United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

United Nations: “Technological advances have revolutionized communications, connecting people on a previously unthinkable scale. They have supported communities in times of crisis, elevated marginalized voices and helped mobilize global movements for racial justice and gender equality.

Yet these same advances have enabled the spread of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech at an unprecedented volume, velocity and virality, risking the integrity of the information ecosystem.

New and escalating risks stemming from leaps in AI technologies have made strengthening information integrity one of the urgent tasks of our time.

This clear and present global threat demands coordinated international action.

The United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity show us another future is possible…(More)”

The tools of global spycraft have changed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “A few years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected CCTV cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.

The attack was not revealed by an Indian or Western intelligence agency, but by Recorded Future, a firm in Somerville, Massachusetts. Christopher Ahlberg, its boss, claims the company has knowledge of more c2 nodes than anyone in the world. “We use that to bust Chinese and Russian intel operations constantly.” It also has billions of stolen log-in details found on the dark web (a hard-to-access part of the internet) and collects millions of images daily. “We know every UK company, every Chinese company, every Indian company,” says Mr Ahlberg.  Recorded Future has 1,700 clients in 75 countries, including 47 governments.

The Chinese intrusion and its discovery were a microcosm of modern intelligence. The internet, and devices connected to it, is everywhere, offering opportunities galore for surveillance, entrapment and covert operations. The entities monitoring it, and acting on it, are often private firms, not government agencies…(More)” See Special Issue on Watching the Watchers

Satisfaction with democracy has declined in recent years in high-income nations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research Center: “..Since 2017, we’ve regularly asked people in 12 economically advanced democracies how satisfied they are with the state of their democracy. Overall, satisfaction declined in these countries between 2017 and 2019 before bouncing back in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trend chart over time showing that satisfaction with democracy across 12 high-income, democratic countries is down in recent years

Since 2021, however, people in these nations have become more frustrated with their democracies. A median of 49% across these 12 nations were satisfied with the way their democracy was working in 2021; today, just 36% hold this view. (The 2024 survey was conducted before the European Parliament elections in June.)

Trend chart over time showing declines in satisfaction with democracy since 2021 across 9 countries

Satisfaction is lower today than it was in 2021 in nine of the 12 nations where we have asked the question consistently. This includes six countries where satisfaction has dropped by double digits: Canada, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Satisfaction has not increased in any of the 12 countries surveyed…(More)”

From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation

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Paper by Josh Lerner: “Anti-democratic movements are surging around the world, threatening to undermine elections and replace them with oligarchy. Pro-democracy movements mainly focus on defending elections, even though most people think that elections alone are inadequate. While elections dominate current thinking about democracy, the history and future of democracy is much broader. For over 5,000 years, people have built up competing waves of electoral, direct, deliberative, and participatory democracy. We are now seeing a transition, however, from waves to ecosystems. Rather than seeking one single solution to our ailing democracy, a new generation of democracy reformers is weaving together different democratic practices into balanced democratic ecosystems. This white paper provides a roadmap for this emerging next stage of democratic innovation. It reviews the limitations of elections, the different waves of democratic innovation and efforts to connect them, and key challenges and strategies for building healthy ecosystems of democracy…(More)”.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Renée DiResta: “…investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
 
By revealing the machinery and dynamics of the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, DiResta vividly illustrates the way propagandists deliberately undermine belief in the fundamental legitimacy of institutions that make society work. This alternate system for shaping public opinion, unexamined until now, is rewriting the relationship between the people and their government in profound ways. It has become a force so shockingly effective that its destructive power seems limitless. Scientific proof is powerless in front of it. Democratic validity is bulldozed by it. Leaders are humiliated by it. But they need not be.
 
With its deep insight into the power of propagandists to drive online crowds into battle—while bearing no responsibility for the consequences—Invisible Rulers not only predicts those consequences but offers ways for leaders to rapidly adapt and fight back…(More)”.

The Deliberative Turn in Democratic Theory

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Book by Antonino Palumbo: “Thirty years of developments in deliberative democracy (DD) have consolidated this subfield of democratic theory. The acquired disciplinary prestige has made theorist and practitioners very confident about the ability of DD to address the legitimacy crisis experienced by liberal democracies at present at both theoretical and practical levels. The book advance a critical analysis of these developments that casts doubts on those certainties — current theoretical debates are reproposing old methodological divisions, and are afraid to move beyond the minimalist model of democracy advocated by liberal thinkers; democratic experimentation at the micro-level seems to have no impact at the macro-level, and remain sets of isolated experiences. The book indicates that those defects are mainly due to the liberal minimalist frame of reference within which reflection in democratic theory and practice takes place. Consequently, it suggests to move beyond liberal understandings of democracy as a game in need of external rules, and adopt instead a vision of democracy as a self-correcting metagame…(More)”.

Why the future of democracy could depend on your group chats

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nathan Schneider: “I became newly worried about the state of democracy when, a few years ago, my mother was elected president of her neighborhood garden club.

Her election wasn’t my worry – far from it. At the time, I was trying to resolve a conflict on a large email group I had created. Someone, inevitably, was being a jerk on the internet. I had the power to remove them, but did I have the right? I realized that the garden club had in its bylaws something I had never seen in nearly all the online communities I had been part of: basic procedures to hold people with power accountable to everyone else.

The internet has yet to catch up to my mother’s garden club.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s, he made an observation that social scientists have seen over and over since: Democracy at the state and national levels depends on everyday organizations like that garden club. He called them “schools” for practicing the “general theory of association.” As members of small democracies, people were learning to be citizens of a democratic country.

How many people experience those kinds of schools today?

People interact online more than offline nowadays. Rather than practicing democracy, people most likely find themselves getting suspended from a Facebook group they rely on with no reason given or option to appeal. Or a group of friends join a chat together, but only one of them has the ability to change its settings. Or people see posts from Elon Musk inserted into their mentions on X, which he owns. All of these situations are examples of what I call “implicit feudalism.”…(More)”.

Generative AI and Democracy: Impacts and Interventions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Demos (UK): “This week’s election announcement has set all political parties firmly into campaign mode and over the next 40 days the public will be weighing up who will get their vote on 4th July.

This democratic moment, however, will take place against the backdrop of a new and largely untested threat; generative-AI. In the lead up to the election, the strength of our electoral integrity is likely to be tested by the spread of AI-generated content and deepfakes – an issue that over 60% of the public are concerned about, according to recent Demos and Full Fact polling.

Our new paper takes a look at the near and long-term solutions at our disposal for bolstering the resilience of our democratic institutions amidst the modern technological age. We explore the top four pressing mechanisms by which generative-AI challenges the stability of democracy, and how to mitigate them…(More)”.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Alex Edmans: “Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.

Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions…(More)”.

AI and Epistemic Risk for Democracy: A Coming Crisis of Public Knowledge?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Wihbey: “As advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are developed and deployed, core zones of information and knowledge that support democratic life will be mediated more comprehensively by machines. Chatbots and AI agents may structure most internet, media, and public informational domains. What humans believe to be true and worthy of attention – what becomes public knowledge – may increasingly be influenced by the judgments of advanced AI systems. This pattern will present profound challenges to democracy. A pattern of what we might consider “epistemic risk” will threaten the possibility of AI ethical alignment with human values. AI technologies are trained on data from the human past, but democratic life often depends on the surfacing of human tacit knowledge and previously unrevealed preferences. Accordingly, as AI technologies structure the creation of public knowledge, the substance may be increasingly a recursive byproduct of AI itself – built on what we might call “epistemic anachronism.” This paper argues that epistemic capture or lock-in and a corresponding loss of autonomy are pronounced risks, and it analyzes three example domains – journalism, content moderation, and polling – to explore these dynamics. The pathway forward for achieving any vision of ethical and responsible AI in the context of democracy means an insistence on epistemic modesty within AI models, as well as norms that emphasize the incompleteness of AI’s judgments with respect to human knowledge and values…(More)” – See also: Steering Responsible AI: A Case for Algorithmic Pluralism