The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Philip Howard and Samantha Bradshaw: “…The report explores the tools, capacities, strategies and resources employed by global ‘cyber troops’, typically government agencies and political parties, to influence public opinion in 70 countries.

Key findings include:

  • Organized social media manipulation has more than doubled since 2017, with 70 countries using computational propaganda to manipulate public opinion.
  • In 45 democracies, politicians and political parties have used computational propaganda tools by amassing fake followers or spreading manipulated media to garner voter support.
  • In 26 authoritarian states, government entities have used computational propaganda as a tool of information control to suppress public opinion and press freedom, discredit criticism and oppositional voices, and drown out political dissent.
  • Foreign influence operations, primarily over Facebook and Twitter, have been attributed to cyber troop activities in seven countries: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
  • China has now emerged as a major player in the global disinformation order, using social media platforms to target international audiences with disinformation.
  • 25 countries are working with private companies or strategic communications firms offering a computational propaganda as a service.
  • Facebook remains the platform of choice for social media manipulation, with evidence of formally organised campaigns taking place in 56 countries….

The report explores the tools and techniques of computational propaganda, including the use of fake accounts – bots, humans, cyborgs and hacked accounts – to spread disinformation. The report finds:

  • 87% of countries used human accounts
  • 80% of countries used bot accounts
  • 11% of countries used cyborg accounts
  • 7% of countries used hacked or stolen accounts…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Reliable Local Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Lawrence Sumner , Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman: “The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy-making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated. We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowdsourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that nonexperts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data….(More)”.

Using a design approach to create collaborative governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Bryson, Barbara Crosby and Danbi Seo: “In complex, shared-power settings, policymakers, administrators and other kinds of decision makers increasingly must engage in collaborative inter-organisational efforts to effectively address challenging public issues. These collaborations must be governed effectively if they are to achieve their public purposes. A design approach to the governance of collaborations can help, especially if it explicitly focuses on the design and use of formal and informal settings for dialogue and deliberation (forums), decision making (arenas) and resolution of residual disputes (courts). The success of a design approach will depend on many things, but especially on leaders and leadership and careful attention to the design and use of forums, arenas and courts and the effective use of power. The argument is illustrated by examining the emergence and governance of a collaboration designed to cope with the fragmented policy field of minority business support….(More)”.

Radical visions of future government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nesta Report: “Is government fit for purpose? Evaporating public trust in democracy and political institutions, a broken social contract, lack of money and stale ideas mean it feels increasingly difficult to answer that question in the affirmative. It is this fear – that government and our public services are no longer up to the job – that inspired us to launch an open call, seeking radical visions of future government.

We wanted a serious rethink about what government is, what it should do, and how it should work. Radical Visions of Future Government is the culmination of that work, presenting 17 visions of the future of government. The collection features essays, provocations, thought experiments, fiction, speculative design and original art, with each one asking the reader to consider the implications of an idea about something fundamentally different in the future.

While written from a British context, combinations of these issues have a resonance in governments around the world. We chose the year 2030 as the setting for these visions: near enough to be imaginable, far enough away for radical change to actually be contemplated.

The collection is not intended to set out exclusively desirable or optimistic futures, but instead to stimulate thinking about a spectrum of possibilities. As one essay in the collection argues, it is better to think about the future than not; that in itself is democratising. It would be very surprising if a reader agreed with all of them. Nor are any of them a reflection of a Nesta view. But we think they are useful energisers, and we hope that any reader will come away with a sharpened sense of what might be possible and where we should set our sights for 2030.

The contributions come from a range of voices – researchers, artists, designers, academics, writers and public servants – each with a different perspective on what needs to change about government….(More)”.

The Future of Political Philosophy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Katrina Forrester in Boston Review: “Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to many that liberalism is, in some sense, failing. The turmoil has given pause to economists, some of whom responded by renewing their study of inequality, and to political scientists, who have since turned to problems of democracy, authoritarianism, and populism in droves. But Anglo-American liberal political philosophers have had less to say than they might have.

The silence is due in part to the nature of political philosophy today—the questions it considers worth asking and those it sidelines. Since Plato, philosophers have always asked about the nature of justice. But for the last five decades, political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been preoccupied with a particular answer to that question developed by the American philosopher John Rawls.

Rawls’s work in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a paradigm shift in political philosophy. In his wake, philosophers began exploring what justice and equality meant in the context of modern capitalist welfare states, using those concepts to describe, in impressive and painstaking detail, the ideal structure of a just society—one that turned out to closely resemble a version of postwar social democracy. Working within this framework, they have since elaborated a body of abstract moral principles that provide the philosophical backbone of modern liberalism. These ideas are designed to help us see what justice and equality demand—of our society, of our institutions, and of ourselves.

This is a story of triumph: Rawls’s philosophical project was a major success. It is not that political philosophers after Rawls didn’t disagree; fine-grained and heated arguments are what philosophers do best. But over the last few decades they built a robust consensus about the fundamental rules of the game, conceiving of themselves as engaged in a common intellectual project with a shared conceptual framework. The governing concepts and aims of political philosophy have, for generations, been more or less taken for granted.

But if modern political philosophy is bound up with modern liberalism, and liberalism is failing, it may well be time to ask whether these apparently timeless ideas outlived their usefulness….(More)”.

Administrative Reform and the Quest for Openness: A Popperian Review of Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alex Ingrams: “Scholars and policymakers claim open government offers a panoply of good governance benefits, but it also risks political abuse as window dressing or a smokescreen. To address this risk, this article builds on the meaning of openness through an examination of closed and open society in Karl Popper’s theory. Four historic trends in open government reform are analyzed. The findings suggest a need for new attention to Popperian notions of the social technologist’s piecemeal change and mechanical engineering aimed at serious policy problems. Without appreciation of these open society linkages, open governments will continue to paradoxically co-exist alongside closed societies…(More)”.

When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Rozas , Antonio Tenorio-Fornés , Silvia Díaz-Molina , and Samer Hassan: “Blockchain technologies have generated excitement, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterised by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organisation; and critical accounts of such discourses which, whilst contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralised institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. Therefore the question arises, can we build perspectives of blockchain-based governance that go beyond markets and states?

In this article we draw on the Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualisation of affordances that this technology may provide to communities. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focussed on blockchain-based commons governance. By carrying out this analysis, we aim to expand the debate from one dominated by a culture of competition to one that promotes a culture of cooperation…(More)”.

Accountability in the Age of the Artificial

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

2019 Solomon Lecture by Fiona McLeod: “Our aspiration for open and accountable government faces innumerable challenges, not least the natural reluctance of all governments to expose themselves to criticism and accept responsibility for failure.

Time and again, corporate and political goals take priority over just outcomes, and the human rights of individuals and communities are undervalued and ignored.

Numerous examples of bad behaviour shock us for a while, some even receiving the focused attention of high quality investigative journalism and Royal Commissions, but we are left unsatisfied, cynical and disengaged, more jaded than before, accepting the inevitability of existential threats, the comfort of algorithmic news feeds and vague promises to ‘drain the swamp’.

In this context, are big data and artificial intelligence the enemies of the people, the ultimate tools of the oligarch, or the vital tools needed to eliminate bias, improve scrutiny and just outcomes for the visionary?  Is there a future in which humanity evolves alongside an enhanced hive-mind in time to avert global catastrophe and create a new vision for humanity?…(More)”

Citizens need to know numbers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Spiegelhalter at Aeon: “…Many criticised the Leave campaign for its claim that Britain sends the EU £350 million a week. When Boris Johnson repeated it in 2017 – by which time he was Foreign Secretary – the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official statistical watchdog) rebuked him, noting it was a ‘clear misuse of official statistics’. A private criminal prosecution was even made against Johnson for ‘misconduct in a public office’, but it was halted by the High Court.

The message on the bus had a strong emotional resonance with millions of people, even though it was essentially misinformation. The episode demonstrates both the power and weakness of statistics: they can be used to amplify an entire worldview, and yet they often do not stand up to scrutiny. This is why statistical literacy is so important – in an age in which data plays an ever-more prominent role in society, the ability to spot ways in which numbers can be misused, and to be able to deconstruct claims based on statistics, should be a standard civic skill.

Statistics are not cold hard facts – as Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise (2012): ‘The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.’ Not only has someone used extensive judgment in choosing what to measure, how to define crucial ideas, and to analyse them, but the manner in which they are communicated can utterly change their emotional impact. Let’s assume that £350 million is the actual weekly contribution to the EU. I often ask audiences to suggest what they would put on the side of the bus if they were on the Remain side. A standard option for making an apparently big number look small is to consider it as a proportion of an even bigger number: for example, the UK’s GDP is currently around £2.3 trillion, and so this contribution would comprise less than 1 per cent of GDP, around six months’ typical growth. An alternative device is to break down expenditure into smaller, more easily grasped units: for example, as there are 66 million people in the UK, £350 million a week is equivalent to around 75p a day, less than $1, say about the cost of a small packet of crisps (potato chips). If the bus had said: We each send the EU the price of a packet of crisps each day, the campaign might not have been so successful.

Numbers are often used to persuade rather than inform, statistical literacy needs to be improved, and so surely we need more statistics courses in schools and universities? Well, yes, but this should not mean more of the same. After years of researching and teaching statistical methods, I am not alone in concluding that the way in which we teach statistics can be counterproductive, with an overemphasis on mathematical foundations through probability theory, long lists of tests and formulae to apply, and toy problems involving, say, calculating the standard deviation of the weights of cod. The American Statistical Association’s Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (2016) strongly recommended changing the pedagogy of statistics into one based on problemsolving, real-world examples, and with an emphasis on communication….(More)”.

Experimental Innovation Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Albert Bravo-Biosca: “Experimental approaches are increasingly being adopted across many policy fields, but innovation policy has been lagging. This paper reviews the case for policy experimentation in this field, describes the different types of experiments that can be undertaken, discusses some of the unique challenges to the use of experimental approaches in innovation policy, and summarizes some of the emerging lessons, with a focus on randomized trials. The paper concludes describing how at the Innovation Growth Lab we have been working with governments across the OECD to help them overcome the barriers to policy experimentation in order to make their policies more impactful….(More)”.