Paper by Andrea Geraci, Mattia Nardotto, Tommaso Reggiani and FabioSabatini: “We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user’s line from the network’s node serving the area. Merging information on the topology of the network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital from 1997 to 2017, we show that access to fast Internet caused a significant decline in civic and political engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration crowded out several dimensions of social capital….(More)”.
Controversy Mapping: A Field Guide
Book by Tommaso Venturini, and Anders Kristian Munk: “As disputes concerning the environment, the economy, and pandemics occupy public debate, we need to learn to navigate matters of public concern when facts are in doubt and expertise is contested.
Controversy Mapping is the first book to introduce readers to the observation and representation of contested issues on digital media. Drawing on actor-network theory and digital methods, Venturini and Munk outline the conceptual underpinnings and the many tools and techniques of controversy mapping. They review its history in science and technology studies, discuss its methodological potential, and unfold its political implications. Through a range of cases and examples, they demonstrate how to chart actors and issues using digital fieldwork and computational techniques. A preface by Richard Rogers and an interview with Bruno Latour are also included.
A crucial field guide and hands-on companion for the digital age, Controversy Mapping is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as activists, journalists, citizens, and decision makers…(More)”.
How to avoid sharing bad information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Abby Ohlheiser at MIT Technology Review: “The fast-paced online coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday followed a pattern that’s become familiar in other recent crises that have unfolded around the world. Photos, videos, and other information are posted and reshared across platforms much faster than they can be verified.
The result is that falsehoods are mistaken for truth and amplified, even by well-intentioned people. This can help bad actors to terrorize innocent civilians or advance disturbing ideologies, causing real harm.
Disinformation has been a prominent and explicit part of the Russian government’s campaign to justify the invasion. Russia falsely claimed that Ukrainian forces in Donbas, a city in the southeastern part of the country that harbors a large number of pro-Russian separatists, were planning violent attacks, engaging in antagonistic shelling, and committing genocide. Fake videos of those nonexistent attacks became part of a domestic propaganda campaign. (The US government, meanwhile, has been working to debunk and “prebunk” these lies.)
Meanwhile, even people who are not part of such government campaigns may intentionally share bad, misleading, or false information about the invasion to promote ideological narratives, or simply to harvest clicks, with little care about the harm they’re causing. In other cases, honest mistakes made amid the fog of war take off and go viral….
Your attention matters …
First, realize that what you do online makes a difference. “People often think that because they’re not influencers, they’re not politicians, they’re not journalists, that what they do [online] doesn’t matter,” Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, told me in 2020. But it does matter. Sharing dubious information with even a small circle of friends and family can lead to its wider dissemination.
… and so do your angry quote tweets and duets.
While an urgent news story is developing, well-meaning people may quote, tweet, share, or duet with a post on social media to challenge and condemn it. Twitter and Facebook have introduced new rules, moderation tactics, and fact-checking provisions to try to combat misinformation. But interacting with misinformation at all risks amplifying the content you’re trying to minimize, because it signals to the platform that you find it interesting. Instead of engaging with a post you know to be wrong, try flagging it for review by the platform where you saw it.
Stop.
Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert, developed a method for evaluating online information that he calls SIFT: “Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.” When it comes to news about Ukraine, he says, the emphasis should be on “Stop”—that is, pause before you react to or share what you’re seeing….(More)”.
The Summit for Democracy commitments are out—now what?
Article by Norman Eisen, Mario Picon, Robin J. Lewis, Renzo Falla, and Lilly Blumenthal: “On February 14, 2022, two months after the first Summit for Democracy, the U.S. Department of State released written commitments from 56 governments focused on strengthening democracy, combatting corruption, and defending human rights. Now the post-summit Year of Action can begin in earnest. As two of us discussed in a post right after the Summit, for the event to achieve its objectives, civil society, the private sector, and other good governance champions must work with and hold governments accountable for the implementation of concrete, measurable, and meaningful commitments.
From our initial survey, we observe significant variation in terms of the specificity and nature of commitments published thus far. Here, we offer a brief snapshot of the distribution of countries with published commitments, the range of those commitments, and their significance. Our initial reactions are preliminary; this post offers a roadmap for the deeper reading and analysis of the commitments that we and many others will undertake.
The countries that have submitted written commitments to date fall along the spectrum of governance regimes, as defined by the recently released Democracy Index 2021 from the Economist Intelligence Unit. 53 of 167 countries featured in the index provided written commitments with clear over-representation of those classified as full democracies—18 out of 21 full democracies submitted commitments. Meanwhile, 26 out of 53 countries considered flawed democracies submitted commitments. An even smaller group of hybrid regimes (that is, ones that combine democratic and autocratic features; 8 out of 34 countries) and a minuscule proportion of countries under what are considered authoritarian regimes (1 out of 59 countries) responded to the call for written commitments.
Among these submissions, the nature of the commitments varies. Most countries offer some commitments on the domestic front, but many, particularly the full democracies, focus on the international arena. As examples, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s commitments include “organizing elections within constitutional deadlines,” while New Zealand’s include a pledge of “1 million NZD to support anti-corruption within the Pacific region.”…(More)”.
Russian disinformation frenzy seeds groundwork for Ukraine invasion
Zachary Basu and Sara Fischer at Axios: “Russia is testing its agility at weaponizing state media to win backing at home, in occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and with sympathizers abroad for a war of aggression.
The big picture: State media has pivoted from accusing the West of hysterical warnings about a non-existent invasion to pumping out minute-by-minute coverage of the tensions.
Zoom in: NewsGuard, a misinformation tech firm, identified three of the most common false narratives being propagated by Russian state media like RT, Sputnik News, and TASS:
- The West staged a coup in 2014 to overthrow the Ukrainian government
- Ukrainian politics is dominated by Nazi ideology
- Ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s Donbas region have been subjected to genocide
Between the lines: Social media platforms have been on high alert for Russian disinformation that would violate their policies but have less control over private messaging, where some propaganda efforts have moved to avoid detection.
- A Twitter spokesperson notes: “As we do around major global events, our safety and integrity teams are monitoring for potential risks associated with conflicts to protect the health of the platform.”
- YouTube’s threat analysis group and trust and safety teams have also been closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine. The platform’s policies ban misleading titles, thumbnails or descriptions that trick users into believing the content is something it is not….(More)”.
This Is the Difference Between a Family Surviving and a Family Sinking
Article by Bryce Covert: “…The excitement around policymaking is almost always in the moments after ink dries on a bill creating something new. But if a benefit fails to reach the people it’s designed for, it may as well not exist at all. Making government benefits more accessible and efficient doesn’t usually get the spotlight. But it’s often the difference between a family getting what it needs to survive and falling into hardship and destitution. It’s the glue of our democracy.
President Biden appears to have taken note of this. Late last year, he issued an executive order meant to improve the “customer experience and service delivery” of the entire federal government. He put forward some ideas, including moving Social Security benefit claims and passport renewals online, reducing paperwork for student loan forgiveness and certifying low-income people for all the assistance they qualify for at once, rather than making them seek out benefits program by program. More important, he shifted the focus of government toward whether or not the customers — that’s us — are having a good experience getting what we deserve.
It’s a direction all lawmakers, from the federal level down to counties and cities, should follow.
One of the biggest barriers to government benefits is all of the red tape to untangle, particularly for programs that serve low-income people. They were the ones wrangling with the I.R.S.’s nonfiler portal while others got their payments automatically. Benefits delivered through the tax code, which flow so easily that many people don’t think of them as government benefits at all, mostly help the already well-off. Programs for the poor, on the other hand, tend to be bloated with barriers like income tests, work requirements and in-person interviews. It’s not just about applying once, either; many require people to continually recertify, going through the process over and over again.
The hassle doesn’t just cost time and effort. It comes with a psychological cost. “You get mad at the D.M.V. because it takes hours to do something that should only take minutes,” Pamela Herd, a sociologist at Georgetown, said. “These kind of stresses can be really large when you’re talking about people who are on a knife’s edge in terms of their ability to pay their rent or feed their children.”…(More)”.
The Behavioral Code
Book by Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine: “Why do most Americans wear seatbelts but continue to speed even though speeding fines are higher? Why could park rangers reduce theft by removing “no stealing” signs? Why was a man who stole 3 golf clubs sentenced to 25 years in prison?
Some laws radically change behavior whereas others are consistently ignored and routinely broken. And yet we keep relying on harsh punishment against crime despite its continued failure.
Professors Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine draw on decades of research to uncover the behavioral code: the root causes and hidden forces that drive human behavior and our responses to society’s laws. In doing so, they present the first accessible analysis of behavioral jurisprudence, which will fundamentally alter how we understand the connection between law and human behavior.
The Behavioral Code offers a necessary and different approach to battling crime and injustice that is based in understanding the science of human misconduct—rather than relying on our instinctual drive to punish as a way to shape behavior. The book reveals the behavioral code’s hidden role through illustrative examples like:
• The illusion of the US’s beloved tax refund
• German walls that “pee back” at public urinators
• The $1,000 monthly “good behavior” reward that reduced gun violence
• Uber’s backdoor “Greyball” app that helped the company evade Seattle’s taxi regulators
• A $2.3 billion legal settlement against Pfizer that revealed how whistleblower protections fail to reduce corporate malfeasance
• A toxic organizational culture playing a core role in Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal
• How Peter Thiel helped Hulk Hogan sue Gawker into oblivion…(More)”.
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media
Book by Jacob Mchangama: A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today. Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.
In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders—from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists—Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes.
Meticulously researched and deeply humane, Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained from this principle—and how much we stand to lose without it…(More)”.
OECD Report on Public Communication: The Global Context and the Way Forward
OECD Report: “…The first OECD Report on Public Communication: The Global Context and the Way Forward examines the public communication structures, mandates and practices of centres of governments and ministries of health from 46 countries, based on the 2020 Understanding Public Communication surveys. It analyses how this important government function contributes to better policies and services, greater citizen trust, and, ultimately, stronger democracies in an increasingly complex information environment. It looks at the role public communication can play in responding to the challenges posed by the spread of mis- and disinformation and in building more resilient media and information ecosystems. It also makes the case for a more strategic use of communication by governments, both to pursue policy objectives and promote more open governments, by providing an extensive mapping of trends, gaps and lessons learned. Finally, it highlights pioneering efforts to move towards the professionalisation of the government communication function and identifies areas for further research to support this transition….(More)”.
Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us
Book by Congressman Ro Khanna: “… offers a revolutionary roadmap to facing America’s digital divide, offering greater economic prosperity to all. In Khanna’s vision, “just as people can move to technology, technology can move to people. People need not be compelled to move from one place to another to reap the benefits offered by technological progress” (from the foreword by Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics).
In the digital age, unequal access to technology and the revenue it creates is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States. There is an economic gulf between those who have struck gold in the tech industry and those left behind by the digital revolution; a geographic divide between those in the coastal tech industry and those in the heartland whose jobs have been automated; and existing inequalities in technological access—students without computers, rural workers with spotty WiFi, and plenty of workers without the luxury to work from home.
Dignity in the Digital Age tackles these challenges head-on and imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people all across the country without uprooting them. Congressman Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley offers a vision for democratizing digital innovation to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities. Instead of being subject to tech’s reshaping of our economy, Representative Khanna argues that we must channel those powerful forces toward creating a more healthy, equal, and democratic society.
Born into an immigrant family, Khanna understands how economic opportunity can change the course of a person’s life. Anchored by an approach Khanna refers to as “progressive capitalism,” he shows how democratizing access to tech can strengthen every sector of economy and culture. By expanding technological jobs nationwide through public and private partnerships, we can close the wealth gap in America and begin to repair the fractured, distrusting relationships that have plagued our country for far too long.
Moving deftly between storytelling, policy, and some of the country’s greatest thinkers in political philosophy and economics, Khanna presents a bold vision we can’t afford to ignore. Dignity in a Digital Age is a roadmap to how we can seek dignity for every American in an era in which technology shapes every aspect of our lives…(More)”.