Can Algorithmic Recommendation Systems Be Good For Democracy? (Yes! & Chronological Feeds May Be Bad)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Aviv Ovadya: Algorithmic recommendation systems (also known as recommender systems and recommendation engines) are one of the primary ways that we navigate the deluge of information from products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and TikTok. We only have a finite amount of time and attention, and recommendation systems help allocate our attention across the zettabytes of data (trillions of gigabytes!) now produced each year. 

The (simplistic) “evil recommendation system” story 

Recommendation systems in the prominent tech companies stereotypically use what has become referred to as “engagement-based ranking.” They aim to predict which content will lead a user to engage the most—e.g., by interacting with the content or spending more time in the product. This content is ranked higher and is the most likely to be shown to the user. The idea is that this will lead to more time using the company’s product, and thus ultimately more time viewing ads. 

While this may be good for business, and is relatively easy to implement, it is likely to be a rather harmful approach—it turns out that this leads people to produce more and more sensationalist and divisive content since that is what leads to the most engagement. This is potentially very dangerous for democratic stability—if things get too divisive, the social contract supporting a democracy can falter, potentially leading to internal warfare. (Caveat: for the sake of brevity, this is a heavily simplified account, and there may be evidence that in some countries this is less of a problem; and many non-ads based companies have similar incentives.) 

Is the chronological feed a fix?  

The perils of engagement-based ranking have led some advocates, policymakers, and even former tech employees to want to replace recommendation systems with chronological feeds: no more recommendations, just a list of posts in order by time. This appears to make sense at first glance. If recommendation systems place business interests over democratic stability, then it seems important to eliminate them before our democracy collapses! 

However, this is where the story gets a bit more complicated. Chronological feeds address some of the problems with engagement-based ranking systems, but they cause many more. To understand why, we need to consider what recommendations systems do to society…(More)”.

The Accountable Bureaucrat

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anya Bernstein and Cristina Rodriguez: “Common wisdom has it that, without close supervision by an elected official, administrative agencies are left unaccountable to the people they regulate. For both proponents and detractors of the administrative state, agency accountability thus hangs on the concentrated power of the President. This Article presents a different vision. Drawing on in-depth interviews with officials from numerous agencies, we argue that everyday administrative practices themselves support accountability—an accountability of a kind that elections alone cannot achieve. The electoral story focuses on the aspect of accountability that kicks in as a sanction after decisions have already been made. We propose instead that the ongoing justification of policy positions to multiple audiences empowered to evaluate and challenge them forms the heart of accountability in a republican democracy. The continual process of reason-giving, testing, and adaptation instantiates the values that make accountability normatively attractive: deliberation, inclusivity, and responsiveness.

Our interviews reveal three primary features of the administrative state that support such accountability. First, political appointees and career civil servants, often presented as conflictual, actually enact complementary decisionmaking modalities. Appointees do not impose direct presidential control but imbue agencies with a diffuse, differentiated sense of abstract political values. Civil servants use expertise and experience to set the parameters within which decisions can be made. The process of moving these differing but interdependent approaches toward a decision promotes deliberation. Second, agencies work through a networked spiderweb of decisionmaking that involves continual justification and negotiation among numerous groups. This claim stands in stark contrast to the strict hierarchy often attributed to government bureaucracy: we show how the principal-agent model, frequently used to analyze agencies, obscures more than it reveals. The dispersion of decisionmaking power, we claim, promotes pluralistic inclusivity and provides more support for ongoing accountability than a concentration in presidential hands would. Finally, many two-way avenues connect agencies to the people and situations they regulate. Those required by law, like notice-and-comment rulemaking, supplement numerous other interaction formats that agencies create. These multiple avenues support agency responsiveness to the views of affected publics and the realities of the regulated world….(More)”.

Democratic Progress in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by the “Democratic Progress” Task force: “There appears to be distrust between citizens and governing officials at all levels, from local municipalities to regional and even national governments. The rapid transformation brought about by digital technologies, from the way we work to where we work, is instilling anxiety and uncertainty in the minds of our population. The fact is that the “business models” and way of doing business has shifted for all, whether you are in government, corporate, and even academia.

Despite their best efforts to innovate and embrace this transformation, the operational systems and processes in place are inefficient and ineffective in doing so, resulting in the digital divide. This divide just increases fear and uncertainty, leading to governments relying on populist views to garner votes, further polarizing rather than uniting nations. 

New democratic forms and institutions, in general, can help liberal democracies overcome the challenges highlighted. We will need to build more collaborations, partnerships, and dialogues with a range of stakeholders (SDG17 SDG16 SDG8) so that we may consider more viewpoints on a number of levels and embrace this transition collectively.

This is where the potential of digital ecosystems (communities), which are primarily represented by coworking spaces, creative hubs, and youth centres, are critical platforms for enabling this shift becomes important. The creation of an enabling environment in which diverse stakeholders (government, corporate, academia, and civil society) can collaborate to accelerate social tech entrepreneurs and digital technologies while holding open and inclusive dialogues about social challenges, cultural, and democratic experiences would be a key focus for this.

The Conference on the Future of Europe has taken a significant step in this direction; now we must bring together and elevate the voices of our citizens and digital ecosystem players to ensure that we create an inclusive and enabling environment that embraces citizens’ needs in the digital transformation and closes the digital divide. The goal of these platforms is to facilitate true contact between citizens and decision-makers, which will aid in the resolution of social issues and the restoration of confidence in our society…(More)”

The Pragmatics of Democratic ‘Front-Sliding’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq: “The global crisis of democracy has reflected, in many cases, a gradual process sometimes characterized as “erosion” or “back-sliding.” This occurs across several fronts—political, legal, epistemic, and psychological—at the same time. As a result, any return to the democratic status quo ante must also be incremental, and confronts the challenge of where to start: How does a democracy that has survived a close call start to recreate conditions of meaningful political competition? What steps are to be taken, and in what order? There is likely to be local variance in the answers to these questions. But we think there are still lessons that can be gleaned from other countries’ experience. To that end, we start by reviewing the dynamic of backsliding. We next then to the problematics of ‘front-sliding’—i.e., the process of rebuilding the necessary political, legal, epistemic, and sociological component of democracy. We then examine distinctive and difficult question of punishing individuals who have been drivers of back-sliding. Finally, we turn, albeit briefly, to the question of how to sequence different elements of ‘front-sliding.’…(More)”.

Shadowbanning Is Big Tech’s Big Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Gabriel Nicholas: “Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned. Republican politicians have been accusing Twitter of shadowbanning—that is, quietly suppressing their activity on the site—since at least 2018, when for a brief period, the service stopped autofilling the usernames of Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as other prominent Republicans, in its search bar. Black Lives Matter activists have been accusing TikTok of shadowbanning since 2020, when, at the height of the George Floyd protests, it sharply reduced how frequently their videos appeared on users’ “For You” pages. …When the word shadowban first appeared in the web-forum backwaters of the early 2000s, it meant something more specific. It was a way for online-community moderators to deal with trolls, shitposters, spam bots, and anyone else they deemed harmful: by making their posts invisible to everyone but the posters themselves. But throughout the 2010s, as the social web grew into the world’s primary means of sharing information and as content moderation became infinitely more complicated, the word became more common, and much more muddled. Today, people use shadowban to refer to the wide range of ways platforms may remove or reduce the visibility of their content without telling them….

According to new research I conducted at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), nearly one in 10 U.S. social-media users believes they have been shadowbanned, and most often they believe it is for their political beliefs or their views on social issues. In two dozen interviews I held with people who thought they had been shadowbanned or worked with people who thought they had, I repeatedly heard users say that shadowbanning made them feel not just isolated from online discourse, but targeted, by a sort of mysterious cabal, for breaking a rule they didn’t know existed. It’s not hard to imagine what happens when social-media users believe they are victims of conspiracy…(More)”.

How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker: “…Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda’s opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi’s associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, “Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.”) Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states. But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company’s efforts to fight spyware, told me, “The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff—not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments.”…(More)”.

The Russian invasion shows how digital technologies have become involved in all aspects of war

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Katharina Niemeyer, Dominique Trudel, Heidi J.S. Tworek, Maria Silina and Svitlana Matviyenko: “Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we keep hearing that this war is like no other; because Ukrainians have cellphones and access to social media platforms, the traditional control of information and propaganda cannot work and people are able to see through the fog of war.

As communications scholars and historians, it is important to add nuance to such claims. The question is not so much what is “new” in this war, but rather to understand its specific media dynamics. One important facet of this war is the interplay between old and new media — the many loops that go from Twitter to television to TikTok, and back and forth.

We have moved away from a relatively static communication model, where journalists report on the news within predetermined constraints and formats, to intense fragmentation and even participation. Information about the war becomes content, and users contribute to its circulation by sharing and commenting online…(More)”.

Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem): “This Democracy Report documents several signs that autocratization is changing nature. With five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an increase in coups unprecedented over the past two decades. These coups contributed to driving the uptick in the number of closed autocracies. They also seem to signal a shift toward emboldened actors, given the previous decline in coups during the 21st century.
Polarization and government misinformation are also increasing. These trends are interconnected. Polarized publics are more likely to demonize political opponents and distrust information from diverse sources, and mobilization shifts as a result. The increase in misinformation and polarization further signals what may prove to be a changing nature of autocratization in the world today. We discuss this shift in detail in the third part of the report: “Autocratization Changing Nature?”.
Another sign of emboldened political leaders is the increasing number of countries where critical, formal aspects of democracy are eroding. The autonomy of institutions such as Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are now attacked and undermined in many autocratzing countries alongside the judiciary and the legislature. This year’s Democracy Report documents such changes.
The Democracy Report 2022 is published along with version 12 of the V-Dem dataset. The dataset is produced by the worldwide V-Dem collaboration and is based on assessments by over 3,700 experts from more than 180 countries, resulting in over 30 million data points. The Democracy Report 2022 is authored by a team at the V-Dem Institute, and we alone are accountable for its contents.
The Democracy Report 2022 analyzes the evidence from three perspectives. The first part examines the state of the world in 2021 based on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and the Regimes of the World (RoW) Index. The second part of the report focuses on countries that are in a process of changing. The third part presents data on coups, polarization, and disinformation, all of which signal that the fundamental dynamics of the current wave of autocratization may be changing.
In summary: The worldwide wave of autocratization is deepening, engulfing more countries, and seems to be changing nature…(More)”.

Transparency in a “Post-Fact” World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sabina Schnell: “What role can government transparency play in a democratic polity in a post-fact and a post-truth world? If the problem is not that citizens lack information about what the government does, but that they filter existing information through pre-existing ideological biases and world views, can government transparency still contribute to better informed citizens and more accountable government? To answer these questions, the article first reviews the critiques of transparency that are particularly salient in a post-fact world: that it reduces trust in government and increases polarization in deliberation. It then discusses three possible solutions: less transparency, tailored transparency, and reasoned transparency. Drawing on deliberative democracy theory, the article concludes that to reclaim the value of transparency, public administration scholars and practitioners need to move from a narrow interpretation of transparency as access to information to a broader, more holistic one, that considers more explicitly the communicative aspects of transparency and its normative foundations….(More)”.

Social-media reform is flying blind

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chris Bail: “As Russia continues its ruthless war in Ukraine, pundits are speculating what social-media platforms might have done years ago to undermine propaganda well before the attack. Amid accusations that social media fuels political violence — and even genocide — it is easy to forget that Facebook evolved from a site for university students to rate each other’s physical attractiveness. Instagram was founded to facilitate alcohol-based gatherings. TikTok and YouTube were built to share funny videos.

The world’s social-media platforms are now among the most important forums for discussing urgent social problems, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID-19 and climate change. Techno-idealists continue to promise that these platforms will bring the world together — despite mounting evidence that they are pulling us apart.

Efforts to regulate social media have largely stalled, perhaps because no one knows what something better would look like. If we could hit ‘reset’ and redesign our platforms from scratch, could we make them strengthen civil society?

Researchers have a hard time studying such questions. Most corporations want to ensure studies serve their business model and avoid controversy. They don’t share much data. And getting answers requires not just making observations, but doing experiments.

In 2017, I co-founded the Polarization Lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We have created a social-media platform for scientific research. On it, we can turn features on and off, and introduce new ones, to identify those that improve social cohesion. We have recruited thousands of people to interact with each other on these platforms, alongside bots that can simulate social-media users.

We hope our effort will help to evaluate some of the most basic premises of social media. For example, tech leaders have long measured success by the number of connections people have. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that humans struggle to maintain meaningful relationships with more than 150 people. Experiments could encourage some social-media users to create deeper connections with a small group of users while allowing others to connect with anyone. Researchers could investigate the optimal number of connections in different situations, to work out how to optimize breadth of relationships without sacrificing depth.

A related question is whether social-media platforms should be customized for different societies or groups. Although today’s platforms seem to have largely negative effects on US and Western-Europe politics, the opposite might be true in emerging democracies (P. Lorenz-Spreen et al. Preprint at https://doi.org/hmq2; 2021). One study suggested that Facebook could reduce ethnic tensions in Bosnia–Herzegovina (N. Asimovic et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2022819118; 2021), and social media has helped Ukraine to rally support around the world for its resistance….(More)”.