media

Dawn of the techlash

Curated on February 11, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Botsman at the Guardian: “…Once seen as saviours of democracy, those titans are now just as likely to be viewed as threats to truth or, at the very least, impassive billionaires falling down on the job of monitoring their own backyards.

It wasn’t always this way. Remember the early catchy slogans that emerged from those ping-pong-tabled tech temples in Silicon Valley? “A place for friends”, “Don’t be evil” or “You can make money without being evil” (rather poignant, given what was to come). Users were enchanted by the sudden, handheld power of a smartphone to voice anything, access anything; grassroots activist movements revelled in these new tools for spreading their cause. The idealism of social media – democracy, friction-free communication, one-button socialising proved infectious.

So how did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle….

Technology is only the means. We also need to ask why our political ideologies have become so polarised, and take a hard look at our own behaviour, as well as that of the politicians themselves and the partisan media outlets who use these platforms, with their vast reach, to sow the seeds of distrust. Why are we so easily duped? Are we unwilling or unable to discern what’s true and what isn’t or to look for the boundaries between opinion, fact and misinformation? But what part are our own prejudices playing?

Luciano Floridi, of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University, points out that technology alone can’t save us from ourselves. “The potential of technology to be a powerful positive force for democracy is huge and is still there. The problems arise when we ignore how technology can accentuate or highlight less attractive sides of human nature,” he says. “Prejudice. Jealousy. Intolerance of different views. Our tendency to play zero sum games. We against them. Saying technology is a threat to democracy is like saying food is bad for you because it causes obesity.”

It’s not enough to blame the messenger. Social media merely amplifies human intent – both good and bad. We need to be honest about our own, age-old appetite for ugly gossip and spreading half-baked information, about our own blindspots.

Is there a solution to it all? Plenty of smart people are working on technical fixes, if for no other reason than the tech companies know it’s in their own best interests to stem the haemorrhaging of trust. Whether they’ll go far enough remains to be seen.

We sometimes forget how uncharted this new digital world remains – it’s a work in progress. We forget that social media, for all its flaws, still brings people together, gives a voice to the voiceless, opens vast wells of information, exposes wrongdoing, sparks activism, allows us to meet up with unexpected strangers. The list goes on. It’s inevitable that there will be falls along the way, deviousness we didn’t foresee. Perhaps the present danger is that in our rush to condemn the corruption of digital technologies, we will unfairly condemn the technologies themselves….(More).

Managing Democracy in the Digital Age

Curated on February 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Julia Schwanholz, Todd Graham and Peter-Tobias Stoll: “In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere.

The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation….(More)”.

Our Hackable Political Future

Curated on February 7, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Henry J. Farrell and Rick Perlstein at the New York Times: “….A program called Face2Face, developed at Stanford, films one person speaking, then manipulates that person’s image to resemble someone else’s. Throw in voice manipulation technology, and you can literally make anyone say anything — or at least seem to….

Another harrowing potential is the ability to trick the algorithms behind self-driving cars to not recognize traffic signs. Computer scientists have shown that nearly invisible changes to a stop sign can fool algorithms into thinking it says yield instead. Imagine if one of these cars contained a dissident challenging a dictator.

In 2007, Barack Obama’s political opponents insisted that footage existed of Michelle Obama ranting against “whitey.” In the future, they may not have to worry about whether it actually existed. If someone called their bluff, they may simply be able to invent it, using data from stock photos and pre-existing footage.

The next step would be one we are already familiar with: the exploitation of the algorithms used by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to spread stories virally to those most inclined to show interest in them, even if those stories are fake.

It might be impossible to stop the advance of this kind of technology. But the relevant algorithms here aren’t only the ones that run on computer hardware. They are also the ones that undergird our too easily hacked media system, where garbage acquires the perfumed scent of legitimacy with all too much ease. Editors, journalists and news producers can play a role here — for good or for bad.

Outlets like Fox News spread stories about the murder of Democratic staff members and F.B.I. conspiracies to frame the president. Traditional news organizations, fearing that they might be left behind in the new attention economy, struggle to maximize “engagement with content.”

This gives them a built-in incentive to spread informational viruses that enfeeble the very democratic institutions that allow a free media to thrive. Cable news shows consider it their professional duty to provide “balance” by giving partisan talking heads free rein to spout nonsense — or amplify the nonsense of our current president.

It already feels as though we are living in an alternative science-fiction universe where no one agrees on what it true. Just think how much worse it will be when fake news becomes fake video. Democracy assumes that its citizens share the same reality. We’re about to find out whether democracy can be preserved when this assumption no longer holds….(More)”.

Reclaiming Civic Spaces

Curated on February 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special edition of Sur International Journal on Human Rights on crackdowns on civil society around the world: “As shown by both the geographic reach of the contributions (authors from 16 countries) and the infographics to this edition, the issue is clearly of global concern. The first section of the journal seeks to address why this crackdown is happening, who is driving it and whether there is cross-fertilisation of ideas between actors.

The edition then focuses on the strategies that activists are implementing to combat the crackdown. A summary of these strategies can be seen in a video which captures a number of the author activists’ perspectives, shared when they gathered in São Paulo in October 2017 for a writers’ retreat….

The role of new media and online spaces in combatting the crackdown is prevalent in the contributions. The ease and speed with which information can be passed on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram was cited as being important in mobilising support rapidly as well as helping reach previously untapped constituents (Sara Alsherif, Zoya Rehman, Raull Santiago, Victoria Ohaeri, Valerie Msoka and Denise Dora, Ravindran Daniel and Barbara Klugman). Despite the opportunities, Bondita Acharya, Helen Kezie-Nwoha, Sondos Shabayek, Shalini Eddens and Susan Jessop, Sara Alsherif and Zoya Rehman all note the challenges that digital tools present. Harassment of activists online is becoming increasingly common, particularly towards women. In addition, authorities are constantly developing new ways of monitoring these platforms. To combat this, Sara Alsherif describes how developing relationships with tech companies can help activists stay one step ahead of the curve.

The use of video is explored by Hagai El-Ad and Raull Santiago, both of whom describe how the medium is an important tool in capturing the restrictions being inflicted on civil society in their respective contexts. Moreover, Raull Santiago describes how his collective is trying to use these video images, captured by members of his community, in legal processes against the police force….(More)”.

The Follower Factory

Curated on February 1, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris And Mark Hansen in The New York Times: “…Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower.

In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into a legal gray zone.

“The continued viability of fraudulent accounts and interactions on social media platforms — and the professionalization of these fraudulent services — is an indication that there’s still much work to do,” said Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the spread of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Despite rising criticism of social media companies and growing scrutiny by elected officials, the trade in fake followers has remained largely opaque. While Twitter and other platforms prohibit buying followers, Devumi and dozens of other sites openly sell them. And social media companies, whose market value is closely tied to the number of people using their services, make their own rules about detecting and eliminating fake accounts.

Devumi’s founder, German Calas, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. “The allegations are false, and we do not have knowledge of any such activity,” Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.

The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers. In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each — sometimes even less — Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site….(More)”.

2018 Edelman Trust Barometer

Curated on January 28, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “Volatility brews beneath a stagnant surface. If a single theme captures the state of the world’s trust in 2018, it is this. Even as people’s trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 28 countries remained largely unchanged, experiencing virtually no recovery from 2017 (Fig. 1), dramatic shifts are taking place at the country level and within the institution of media.

Globally, 20 of 28 countries lie in distruster territory (Fig. 2), one more than in 2017. Trust among the informed public—those with higher levels of income and education— declined slightly on a global level, from 60 percent to 59 percent, thrusting this group into neutral territory from its once trusting status. A closer look, however, reveals a world moving apart (Fig. 3).

In 2018, two poles have emerged: a cluster of six nations where trust has dramatically increased, and six where trust has deeply declined. Whereas in previous years country-level trust has moved largely in lockstep, for the first time ever there is now a distinct split between extreme trust gainers and losers. No country saw steeper declines than the United States, with a 37-point aggregate drop in trust across all institutions.

The loss of trust was most severe among the informed public—a 23-point fall on the Trust Index—nearly erasing the “mass-class” divide that once stood between this segment of the U.S. population and the country’s farless-trusting mass population. At the opposite end of the spectrum, China experienced a 27-point gain, more than any other country. Following behind in the trust gainer category are the UAE (24 points) and South Korea (23 points)….(More)”.

Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?

Curated on January 28, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”.