Report by Pew Research: “The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections left many Americans wondering whether polling was broken and what, if anything, pollsters might do about it. A new Pew Research Center study finds that most national pollsters have changed their approach since 2016, and in some cases dramatically. Most (61%) of the pollsters who conducted and publicly released national surveys in both 2016 and 2022 used methods in 2022 that differed from what they used in 2016. The study also finds the use of multiple methods increasing. Last year 17% of national pollsters used at least three different methods to sample or interview people (sometimes in the same survey), up from 2% in 2016….(More)”.
Meta Kills a Crucial Transparency Tool At the Worst Possible Time
Interview by Vittoria Elliott: “Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would be shutting down CrowdTangle, the social media monitoring and transparency tool that has allowed journalists and researchers to track the spread of mis- and disinformation. It will cease to function on August 14, 2024—just months before the US presidential election.
Meta’s move is just the latest example of a tech company rolling back transparency and security measures as the world enters the biggest global election year in history. The company says it is replacing CrowdTangle with a new Content Library API, which will require researchers and nonprofits to apply for access to the company’s data. But the Mozilla Foundation and 140 other civil society organizations protested last week that the new offering lacks much of CrowdTangle’s functionality, asking the company to keep the original tool operating until January 2025.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone countered in posts on X that the groups’ claims “are just wrong,” saying the new Content Library will contain “more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle” and be made available to nonprofits, academics, and election integrity experts. When asked why commercial newsrooms, like WIRED, are to be excluded from the Content Library, Meta spokesperson Eric Porterfield said, that it was “built for research purposes.” While journalists might not have direct access he suggested they could use commercial social network analysis tools, or “partner with an academic institution to help answer a research question related to our platforms.”
Brandon Silverman, cofounder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, who continued to work on the tool after Facebook acquired it in 2016, says it’s time to force platforms to open up their data to outsiders. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity…(More)”.
Citizen Jury on New Genomic Techniques
Paper by Kai P. Purnhagen and Alexandra Molitorisova: “Between 26-28 January 2024, a citizen jury was convened at the Schloss Thurnau in Upper Franconia, Germany to deliberate about new genomic techniques (NGTs) used in agriculture and food/feed production, ahead of the vote of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union on the European Commission’s proposal for a regulation on plants obtained by certain NGTs and their food and feed. This report serves as a policy brief with all observations, assessments, and recommendations agreed by the jury with a minimum of 75 percent of the jurors’ votes. This report aims to provide policymakers, stakeholders, and the public with perspectives and considerations surrounding the use of NGTs in agriculture and food/feed production, as articulated by the members of the jury. There are 18 final recommendations produced by the jury. Through thoughtful analysis and dialogue, the jury sought to contribute to informed decision-making processes…(More)”.
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Book by Olivier Roy: “Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values?
Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz.
Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right.
Increased left- and right-wing references to ‘identity’ fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level…(More)”.
Narratives Online. Shared Stories in Social Media
Book by Ruth Page: “Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre – the shared story – and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework – ‘Mediated Narrative Analysis’ – to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication…(More)”.
What Does Information Integrity Mean for Democracies?
Article by Kamya Yadav and Samantha Lai: “Democracies around the world are encountering unique challenges with the rise of new technologies. Experts continue to debate how social media has impacted democratic discourse, pointing to how algorithmic recommendations, influence operations, and cultural changes in norms of communication alter the way people consume information. Meanwhile, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) surface new concerns over how the technology might affect voters’ decision-making process. Already, we have seen its increased use in relation to political campaigning.
In the run-up to Pakistan’s 2024 presidential elections, former Prime Minister Imran Khan used an artificially generated speech to campaign while imprisoned. Meanwhile, in the United States, a private company used an AI-generated imitation of President Biden’s voice to discourage people from voting. In response, the Federal Communications Commission outlawed the use of AI-generated robocalls.
Evolving technologies present new threats. Disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda are all different faces of the same problem: Our information environment—the ecosystem in which we disseminate, create, receive, and process information—is not secure and we lack coherent goals to direct policy actions. Formulating short-term, reactive policy to counter or mitigate the effects of disinformation or propaganda can only bring us so far. Beyond defending democracies from unending threats, we should also be looking at what it will take to strengthen them. This begs the question: How do we work toward building secure and resilient information ecosystems? How can policymakers and democratic governments identify policy areas that require further improvement and shape their actions accordingly?…(More)”.
Digital public infrastructure and public value: What is ‘public’ about DPI?
Paper by David Eaves, Mariana Mazzucato and Beatriz Vasconcellos: “Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) are becoming increasingly relevant in the policy and academic domains, with DPI not just being regulated, but funded and created by governments, international organisations, philanthropies and the private sector. However, these transformations are not neutral; they have a direction. This paper addresses how to ensure that DPI is not only regulated but created and governed for the common good by maximising public value creation. Our analysis makes explicit which normative values may be associated with DPI development. We also argue that normative values are necessary but not sufficient for maximising public value creation with DPI, and that a more proactive role of the state and governance are key. In this work, policymakers and researchers will find valuable frameworks for understanding where the value-creation elements of DPI come from and how to design a DPI governance that maximises public value…(More)”.
Influence of public innovation laboratories on the development of public sector ambidexterity
Article by Christophe Favoreu et al: “Ambidexterity has become a major issue for public organizations as they manage increasingly strong contradictory pressures to optimize existing processes while innovating. Moreover, although public innovation laboratories are emerging, their influence on the development of ambidexterity remains largely unexplored. Our research aims to understand how innovation laboratories contribute to the formation of individual ambidexterity within the public sector. Drawing from three case studies, this research underscores the influence of these labs on public ambidexterity through the development of innovations by non-specialized actors and the deployment and reuse of innovative managerial practices and techniques outside the i-labs…(More)”.
Meta to shut off data access to journalists
Article by Sara Fischer: “Meta plans to officially shutter CrowdTangle, the analytics tool widely used by journalists and researchers to see what’s going viral on Facebook and Instagram, the company’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg told Axios in an interview.
Why it matters: The company plans to instead offer select researchers access to a set of new data tools, but news publishers, journalists or anyone with commercial interests will not be granted access to that data.
The big picture: The effort comes amid a broader pivot from Meta away from news and politics and more toward user-generated viral videos.
- Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016 at a time when publishers were heavily reliant on the tech giant for traffic.
- In recent years, it’s stopped investing in the tool, making it less reliable.
The new research tools include Meta’s Content Library, which it launched last year, and an API, or backend interface used by developers.
- Both tools offer researchers access to huge swaths of data from publicly accessible content across Facebook and Instagram.
- The tools are available in 180 languages and offer global data.
- Researchers must apply for access to those tools through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, which will vet their requests…(More)”
Power and Governance in the Age of AI
Reflections by several experts: “The best way to think about ChatGPT is as the functional equivalent of expensive private education and tutoring. Yes, there is a free version, but there is also a paid subscription that gets you access to the latest breakthroughs and a more powerful version of the model. More money gets you more power and privileged access. As a result, in my courses at Middlebury College this spring, I was obliged to include the following statement in my syllabus:
“Policy on the use of ChatGPT: You may all use the free version however you like and are encouraged to do so. For purposes of equity, use of the subscription version is forbidden and will be considered a violation of the Honor Code. Your professor has both versions and knows the difference. To ensure you are learning as much as possible from the course readings, careful citation will be mandatory in both your informal and formal writing.”
The United States fails to live up to its founding values when it supports a luxury brand-driven approach to educating its future leaders that is accessible to the privileged and a few select lottery winners. One such “winning ticket” student in my class this spring argued that the quality-education-for-all issue was of such importance for the future of freedom that he would trade his individual good fortune at winning an education at Middlebury College for the elimination of ALL elite education in the United States so that quality education could be a right rather than a privilege.
A democracy cannot function if the entire game seems to be rigged and bought by elites. This is true for the United States and for democracies in the making or under challenge around the world. Consequently, in partnership with other liberal democracies, the U.S. government must do whatever it can to render both public and private governance more transparent and accountable. We should not expect authoritarian states to help us uphold liberal democratic values, nor should we expect corporations to do so voluntarily…(More)”.