media

Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?

Curated on July 20, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Stoycheff and Erik C. Nisbet in the Conversation: “The irony of internet freedom was on full display shortly after midnight July 16 in Turkey when President Erdogan used FaceTime and independent TV news to call for public resistance against the military coup that aimed to depose him.

In response, thousands of citizens took to the streets and aided the government in beating back the coup. The military plotters had taken over state TV. In this digital age they apparently didn’t realize television was no longer sufficient to ensure control over the message.

This story may appear like a triumphant example of the internet promoting democracy over authoritarianism.

Not so fast….This duality of the internet, as a tool to promote democracy or authoritarianism, or simultaneously both, is a complex puzzle.

The U.S. has made increasing internet access around the world a foreign policy priority. This policy was supported by both Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. State Department has allocated tens of millions of dollars to promote internet freedom, primarily in the area of censorship circumvention. And just this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution declaring internet freedom a fundamental human right. The resolution condemns internet shutdowns by national governments, an act that has become increasingly common in variety of countries across the globe, including Turkey, Brazil, India and Uganda.

On the surface, this policy makes sense. The internet is an intuitive boon for democracy. It provides citizens around the world with greater freedom of expression, opportunities for civil society, education and political participation. And previous research, including our own, has been optimistic about the internet’s democratic potential.

However, this optimism is based on the assumption that citizens who gain internet access use it to expose themselves to new information, engage in political discussions, join social media groups that advocate for worthy causes and read news stories that change their outlook on the world.

And some do.

But others watch Netflix. They use the internet to post selfies to an intimate group of friends. They gain access to an infinite stream of music, movies and television shows. They spend hours playing video games.

However, our recent research shows that tuning out from politics and immersing oneself in online spectacle has political consequences for the health of democracy….Political use of the internet ranks very low globally, compared to other uses. Research has found that just 9 percent of internet users posted links to political news and only 10 percent posted their own thoughts about political or social issues. In contrast, almost three-quarters (72 percent) say they post about movies and music, and over half (54 percent) also say they post about sports online.

This inspired our study, which sought to show how the internet does not necessarily serve as democracy’s magical solution. Instead, its democratic potential is highly dependent on how citizens choose to use it….

Ensuring citizens have access to the internet is not sufficient to ensure democracy and human rights. In fact, internet access may negatively impact democracy if exploited for authoritarian gain.

The U.S. government, NGOs and other democracy advocates have invested a great deal of time and resources toward promoting internet access, fighting overt online censorship and creating circumvention technologies. Yet their success, at best, has been limited.

The reason is twofold. First, authoritarian governments have adapted their own strategies in response. Second, the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy underlying a great deal of internet freedom promotion doesn’t take into account basic human psychology in which entertainment choices are preferred over news and attitudes toward the internet determine its use, not the technology itself.

Allies in the internet freedom fight should realize that the locus of the fight has shifted. Greater efforts must be put toward tearing down “psychological firewalls,” building demand for internet freedom and influencing citizens to employ the internet’s democratic potential.

Doing so ensures that the democratic online toolkit is a match for the authoritarian one….(More)”

Power to the people: how cities can use digital technology to engage and empower citizens

Curated on July 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Saunders at NESTA: “You’re sat in city hall one day and you decide it would be a good idea to engage residents in whatever it is you’re working on – next year’s budget, for example, or the redevelopment of a run down shopping mall. How do you go about it?

In the past, you might have held resident meetings and exhibitions where people could view proposed designs or talk to city government employees. You can still do that today, but now there’s digital: apps, websites and social media. So you decide on a digital engagement strategy: you build a website or you run a social media campaign inviting feedback on your proposals. What happens next?

Two scenarios: 1) You get 50 responses, mostly from campaign groups and local political activists; or 2) you receive such a huge number of responses that you don’t know what to do with them. Besides which, you don’t have the power or budget to implement 90 per cent of the suggestions and neither do you have the time to tell people why their proposals will be ignored. The main outcome of your citizen engagement exercise seems to be that you have annoyed the very people you were trying to get buy in from. What went wrong?

Four tips for digital engagement

With all the apps and platforms out there, it’s hard to make sense of what is going on in the world of digital tools for citizen engagement. It seems there are three distinct activities that digital tools enable: delivering council services online – say applying for a parking permit; using citizen generated data to optimise city government processes and engaging citizens in democratic exercises. In Conneced Councils Nesta sets out what future models of online service delivery could look like. Here I want to focus on the ways that engaging citizens with digital technology can help city governments deliver services more efficiently and improve engagement in democratic processes.

Resist the temptation to build an app…

Think about what you want to engage citizens for…

Sometimes engagement is statutory: communities have to be shown new plans for their area. Beyond this, there are a number of activities that citizen engagement is useful for. When designing a citizen engagement exercise it may help to think which of the following you are trying to achieve (note: they aren’t mutually exclusive):

Better understanding of the facts

If you want to use digital technologies to collect more data about what is happening in your city, you can buy a large number of sensors and install them across the city, to track everything from people movements to how full bins are. A cheaper and possibly more efficient way for cities to do this might involve working with people to collect this data – making use of the smartphones that an increasing number of your residents carry around with them. Prominent examples of this included flood mapping in Jakarta using geolocated tweets and pothole mapping in Boston using a mobile app.

For developed world cities, the thought of outsourcing flood mapping to citizens might fill government employees with horror. But for cities in developing countries, these technologies present an opportunity, potentially, for them to leapfrog their peers – to reach a level of coverage now that would normally require decades of investment in infrastructure to achieve. This is currently a hypothetical situation: cities around the world are only just starting to pilot these ideas and technologies and it will take a number of years before we know how useful they are to city governments.

Generating better ideas and options

The examples above involve passive data collection. Moving beyond this to more active contributions, city governments can engage citizens to generate better ideas and options. There are numerous examples of this in urban planning – the use of Minecraft by the UN in Nairobi to collect and visualise ideas for the future development of the community, or the Carticipe platform in France, which residents can use to indicate changes they would like to see in their city on a map.

It’s all very well to create a digital suggestion box, but there is a lot of evidence that deliberation and debate lead to much better ideas. Platforms like BetterReykjavic include a debate function for any idea that is proposed. Based on feedback, the person who submitted the idea can then edit it, before putting it to a public vote – only then, if the proposal gets the required number of votes, is it sent to the city council for debate.

Better decision making

As well as enabling better decision making by giving city government employees, better data and better ideas, digital technologies can give the power to make decisions directly to citizens. This is best encapsulated by participatory budgeting – which involves allowing citizens to decide how a percentage of the city budget is spent. Participatory budgeting emerged in Brazil in the 1980s, but digital technologies help city governments reach a much larger audience. ‘Madame Mayor, I have an idea’ is a participatory budgeting process that lets citizens propose and vote on ideas for projects in Paris. Over 20,000 people have registered on the platform and the pilot phase of the project received over 5000 submissions.

Remember that there’s a world beyond the internet…

Pick the right question for the right crowd…

When we talk to city governments and local authorities, they express a number of fears about citizen engagement: Fear of relying on the public for the delivery of critical services, fear of being drowned in feedback and fear of not being inclusive – only engaging with those that are online and motivated. Hopefully, thinking through the issues discussed above may help alleviate some of these fears and make city government more enthusiastic about digital engagement….(More)

How Twitter gives scientists a window into human happiness and health

Curated on July 14, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lewis Mitchell at the Conversation: “Since its public launch 10 years ago, Twitter has been used as a social networking platform among friends, an instant messaging service for smartphone users and a promotional tool for corporations and politicians.

But it’s also been an invaluable source of data for researchers and scientists – like myself – who want to study how humans feel and function within complex social systems.

By analyzing tweets, we’ve been able to observe and collect data on the social interactions of millions of people “in the wild,” outside of controlled laboratory experiments.

It’s enabled us to develop tools for monitoring the collective emotions of large populations, find the happiest places in the United States and much more.

So how, exactly, did Twitter become such a unique resource for computational social scientists? And what has it allowed us to discover?

Twitter’s biggest gift to researchers

On July 15, 2006, Twittr (as it was then known) publicly launched as a “mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS.” The ability to send free 140-character group texts drove many early adopters (myself included) to use the platform.

With time, the number of users exploded: from 20 million in 2009 to 200 million in 2012 and 310 million today. Rather than communicating directly with friends, users would simply tell their followers how they felt, respond to news positively or negatively, or crack jokes.

For researchers, Twitter’s biggest gift has been the provision of large quantities of open data. Twitter was one of the first major social networks to provide data samples through something called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which enable researchers to query Twitter for specific types of tweets (e.g., tweets that contain certain words), as well as information on users.

This led to an explosion of research projects exploiting this data. Today, a Google Scholar search for “Twitter” produces six million hits, compared with five million for “Facebook.” The difference is especially striking given that Facebook has roughly five times as many users as Twitter (and is two years older).

Twitter’s generous data policy undoubtedly led to some excellent free publicity for the company, as interesting scientific studies got picked up by the mainstream media.

Studying happiness and health

With traditional census data slow and expensive to collect, open data feeds like Twitter have the potential to provide a real-time window to see changes in large populations.

The University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab was founded in 2006 and studies problems across applied mathematics, sociology and physics. Since 2008, the Story Lab has collected billions of tweets through Twitter’s “Gardenhose” feed, an API that streams a random sample of 10 percent of all public tweets in real time.

I spent three years at the Computational Story Lab and was lucky to be a part of many interesting studies using this data. For example, we developed a hedonometer that measures the happiness of the Twittersphere in real time. By focusing on geolocated tweets sent from smartphones, we were able to map the happiest places in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found Hawaii to be the happiest state and wine-growing Napa the happiest city for 2013.

A map of 13 million geolocated U.S. tweets from 2013, colored by happiness, with red indicating happiness and blue indicating sadness. PLOS ONE, Author provided

These studies had deeper applications: Correlating Twitter word usage with demographics helped us understand underlying socioeconomic patterns in cities. For example, we could link word usage with health factors like obesity, so we built a lexicocalorimeter to measure the “caloric content” of social media posts. Tweets from a particular region that mentioned high-calorie foods increased the “caloric content” of that region, while tweets that mentioned exercise activities decreased our metric. We found that this simple measure correlates with other health and well-being metrics. In other words, tweets were able to give us a snapshot, at a specific moment in time, of the overall health of a city or region.

Using the richness of Twitter data, we’ve also been able to see people’s daily movement patterns in unprecedented detail. Understanding human mobility patterns, in turn, has the capacity to transform disease modeling, opening up the new field of digital epidemiology….(More)”

How technology disrupted the truth

Curated on July 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Katharine Viner in The Guardian: “Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism…

When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not. The leave campaign was well aware of this – and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to police political claims. A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
It was little surprise that some people were shocked after the result to discover that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised benefits. When “facts don’t work” and voters don’t trust the media, everyone believes in their own “truth” – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.

How did we end up here? And how do we fix it?

Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.

Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). A dubious story about Cameron and a pig appears in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has flown around the world on social media and turned up in trusted news sources everywhere. This may seem like a small matter, but its consequences are enormous.

In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true. “The Truth”, as Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter!, their history of the Sun newspaper, is a “bald statement which every newspaper prints at its peril”. There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts.

This settled “truth” was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press. Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.

Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their pot to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.

Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.

On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:

I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I’m *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.

This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies … We’re getting countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.

But asking technology companies to “do something” about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see….(More)”

iStreetWatch

Curated on July 12, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Welcome to iStreetWatch: “We track racist and xenophobic harassment in public spaces. Incidents of racist and anti-migrant abuse are becoming ever more public and ever more prolific. If you have witnessed or experienced racist or xenophobic harassment, please submit your experience here.

We aim to:

Make these now everyday incidents visible to a wider community.
Help people at risk map which areas are safer to be in.
Collect data over time to help monitor the correlation between these incidents and inflammatory speech from the media and politicians.

Everyone has the right to feel safe on the street. For many people, leaving their house means risking verbal and sometimes physical abuse. This site has been created in response to the rise in hate crime following the referendum result. We all have a role to play in making our streets safe for everyone.

If you witness racist or xenophobic harassment, there are other things you can do:

Say something: Show you won’t accept this behaviour on our streets.
Film it: Providing evidence can be key to making an arrest or charge.
Report abuse to the police: There are laws to protect people from abuse and harassment which should be enforced
Be safe: Don’t intervene if you think you will escalate the situation….(More)”

Why we no longer trust the experts

Curated on July 4, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Last week, I decided to take a gaggle of kids for an end-of-school-year lunch in a New York neighbourhood that I did not know well. I duly began looking for a suitable restaurant. A decade ago, I would have done that by turning to a restaurant guide. In the world I grew up in, it was normal to seek advice from the “experts”.

But in Manhattan last week, it did not occur to me to consult Fodor’s. Instead, I typed what I needed into my cellphone, scrolled through a long list of online restaurant recommendations, including comments from people who had eaten in them — and picked one.

Yes, it was a leap of faith; those restaurant reviews might have been fake. But there were enough voices for me to feel able to trust the wisdom of the cyber crowds — and, as it happened, our lunch choice was very good.

This is a trivial example of a much bigger change that is under way, and one that has some thought-provoking implications in the wake of the Brexit vote. Before the referendum, British citizens were subjected to a blitz of advice about the potential costs of Brexit from “experts”: economists, central bankers, the International Monetary Fund and world leaders, among others. Indeed, the central strategy of the government (and other “Remainers”) appeared to revolve around wheeling out these experts, with their solemn speeches and statistics….

I suspect that it indicates something else: that citizens of the cyber world no longer have much faith in anything that experts say, not just in the political sphere but in numerous others too. At a time when we increasingly rely on crowd-sourced advice rather than official experts to choose a restaurant, healthcare and holidays, it seems strange to expect voters to listen to official experts when it comes to politics.

In our everyday lives, we are moving from a system based around vertical axes of trust, where we trust people who seem to have more authority than we do, to one predicated on horizontal axes of trust: we take advice from our peer group.

You can see this clearly if you look at the surveys conducted by groups such as the Pew Research Center. These show that faith in institutions such as the government, big business and the media has crumbled in recent years; indeed, almost the only institution in the US that has bucked the trend is the military.

What is even more interesting to look at, however, are the areas where trust remains high. In an annual survey conducted by the Edelman public relations firm, people in 20 countries are asked who they trust. They show rising confidence in the “a person like me” category, and surprisingly high trust in digital technology. We live in a world where we increasingly trust our Facebook friends and the Twitter crowd more than we do the IMF or the prime minister.

In some senses, this is good news. Relying on horizontal axes of trust should mean more democracy and empowerment for ordinary citizens. But the problem of this new world is that people can fall prey to social fads and tribalism — or groupthink…..

Either way, nobody is going to put this genie back into the bottle. So we all need to think about what creates the bonds of “trust” in today’s world. And recognise that the 20th-century model of politics, with its reverence for experts and fixed parties, may eventually seem as outdated as restaurant guides. We live in volatile time…(More)”

Intermediation in Open Development

Curated on July 4, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Katherine M. A. Reilly and Juan P. Alperin at Global Media Journal: “Open Development (OD) is a subset of ICT4D that studies the potential of ITenabled openness to support social change among poor or marginalized populations. Early OD work examined the potential of IT-enabled openness to decentralize power and enable public engagement by disintermediating knowledge production and dissemination. However, in practice, intermediaries have emerged to facilitate open data and related knowledge production activities in development processes. We identify five models of intermediation in OD work: decentralized, arterial, ecosystem, bridging, and communities of practice and examine the implications of each for stewardship of open processes. We conclude that studying OD through these five forms of intermediation is a productive way of understanding whether and how different patterns of knowledge stewardship influence development outcomes. We also offer suggestions for future research that can improve our understanding of how to sustain openness, facilitate public engagement, and ensure that intermediation contributes to open development….(More)”

Due Diligence? We need an app for that

Curated on June 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Banks at kiwanja.net: “The ubiquity of mobile phones, the reach of the Internet, the shear number of problems facing the planet, competitions and challenges galore, pots of money and strong media interest in tech-for-good projects has today created the perfect storm. Not a day goes by without the release of an app hoping to solve something, and the fact so many people are building so many apps to fix so many problems can only be a good thing. Right?

The only problem is this. It’s become impossible to tell good from bad, even real from fake. It’s something of a Wild West out there. So it was no surprise to see this happening recently. Quoting The Guardian:

An app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake. The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), which would provide help.

In fact, the app did nothing of the sort. Rather than presenting real-time satellite footage – a difficult and expensive task – it instead simply shows a portion of a static, unchanging image. And while it claims to show the weather in the southern Mediterranean, that too isn’t that accurate: it’s for Western Libya.

The worry isn’t only that someone would decide to build a fake app which ‘tackles’ such an emotive subject, but the fact that this particular app won an award and received favourable press. Wired, Mashable, the Evening Standard and Reuters all spoke positively about it. Did no-one check that it did what it said it did?

This whole episode reminds me of something Joel Selanikio wrote in his contributing chapter to two books I’ve recently edited and published. In his chapters, which touch on his work on the Magpi data collection tool in addition to some of the challenges facing the tech-for-development community, Joel wrote:

In going over our user activity logs for the online Magpi app, I quickly realised that no-one from any of our funding organisations was listed. Apparently no-one who was paying us had ever seen our working software! This didn’t seem to make sense. Who would pay for software without ever looking at it? And if our funders hadn’t seen the software, what information were they using when they decided whether to fund us each year?

…The shear number of apps available that claim to solve all manner of problems may seem encouraging on the surface – 1,500 (and counting) to help refugees might be a case in point – but how many are useful? How many are being used? How many solve a problem? And how many are real?

Due diligence? Maybe it’s time we had an app for that…(More)”