The Internet Freedom League: How to Push Back Against the Authoritarian Assault on the Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Richard A. Clarke And Rob Knake in Foreign Affairs: “The early days of the Internet inspired a lofty dream: authoritarian states, faced with the prospect of either connecting to a new system of global communication or being left out of it, would choose to connect. According to this line of utopian thinking, once those countries connected, the flow of new information and ideas from the outside world would inexorably pull them toward economic openness and political liberalization. In reality, something quite different has happened. Instead of spreading democratic values and liberal ideals, the Internet has become the backbone of authoritarian surveillance states all over the world. Regimes in China, Russia, and elsewhere have used the Internet’s infrastructure to build their own national networks. At the same time, they have installed technical and legal barriers to prevent their citizens from reaching the wider Internet and to limit Western companies from entering their digital markets. 

But despite handwringing in Washington and Brussels about authoritarian schemes to split the Internet, the last thing Beijing and Moscow want is to find themselves relegated to their own networks and cut off from the global Internet. After all, they need access to the Internet to steal intellectual property, spread propaganda, interfere with elections in other countries, and threaten critical infrastructure in rival countries. China and Russia would ideally like to re-create the Internet in their own images and force the world to play by their repressive rules. But they haven’t been able to do that—so instead they have ramped up their efforts to tightly control outside access to their markets, limit their citizens’ ability to reach the wider Internet, and exploit the vulnerability that comes with the digital freedom and openness enjoyed in the West.

The United States and its allies and partners should stop worrying about the risk of authoritarians splitting the Internet. Instead, they should split it themselves, by creating a digital bloc within which data, services, and products can flow freely…(More)”.

Social Media and Polarization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Arthur Campbell, C. Matthew Leister and Yves Zenou: “Because of its impacts on democracy, there is an important debate on whether the recent trends towards greater use of social media increases or decreases (political) polarization. One challenge for understanding this issue is how social media affects the equilibrium prevalence of different types of media content. We address this issue by developing a model of a social media network where there are two types of news content: mass-market (mainstream news) and niche-market (biased or more “extreme” news) and two different types of individuals who have a preference for recommending one or other type of content. We find that social media will amplify the prevalence of mass-market content and may result in it being the only type of content consumed. Further, we find that greater connectivity and homophily in the social media network will concurrently increase the prevalence of the niche market content and polarization. We then study an extension where there are two lobbying agents that can and wish to influence the prevalence of each type of content. We find that the lobbying agent in favor of the niche content will invest more in lobbying activities. We also show that lobbying activity will tend to increase polarization, and that this effect is greatest in settings where polarization would be small absent of lobbying activity. Finally, we allow individuals to choose the degree of homophily amongst their connections and demonstrate that niche-market individuals exhibit greater homophily than the mass-market ones, and contribute more to polarization….(More)”.

Battling Information Illiteracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Paul T. Jaeger and Natalie Greene Taylor on “How misinformation affects the future of policy…“California wildfires are being magnified and made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!”

This tweet was a statement by a US president about a major event, suggesting changes to existing policies. It is also not true. Every element of the tweet—other than the existence of California, the Pacific Ocean, and wildfires—is false. And it was not a simple misunderstanding, because a tweet from Trump the next day reiterated these themes and blamed the state’s governor personally for holding back water to fight the fires.

So how does this pertain to information policy, since the tweet is about environmental policy issues? The answer is in the information. The use and misuse of information in governance and policymaking may be turning into the biggest information policy issue of all. And as technologies and methods of communication evolve, a large part of engaging with and advocating for information policy will consist of addressing the new challenges of teaching information literacy and behavior.

Misinformation literacy

The internet has made it easy for people to be information illiterate in new ways. Anyone can create information now—regardless of quality—and get it in front of a large number of people. The ability of social media to spread information as fast as possible, and to as many people as possible, challenges literacy, as does the ability to manipulate images, sounds, and video with ease….(More)”

In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support as Thermostatic Opinion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christopher Claassen: “Public support has long been thought crucial for the survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy moreover appears to create its own demand: the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces a public who supports democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this paper finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion….(More)”.

Truth and Consequences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sophia Rosenfeld at The Hedgehog Review: “Conventional wisdom has it that for democracy to work, it is essential that we—the citizens—agree in some minimal way about what reality looks like. We are not, of course, all required to think the same way about big questions, or believe the same things, or hold the same values; in fact, it is expected that we won’t. But somehow or other, we need to have acquired some very basic, shared understanding about what causes what, what’s broadly desirable, what’s dangerous, and how to characterize what’s already happened.

Some social scientists call this “public knowledge.” Some, more cynically, call it “serviceable truth” to emphasize its contingent, socially constructed quality. Either way, it is the foundation on which democratic politics—in which no one person or institution has sole authority to determine what’s what and all claims are ultimately revisable—is supposed to rest. It is also imagined to be one of the most exalted products of the democratic process. And to a certain degree, this peculiar, messy version of truth has held its own in modern liberal democracies, including the United States, for most of their history.

Lately, though, even this low-level kind of consensus has come to seem elusive. The issue is not just professional spinners talking about “alternative facts” or the current US president bending the truth and spreading conspiracy theories at every turn, from mass rallies to Twitter rants. The deeper problem stems from the growing sense we all have that, today, even hard evidence of the kind that used to settle arguments about factual questions won’t persuade people whose political commitments have already led them to the opposite conclusion. Rather, citizens now belong to “epistemic tribes”: One person’s truth is another’s hoax or lie. Just look at how differently those of different political leanings interpret the evidence of global warming or the conclusions of the Mueller Report on Russian involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Moreover, many of those same people are also now convinced that the boundaries between truth and untruth are, in the end, as subjective as everything else. It is all a matter of perception and spin; nothing is immune, and it doesn’t really matter.

Headed for a Cliff

So what’s happened? Why has assent on even basic factual claims (beyond logically demonstrable ones, like 2 + 2 = 4) become so hard to achieve? Or, to put it slightly differently, why are we—meaning people of varied political persuasions—having so much trouble lately arriving at any broadly shared sense of the world beyond ourselves, and, even more, any consensus on which institutions, methods, or people to trust to get us there? And why, ultimately, do so many of us seem simply to have given up on the possibility of finding some truths in common?

These are questions that seem especially loaded precisely because of the traditionally close conceptual and historical relationship between truth and democracy as social values….(More)”.

From City to Nation: Digital government in Argentina, 2015–2018

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tanya Filer, Antonio Weiss and Juan Cacace: “In 2015, voters in Argentina elected Mauricio Macri of the centre-right Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as their new President, following a tightly contested race. Macri inherited an office wrought with tensions: an unstable economy; a highly polarised population; and an increasing weariness towards the institutions of governance overall. In this context, his administration hoped to harness the possibilities of digital transformation to make citizens’ interactions with the State more efficient, more accountable, and ‘friendlier’.

Following a successful tenure in the City of Buenos Aires, where Macri had been Mayor, Minister Andrés Ibarra and a digital government team were charged with the project of national digital transformation, taking on projects from a single ‘whole-of-government’ portal to a mobile phone application designed to reduce the incidence of gender-based violence against women. Scaling up digitisation from the city to the national level was, by all accounts, a challenge. By 2018, Argentina had won global acclaim for its progress on key aspects of digital government, but also increasingly recognised the difficulties of digitisation at the national scale. It identified the need, as observed by the OECD, for an overarching strategic plan to manage the scale, diversity and politics of federal-level digital transformation. Based on interviews with key stakeholders, this case discusses the country’s digital modernisation agenda from 2015 to 2018, with a primary focus on service provision projects. It examines the challenges faced in terms of politics and technology, and the lessons that Argentina’s experience offers….(More)”

Co-Creation Of Public Services: Why And How

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Osimo and Francesco Mureddu: “Co-creation” and “design thinking” are trendy themes – the topic of innumerable conferences and a growing number of academic papers. But how do we turn co-creation into a reality for Europe’s 508 million citizens? In Co-Creation of Public Services: Why and How, Co-VAL’s new Policy Brief, co-authors Francesco Mureddu and David Osimo propose a ten-step roadmap for delivering genuinely user-centric digital government. The authors argue that it is time to put co-creation at the core of government functioning.

According to the authors, “today, co-creation is a mature subject. There is an extended theoretical and applied research effort underway, led in many places by members of the Co-VAL consortium, whose research informed the new policy brief.  And there is a solid professional community, ready to deliver, and staffed by people with clearly identified job profiles, such as “user researcher” and “service designer.” There are even success stories of entire countries that scaled up design thinking at national level, such as Italy’s Government Commissioner and Digital Transformation Team and the United Kingdom’s legendary Government Digital Services.”…(More)”.

Three Companies Innovating Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Harder at Beyond Voting: “….Below, we’ll explore three websites that allow citizens to communicate better with their governing systems.

Countable.us makes it easier to know what your representatives are voting on, and to tell them how you think they should vote. For each upcoming bill, you can suggest a yea or nay to your representative via email or can even send video messages. Each bill also has a lively debate section so the yeas and nays can share, upvote their opinions and learn from each other. The result is seeing more informed and better arguments in favor of your preferences, and perhaps more importantly, against.

IssueVoter.us is similar to Countable in that you give your opinions to your representatives. But IssueVoter puts a different spin on it by giving you a “scorecard” highlighting how closely your representatives votes align to your preferences. The site is still new, so the functionality is not as great as it could be, but the concept is worth note.

Bang the Table focuses on engagement at a local level. They create civic engagement dashboards for cities that allow residents to stay informed and share opinions about city projects. They offer several levels of engagement, from simply dispensing information for the city to engaging citizens in collective discussions and decision making. Fayetteville, AR used them to make the engagement page Speak Up Fayetteville, which informed citizens about projects such as the Cultural Arts Corridor.

While none of these are driving massive change just yet, it’s easy to imagine how they could be enormously impactful if embraced at scale. First, they will all have to figure out how to design websites which are appealing enough to bring the masses, yet meaningful enough to benefit decision-makers. We’re stuck in the in-between phase where the internet is the most powerful communication medium, but we haven’t learned to utilize it for productive democratic purposes….(More)”.

Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, and Natasha Tusikov: “This book explores the interconnected ways in which the control of knowledge has become central to the exercise of political, economic, and social power. Building on the work of International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange, this multidisciplinary volume features experts from political science, anthropology, law, criminology, women’s and gender studies, and Science and Technology Studies, who consider how the control of knowledge is shaping our everyday lives. From “weaponised copyright” as a censorship tool, to the battle over control of the internet’s “guts,” to the effects of state surveillance at the Mexico–U.S. border, this book offers a coherent way to understand the nature of power in the twenty-first century…(More)”.

Disinformation Rated As Significant of a Problem As Gun Violence and Terrorism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute for Public Relations: “Sixty-three percent of Americans view disinformation—deliberately biased and misleading information—as a “major” problem in society, on par with gun violence (63%) and terrorism (66%), according to the 2019 Institute for Public Relations Disinformation in Society Report.

The 2019 IPR Disinformation in Society Report surveyed 2,200 adults to determine the prevalence of disinformation, who is responsible for sharing disinformation, the level of trust in different information sources, and the parties responsible for combatting disinformation.

“One surprising finding was how significant of a problem both Republicans and Democrats rated disinformation,” said Dr. Tina McCorkindale, APR, President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations. “Unfortunately, only a few organizations outside of the media literacy and news space devote resources to help fix it, including many of the perceived culprits responsible for spreading disinformation.”

More than half (51%) of the respondents said they encounter disinformation at least once a day, while 78% said they see it once a week. Four in five adults (80%) said they are confident in their ability to recognize false news and information. Additionally, nearly half of Americans (47%) said they “often” or “always” go to other sources to see if news and information are accurate….(More)”.