advances have given people the ability to instantly access and share knowledge and amplified their personal and collective power to understand and shape their surroundings. Today there is general agreement that smart machines, bots and systems powered mostly by machine learning and artificial intelligence will quickly increase in speed and sophistication between now and 2035.

As individuals more deeply embrace these technologies to augment, improve and streamline their lives, they are continuously invited to outsource more decision-making and personal autonomy to digital tools.

Some analysts have concerns about how business, government and social systems are becoming more automated. They fear humans are losing the ability to exercise judgment and make decisions independent of these systems.

Others optimistically assert that throughout history humans have generally benefited from technological advances. They say that when problems arise, new regulations, norms and literacies help ameliorate the technology’s shortcomings. And they believe these harnessing forces will take hold, even as automated digital systems become more deeply woven into daily life.

Thus the question: What is the future of human agency? Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts to share their insights on this; 540 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, academics and activists responded. Specifically, they were asked:

By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?

The results of this nonscientific canvassing:

  • 56% of these experts agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will not be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
  • 44% said they agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making.

It should be noted that in explaining their answers, many of these experts said the future of these technologies will have both positive and negative consequences for human agency. They also noted that through the ages, people have either allowed other entities to make decisions for them or have been forced to do so by tribal and national authorities, religious leaders, government bureaucrats, experts and even technology tools themselves…(More)”.

Seize the Future by Harnessing the Power of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kriss Deiglmeier: “Data is a form of power. And the sad reality is that power is being held increasingly by the commercial sector and not by organizations seeking to create a more just, sustainable, and prosperous world. A year into my tenure as the chief global impact officer at Splunk, I became consumed with the new era driven by data. Specifically, I was concerned with the emerging data divide, which I defined as “the disparity between the expanding use of data to create commercial value, and the comparatively weak use of data to solve social and environmental challenges.”2

We need to face the fact that the underlying foundation of society is shifting while the social sector is not. This foundational change is laid out in the new book coauthored by Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Huttenlocker, The Age of AI. They make the case that we are moving into a coexistence between humanity and machines. From a historical context, the evolution of humans started in the age of faith that evolved into the age of reason. The future upon us now is the age of people and machines. The world around us will increasingly be full of intelligent systems that will be humanlike but not human. Society, especially the social sector, must get ahead of the implications of that and plan for both the good and bad impact it will have on society. After all, who better to look out for the “people” part of the “people and machines” than the human-centric social sector?

To effectively address the emerging data future, the social impact sector must build an entire impact data ecosystem for this moment in time—and the next moment in time. The way to do that is by investing in those areas where we currently lag the commercial sector. Consider the following gaps:

  • Nonprofits are ill-equipped with the financial and technical resources they need to make full use of data, often due to underfunding.
  • The sector’s technical and data talent is a desert compared to the commercial sector.
  • While the sector is rich with output and service-delivery data, that data is locked away or is unusable in its current form.
  • The sector lacks living data platforms (collaboratives and data refineries) that can make use of sector-wide data in a way that helps improve service delivery, maximize impact, and create radical innovation.

The harsh realities of the sector’s disparate data skills, infrastructure, and competencies show the dire current state. For the impact sector to transition to a place of power, it must jump without hesitation into the arena of the Data Age—and invest time, talent, and money in filling in these gaps…(More)”.

Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sander van der Linden: “From fake news to conspiracy theories, from pandemics to politics, misinformation may be the defining problem of our era. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds – altering our beliefs and replicating at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, our primary strategies of fact-checking and debunking are an insufficient cure.

In Foolproof Sander van der Linden describes how to inoculate yourself and others against the spread of misinformation, discern fact from fiction and push back against methods of mass persuasion.

Everyone is susceptible to fake news. There are polarising narratives in society, conspiracy theories are rife, fake experts dole out misleading advice and accuracy is often lost in favour of sensationalist headlines. So how and why does misinformation spread if we’re all aware of its existence? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?…(More)”.

How four countries practise direct democracy today

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bruno Kaufmann: “We are the people,” protesters on the streets of East Germany shouted back in 1989 as a challenge to the then-communist one-party state. One year later, they had succeeded in overcoming half a century of dictatorship and establishing a united democratic country with West Germany.

Since then, hundreds of millions of people around the world have demanded the fulfilment of a fundamental human right, set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 21.1): “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.” 

“The idea of having ordinary people capable of governing themselves is much older than the UN Human Rights Declaration”, says John Matusaka, a finance professor at the University of Southern California and the author of several books on the role of modern direct democracy in representative government systems. “Popular self-government is an experiment that continues to shape the modern world.” 

Although this experiment has sometimes ended in a populist or even autocratic backlash, a growing number of political communities – cities, regions, nation-states and even continents – have been able to establish and implement a large variety of people-led initiatives and referendums in recent years. Some countries, like Switzerland and the United States, have been practising citizen-lawmaking for more than a century. Others, like Taiwan, are relative newcomers to the field and showcase the breadth of participatory democracy tools being applied today…

The island of Taiwan (36,000 km2, population 23 million) has moved from a democracy on paper to a functioning democracy run by the Taiwanese people, through a process that has accelerated since the 1980s. Today it is a vibrant multiethnic society with 18 official languages.

In 2003 Taiwan introduced its first law on initiatives and referendums. In the last 20 years, the text has undergone improvements and amendments that include a relatively low threshold for forcing a popular vote on proposed legislation. These changes mean that today the people of Taiwan are able to have a genuine say in politics – both at the local and national levels. 

In November 2018 alone, more than ten citizen-led proposals, on issues ranging from environmental protection and marriage equality to the international status of the island, were put to a general vote. In 2021 the Taiwanese decided to amend their direct democracy law in a way that voting on candidates in elections and on issues by referendum were separated. 

One weakness in the process, however, is the legal requirement for a minimum 25% approval rate among the whole electorate for a proposition to pass. This  allows opponents of a proposal to influence the outcome of the vote by simply not participating. In 2021 four referendums were invalidated as they did not reach the approval of 25% among all voters…(More)”.

Expanding anticipatory governance to legislatures: The emergence and global diffusion of legislature-based future institutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Vesa Koskimaa et al: “Global challenges from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised legitimate questions about the ability of democratic decision-makers to prepare for such crises. Gradually, countries throughout the world have established state-level foresight mechanisms. Most operate under the executive branch, but increasingly such institutions have started to emerge also in legislatures, expanding anticipatory governance towards democratic publics. Drawing on a global survey, official documents and expert interviews, this article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the emergence and diffusion of legislature-based future institutions. We show that, despite the early emergence of a pacesetting institution, such committees have spread slowly and only very recently, and they still exist in only a few countries. For diffusion, the findings highlight the importance of the pacesetter, semi-formal networks of like-minded individuals and personalized agency. Most especially, the role of Members of Parliament (MPs) seems crucial, suggesting that expanding anticipatory governance to legislatures is largely in the hand of legislators…(More)”.

Upshift: Turning Pressure into Performance and Crisis into Creativity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ben Ramalingam: “… distils this expertise into an insightful, powerful, and engaging book that will show you how to reframe your set responses to stress and pressure and instead use them to harness the potential they hold not just for improving your work, your relationships, and your mindset, but for transforming them.

Upshift takes readers on an epic journey from early humans’ survival of the Ice Age to present times in our inescapable, pernicious and ever-shifting digital landscape. You will hear remarkable stories from a vast range of upshifters—all of whom carved new routes around perceived barriers using their powers to upshift. Underlying stories of how city commuters navigate train cancellations to how astronauts deal with life-threatening incidents, is one key message: We all have the power to innovate, whether or not we identify ourselves as creative or extraordinary.

Maybe you’re the challenger, who thrives by constructively disrupting the status quo like Greta Thunberg. Or perhaps you find yourself constantly tweaking, prodding, breaking, rebuilding, and improving like crafters such as the team that revolutionized space travel called the NASA Pirates. Do you love introducing people whose combined efforts will lead to greater achievements? You might be a connector, like master networker Ariana Huffington.

In a runaway world that is an engine for perpetual crisis, Upshift is not only an essential toolkit for survival, it is a roadmap for positive, and potentially life-changing transformation and influence. You don’t have to shut down – you can upshift…(More)”

850 million people globally don’t have ID—why this matters and what we can do about it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Julia Clark, Anna Diofasi, and Claire Casher: “Having proof of legal identity or other officially recognized identification (ID) matters for equitable, sustainable development. It is a basic right and often provides the key to access services and opportunities, whether that is getting a job, opening a bank account, or receiving social assistance payments. The growth of digital services has further increased the need for secure and convenient ways to verify a person’s identity online and remotely.

Yet according to new estimates, some 850 million people globally do not have an official ID (let alone a digital one). 

The World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) Initiative works to tackle the lack of access to identification challenge in multiple ways, starting with counting the uncounted. 

ID4D has produced estimates of global ID coverage since 2016 as part of its Global Dataset. Extensively updated in 2021-2022, the estimate now includes brand new data sources that paint the clearest picture yet of global ID ownership. 

ID4D partnered with the Global Findex survey to obtain representative survey data on adult ID ownership and usage. With this new individual-level data, as well as a significantly expanded set of administrative data provided by ID authorities, estimates released at the end of 2022 indicate that just under 850 million people around the world do not have an official ID (the full methodology is described in the ID4D Global Coverage Estimate report)…(More)”.