Computational Propaganda Worldwide


Executive Summary: “The Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, has researched the use of social media for public opinion manipulation. The team involved 12 researchers across nine countries who, altogether, interviewed 65 experts, analyzed tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents. Each case study analyzes qualitative, quantitative, and computational evidence collected between 2015 and 2017 from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks. We find several distinct global trends in computational propaganda. •

  • Social media are significant platforms for political engagement and crucial channels for disseminating news content. Social media platforms are the primary media over which young people develop their political identities.
    • In some countries this is because some companies, such as Facebook, are effectively monopoly platforms for public life. o In several democracies the majority of voters use social media to share political news and information, especially during elections.
    • In countries where only small proportions of the public have regular access to social media, such platforms are still fundamental infrastructure for political conversation among the journalists, civil society leaders, and political elites.
  • Social media are actively used as a tool for public opinion manipulation, though in diverse ways and on different topics. o In authoritarian countries, social media platforms are a primary means of social control. This is especially true during political and security crises. o In democracies, social media are actively used for computational propaganda either through broad efforts at opinion manipulation or targeted experiments on particular segments of the public.
  • In every country we found civil society groups trying, but struggling, to protect themselves and respond to active misinformation campaigns….(More)”.

Teaching machines to understand – and summarize – text


 and  in The Conversation: “We humans are swamped with text. It’s not just news and other timely information: Regular people are drowning in legal documents. The problem is so bad we mostly ignore it. Every time a person uses a store’s loyalty rewards card or connects to an online service, his or her activities are governed by the equivalent of hundreds of pages of legalese. Most people pay no attention to these massive documents, often labeled “terms of service,” “user agreement” or “privacy policy.”

These are just part of a much wider societal problem of information overload. There is so much data stored – exabytes of it, as much stored as has ever been spoken by people in all of human history – that it’s humanly impossible to read and interpret everything. Often, we narrow down our pool of information by choosing particular topics or issues to pay attention to. But it’s important to actually know the meaning and contents of the legal documents that govern how our data is stored and who can see it.

As computer science researchers, we are working on ways artificial intelligence algorithms could digest these massive texts and extract their meaning, presenting it in terms regular people can understand….

Examining privacy policies

A modern internet-enabled life today more or less requires trusting for-profit companies with private information (like physical and email addresses, credit card numbers and bank account details) and personal data (photos and videos, email messages and location information).

These companies’ cloud-based systems typically keep multiple copies of users’ data as part of backup plans to prevent service outages. That means there are more potential targets – each data center must be securely protected both physically and electronically. Of course, internet companies recognize customers’ concerns and employ security teams to protect users’ data. But the specific and detailed legal obligations they undertake to do that are found in their impenetrable privacy policies. No regular human – and perhaps even no single attorney – can truly understand them.

In our study, we ask computers to summarize the terms and conditions regular users say they agree to when they click “Accept” or “Agree” buttons for online services. We downloaded the publicly available privacy policies of various internet companies, including Amazon AWS, Facebook, Google, HP, Oracle, PayPal, Salesforce, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp….

Our software examines the text and uses information extraction techniques to identify key information specifying the legal rights, obligations and prohibitions identified in the document. It also uses linguistic analysis to identify whether each rule applies to the service provider, the user or a third-party entity, such as advertisers and marketing companies. Then it presents that information in clear, direct, human-readable statements….(More)”

LSE launches crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials to shape Brexit


LSE Press Release: “A crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape the upcoming Brexit negotiations is being launched by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this week.

The social media-based project, which hopes to engage 3000 millennials aged 35 and under, kicks off on 23 June, the first anniversary of the life-changing vote to take Britain out of the EU.

One of the Generation Brexit project leaders, Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece from LSE’s European Institute, said the online platform would give a voice to British and European millennials on the future of Europe in the Brexit negotiations and beyond.

She said: “We’re going to invite millennials from across the UK and Europe to debate, decide and draft policy proposals that will be sent to parliaments in Westminster and Strasbourg during the negotiations.”

Another project leader, Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, said the pan-European project would seek views from a whole cross section of millennials, including Leavers, Remainers, left and right-wingers, European federalists and nationalists.

“We want to come up with millennial proposals for a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting the diverse political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds in the UK and EU.

“We are especially keen to engage the forgotten, the apolitical and the apathetic – for whom Brexit has become a moment of political awakening,” he said.

Generation Brexit follows on the heels of LSE’s Constitution UK crowdsourcing project in 2015, which broke new ground in galvanising people around the country to help shape Britain’s first constitution. The 10-week internet project signed up 1500 people from all corners of the UK to debate how the country should be governed.

Dr Manmit Bhambra, also working on the project, said the success of the Constitution UK platform had laid the foundation for Generation Brexit, with LSE hoping to double the numbers and sign up 3000 participants, split equally between Britain and Europe.

The project can be accessed at www.generationbrexit.org and all updates will be available on Twitter @genbrexit & @lsebrexitvote with the hashtag #GenBrexit, and on facebook.com/GenBrexit… (More)”.

Fly on the Facebook Wall: How UNHCR Listened to Refugees on Social Media


 at Social Media for Good: “In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR shows how to conduct meaningful, qualitative social media monitoring in a humanitarian crisis.

From A Refugee PerspectiveBetween March and December 2016 the project team (one project manager, one Pashto and Dari speaker, two native Arabic speakers and an English copy editor) monitored Facebook conversations related to flight and migration in the Afghan and Arabic speaking communities.

To do this, the team created Facebook accounts, joined relevant Facebook groups and summarised their findings in weekly monitoring reports to UNHCR staff and other interested people. I received these reports every week while working as the UNHCR team leader for the Communicating with Communities team in Greece and found them very useful since they gave me insights into what were some of the burning issues that week.

The project did not monitor Twitter because Twitter was not widely used by the communities.

In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe. Among other things, these discussion provided information on how the refugees and migrants are consuming and exchanging information (related: see this BBC Media Action report).

Of course, this type of research is much more resource intensive than what most organisations have in mind when they want to do social media monitoring, but this report shows that additional resources can also result in more meaningful information.

Smuggling prices

Smuggling prices according to monitored Facebook page. Source: From A Refugee Perspective

Monitoring the conversations on Facebook enabled the team to track trends, such as the rise and fall of prices that smugglers asked for different routes (see image). In addition, it provided fascinating insights into how smugglers are selling their services online….(More)”

Facebook Disaster Maps


Molly Jackman et al at Facebook: “After a natural disaster, humanitarian organizations need to know where affected people are located, what resources are needed, and who is safe. This information is extremely difficult and often impossible to capture through conventional data collection methods in a timely manner. As more people connect and share on Facebook, our data is able to provide insights in near-real time to help humanitarian organizations coordinate their work and fill crucial gaps in information during disasters. This morning we announced a Facebook disaster map initiative to help organizations address the critical gap in information they often face when responding to natural disasters.

Facebook disaster maps provide information about where populations are located, how they are moving, and where they are checking in safe during a natural disaster. All data is de-identified and aggregated to a 360 square meter tile or local administrative boundaries (e.g. census boundaries). [1]

This blog describes the disaster maps datasets, how insights are calculated, and the steps taken to ensure that we’re preserving privacy….(More)”.

Design and Implementation of Behavioral Informatics Interventions


Chapter by Liliana Laranjo, Annie Lau and Enrico Coiera in Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine: “The growing burden of chronic disease is drawing unprecedented attention to the importance of optimizing lifestyle behaviors. Interventions to promote behavior change seem promising, but their full potential can be missed when they are not easily disseminated or accessible to a larger audience. The ability of technology to address these issues, as well as to facilitate the tailoring of interventions, has led to the growing popularity of the field of behavioral informatics (BI).

Behavioral informatics interventions are designed to support patients and healthy consumers in modifying behaviors to improve health, with the help of computers, the Internet, mobile phones, wireless devices, or social media, among other technologies. To date, BI interventions have been applied in several health domains, from the promotion of healthy lifestyle behaviors to mental health and chronic disease self-management.

The effectiveness and impact of BI interventions are largely dependent on their meaningful design, development, evaluation, and implementation. Key elements for success include: performing a comprehensive observation and framing of the particular behavioral challenge within context; recognizing the relevant behavior change theories, models and techniques; having a deep understanding of user characteristics and needs; involving users throughout design and development; and refining the design through user-centred evaluation.

Due to the rapid pace of technology development, the evaluation of interventions and translation of research to practice are met with particular challenges. Innovative methodologies and implementation strategies are increasingly required to bring to fruition the potential of BI interventions in delivering cost-effective, personalized interventions, with broad scalability….(More)”.

Facebook Features Connect Lawmakers With Constituents


Griffin Connolly at RollCall: “Facebook users now have the option to pin “constituent badges” to their profiles, letting friends — and members of Congress — know which district they live in. And users can now search for articles, links, and posts that other residents in their districts engage with most frequently.

“When we think about civic engagement, we think about building communities of people,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s vice president of U.S. public policy. “And this is about making sure that people engage with government.”

The new features can also help identify the issues that voters care about most. That could be a valuable tool for lawmakers — and their opponents — during election season.

“I’ve always been fascinated by how the internet helps citizens have a voice like never before,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s head of civic engagement, told reporters and congressional staffers at the unveiling Wednesday. “But at the same time, it makes it more complicated for decision-makers to actually make sense of it all.”

Facebook’s new technology can help, he said.

The constituent badge unlocks a number of possibilities for lawmakers looking to engage voters more directly.

They can now choose to make their posts available exclusively to voters in their district, which Facebook calls “district targeting.” In the past, policymakers could only post publicly from their pages….

The badge tool also enables lawmakers to host virtual town halls with an exclusive audience of their own constituents via the Facebook Live streaming medium and to tailor their messages to a narrower band of local media sources and citizens.

One unintended consequence of these more private Facebook Live sessions is that reporters who don’t live in a lawmaker’s district may not be able to view it. Facebook users can only provide one address, and that determines their constituent badge. …

A number of tech-savvy lawmakers have led the charge in leveraging new social media features and platforms to promote their image and policies.

In March, two Texas House members, Democrat Beto O’Rourke and Republican Will Hurd, struck out on a multiday “bipartisan road trip” from the Lone Star State back to Washington, using Facebook Live and the livestreaming app Periscope to update viewers and answer questions on policy.

Democrat Rick Nolan and Republican Jason Lewis copied that approach in April when the two Minnesota congressmen traveled back to their home state.

Louisiana Republican Rep. Garret Graves, who spoke at the Facebook unveiling on Wednesday, has gone full bore with his use of Facebook Live, hosting town halls every Friday around lunchtime and periodically on evenings throughout the week….(More)”

The Citizen Marketer


Book by Joel Penney: “From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture.

While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles — particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle — some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation….(More)”.

Europol introduce crowdsourcing to catch child abusers


LeakofNations: “The criminal intelligence branch of the European Union, known as Europol, have started a campaign called #TraceAnObject which uses social media crowdsourcing to detect potentially-identifying objects in material that depicts child abuse….

Investigative crowdsourcing has gained traction in academic and journalistic circles in recent years, but this represents the first case of government bureaus relying on social media people-power to conduct more effective analysis.

Journalists are increasingly relying on a combination of high-end computing to organise terabytes of data and internet cloud hubs that allow a consortium of journalists from around the world to share their analysis of the material. In the Panama Papers scoop the Australian software Nuix was used to analyse, extract, and index documents into an encrypted central hub in which thousands of journalists from 80 countries were able to post their workings and assist others in a forum-type setting. This model was remarkably efficient; over 11.5 million documents, dating back to the 1970’s, were analysed in less than a year.

The website Zooinverse has achieved huge success in creating public participation on academic projects, producing the pioneering game Foldit, where participants play with digital models of proteins. The Oxford University-based organisation has now engaged over 1 million volunteers, and has has significant successes in astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.

The most complex investigations still require thousands of hours of straightforward tasks that cannot be computerised. The citizen science website Planet Four studies conditions on Mars, and needs volunteers to compare photographs and detect blotches on Mars’ surface – enabling anyone to feel like Elon Musk, regardless of their educational background.

Child abuse is something that incites anger in most people. Crowdsourcing is an opportunity to take the donkey-work away from slow bureaucratic offices and allow ordinary citizens, many of whom felt powerless to protect children from these vile crimes, to genuinely progress cases that will make children safer.

Zooinverse proves that the public are hungry for this kind of work; the ICIJ project model of a central cloud forum shows that crowdsourcing across international borders allows data to be interpreted more efficiently. Europol’s latest idea could well be a huge success.

Even the most basic object could potentially provide vital clues to the culprit’s identity. The most significant items released so far include a school uniform complete with ID card necktie, and a group of snow-covered lodges….(More) (see also #TraceAnObject).

The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Democracy


Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review: “Accusations that the Internet and social media sow political division have flown thick and fast since recent contentious elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even pledged to start working on technology that will turn the energy of online interactions into a more positive force (see “We Need More Alternatives to Facebook”).

Tiny, largely self-funded U.S. startup Pol.is has been working on a similar project longer than Zuckerberg and already has some promising results. The company’s interactive, crowdsourced survey tool can be used to generate maps of public opinion that help citizens, governments, and legislators discover the nuances of agreement and disagreement on contentious issues that exist. In 2016, that information helped the government of Taiwan break a six-year deadlock over how to regulate online alcohol sales, caused by entrenched, opposing views among citizens on what rules should apply.

“It allowed different sides to gradually see that they share the same underlying concern despite superficial disagreements,” says Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister. The island’s government now routinely sends out Pol.is surveys using Facebook ads, and to special-interest groups. It has also used the system to help thrash out what rules should apply to Airbnb rentals and mobile ride-hailing services such as Uber.

Pol.is’s open-source software is designed to serve up interactive online surveys around a particular issue. People are shown a series of short statements about aspects of a broader issue—for example, “Uber drivers should need the same licenses cab drivers do”—and asked to click to signal that they agree or disagree. People can contribute new statements of their own for others to respond to. The tangle of crisscrossing responses is used to automatically generate charts that map out different clusters of opinion, making it easy to see the points on which people tend to overlap or disagree.

Alternativet, a progressive Danish political party with nine members of parliament, is piloting Pol.is as a way to give its members a more direct role in formulating policy. Jon Skjerning-Rasmussen, a senior process coordinator with the party, says the way Pol.is visualizations are shared with people as they participate in a survey—letting them see how their opinions compare with those of others—helps people engage with the tool….(More).