The Design of Digital Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gianluca Sgueo: “Ever-stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design are transforming our relationship with democratic decision-making. When we are online, or when we use digital products and services, we tend to focus more on certain factors like speed of service and user-friendliness, and to overlook the costs – both for ourselves and others. As a result, a widening gap separates our expectations of everything related to digitalization – including government – and the actual practice of democratic governance. Democratic regulators, unable to meet citizens’ demands for tangible, fast and gratifying returns, are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention, despite using the most cutting-edge technologies.

This book explores various aspects of the relationship between democracy, technology and entertainment. These include, on the one hand, the role that digital technology has in strengthening our collective intelligence, nurturing empathic relations between citizens and democratic institutions, and supporting processes of political aggregation, deliberation and collaboration. On the other hand, they comprise the challenges accompanying digital technology for representation, transparency and inclusivity in democratic decision-making.

The book’s main argument is that digital democratic spaces should be redesigned to narrow the gap between the expectations and outcomes of democratic decision-making. It suggests abandoning the notion of digital participatory rights as being fast and easy to enjoy. It also refutes the notion that digital democratic decision-making can only be effective when it delivers rapid and successful responses to the issues of the day, regardless of their complexity.

Ultimately, the success or failure of digital democracy will depend on the ability of public regulators to design digital public spaces with a commitment to complexity, so as to make them appealing, but also effective at engaging citizens…(More)”.

Tyranny of the Minority

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

In this revelatory book, Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all…(More)”.

Changing Facebook’s algorithm won’t fix polarization, new study finds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Naomi Nix, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Cat Zakrzewski: “For years, regulators and activists have worried that social media companies’ algorithms were dividing the United States with politically toxic posts and conspiracies. The concern was so widespread that in 2020, Meta flung open troves of internal data for university academics to study how Facebook and Instagram would affect the upcoming presidential election.

The first results of that research show that the company’s platforms play a critical role in funneling users to partisan information with which they are likely to agree. But the results cast doubt on assumptions that the strategies Meta could use to discourage virality and engagement on its social networks would substantially affect people’s political beliefs.

“Algorithms are extremely influential in terms of what people see on the platform, and in terms of shaping their on-platform experience,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and one of the leaders on the research project, said in an interview.

“Despite the fact that we find this big impact in people’s on-platform experience, we find very little impact in changes to people’s attitudes about politics and even people’s self-reported participation around politics.”

The first four studies, which were released on Thursday in the journals Science and Nature, are the result of a unique partnership between university researchers and Meta’s own analysts to study how social media affects political polarization and people’s understanding and opinions about news, government and democracy. The researchers, who relied on Meta for data and the ability to run experiments, analyzed those issues during the run-up to the 2020 election. The studies were peer-reviewed before publication, a standard procedure in science in which papers are sent out to other experts in the field who assess the work’s merit.

As part of the project, researchers altered the feeds of thousands of people using Facebook and Instagram in fall of 2020 to see if that could change political beliefs, knowledge or polarization by exposing them to different information than they might normally have received. The researchers generally concluded that such changes had little impact.

The collaboration, which is expected to be released over a dozen studies, also will examine data collected after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tucker said…(More)”.

Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Patrick Walters: “News deserts” have proliferated across the U.S. Half of the nation’s more than 3,140 counties now have only one newspaper—and nearly 200 of them have no paper at all. Of the publications that survive, researchers have found many are “ghosts” of their former selves.

Journalism has problems nationally: CNN announced hundreds of layoffs at the end of 2022, and National Geographic laid off the last of its staff writers this June. In the latter month the Los Angeles Times cut 13 percent of its newsroom staff. But the crisis is even more acute at the local level, with jobs in local news plunging from 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020. Closures and cutbacks often leave people without reliable sources that can provide them with what the American Press Institute has described as “the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their daily lives.”

Americans need to understand that journalism is a vital public good—one that, like roads, bridges and schools, is worthy of taxpayer support. We are already seeing the disastrous effects of otherwise allowing news to disintegrate in the free market: namely, a steady supply of misinformation, often masquerading as legitimate news, and too many communities left without a quality source of local news. Former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has a called this a “crisis of American democracy.”

The terms “crisis” and “collapse” have become nearly ubiquitous in the past decade when describing the state of American journalism, which has been based on a for-profit commercial model since the rise of the “penny press” in the 1830s. Now that commercial model has collapsed amid the near disappearance of print advertising. Digital ads have not come close to closing the gap because Google and other platforms have “hoovered up everything,” as Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Journalism at Columbia University, told the Nieman Journalism Lab in a 2018 interview. In June the newspaper chain Gannett sued Google’s parent company, alleging it has created an advertising monopoly that has devastated the news industry.

Other journalism models—including nonprofits such as MinnPost, collaborative efforts such Broke in Philly and citizen journalism—have had some success in fulfilling what Lewis Friedland of the University of Wisconsin–Madison called “critical community information needs” in a chapter of the 2016 book The Communication Crisis in America, and How to Fix It. Friedland classified those needs as falling in eight areas: emergencies and risks, health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, civic information and political information. Nevertheless, these models have proven incapable of fully filling the void, as shown by the dearth of quality information during the early years of the COVID pandemic. Scholar Michelle Ferrier and others have worked to bring attention to how news deserts leave many rural and urban areas “impoverished by the lack of fresh, daily local news and information,” as Ferrier wrote in a 2018 article. A recent study also found evidence that U.S. judicial districts with lower newspaper circulation were likely to see fewer public corruption prosecutions.

A growing chorus of voices is now calling for government-funded journalism, a model that many in the profession have long seen as problematic…(More)”.

Russia Is Trying to Leave the Internet and Build Its Own

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Timmy Broderick: “Last week the Russian government tried to disconnect its Internet infrastructure from the larger global Web. This test of Russia’s “sovereign Internet” seemingly failed, causing outages that suggest the system is not ready for practical use.

“Sovereign Internet is not really a whole different Internet; it is more like a project that uses various tools,” says Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at the international digital-rights nonprofit Access Now. “It involves technology like deep packet inspection, which allows major filtering of the Internet and gives governments the ability to throttle certain connections and websites.” By cutting off access to sites such as Western social media platforms, the Russian government could restrict residents from viewing any source of information other than the country’s accepted channels of influence.

This method of curtailing digital freedom goes beyond Russia: other countries are also attempting to develop their own nationwide Internet. And if successful, these endeavors could fragment the World Wide Web. Scientific American talked with Krapiva over Zoom about the implications of this latest test, the motive behind Russia’s actions and the ways the push for a sovereign Internet affect the digital rights of all users…(More)”.

Three approaches to re-design digital public spaces 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Gianluca Sgueo: “The underlying tenet of so-called “human centred-design” is a public administration capable of delivering a satisfactory (even gratifying) digital experience to every user. Public services, however, are still marked by severe qualitative asymmetries, both nationally and supranationally. In this article we discuss the key shortcomings of digital public spaces, and we explore three approaches to re-design such spaces with the aim to widen the existing gaps separating the ideal from the actual rendering of human-centred digital government…(More)”.

Will Democracies Stand Up to Big Brother?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Simon Johnson, Daron Acemoglu and Sylvia Barmack: “Rapid advances in AI and AI-enhanced surveillance tools have created an urgent need for international norms and coordination to set sensible standards. But with oppressive authoritarian regimes unlikely to cooperate, the world’s democracies should start preparing to play economic hardball…Fiction writers have long imagined scenarios in which every human action is monitored by some malign centralized authority. But now, despite their warnings, we find ourselves careening toward a dystopian future worthy of George Orwell’s 1984. The task of assessing how to protect our rights – as consumers, workers, and citizens – has never been more urgent.

One sensible proposal is to limit patents on surveillance technologies to discourage their development and overuse. All else being equal, this could tilt the development of AI-related technologies away from surveillance applications – at least in the United States and other advanced economies, where patent protections matter, and where venture capitalists will be reluctant to back companies lacking strong intellectual-property rights. But even if such sensible measures are adopted, the world will remain divided between countries with effective safeguards on surveillance and those without them. We therefore also need to consider the legitimate basis for trade between these emergent blocs.

AI capabilities have leapt forward over the past 18 months, and the pace of further development is unlikely to slow. The public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was the generative-AI shot heard round the world. But just as important has been the equally rapid increase in governments and corporations’ surveillance capabilities. Since generative AI excels at pattern matching, it has made facial recognition remarkably accurate (though not without some major flaws). And the same general approach can be used to distinguish between “good” and problematic behavior, based simply on how people move or comport themselves.

Such surveillance technically leads to “higher productivity,” in the sense that it augments an authority’s ability to compel people to do what they are supposed to be doing. For a company, this means performing jobs at what management considers to be the highest productivity level. For a government, it means enforcing the law or otherwise ensuring compliance with those in power.

Unfortunately, a millennium of experience has established that increased productivity does not necessarily lead to improvements in shared prosperity. Today’s AI-powered surveillance allows overbearing managers and authoritarian political leaders to enforce their rules more effectively. But while productivity may increase, most people will not benefit…(More)”

Digital Freedoms in French-Speaking African Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by AFD: “As digital penetration increases in countries across the African continent, its citizens face growing risks and challenges. Indeed, beyond facilitated access to knowledge such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to leisure-related tools such as Youtube, and to sociability such as social networks, digital technology offers an unprecedented space for democratic expression. 

However, these online civic spaces are under threat. Several governments have enacted vaguely-defined laws, allowing for random arrests.

Several countries have implemented repressive practices restricting freedom of expression and access to information. This is what is known as “digital authoritarianism”, which is on the rise in many countries.

This report takes stock of digital freedoms in 26 French-speaking African countries, and proposes concrete actions to improve citizen participation and democracy…(More)”

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Book by Jeff Jarvis: “The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power…(More)”

Shallowfakes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by James R. Ostrowski: “…This dystopian fantasy, we are told, is what the average social media feed looks like today: a war zone of high-tech disinformation operations, vying for your attention, your support, your compliance. Journalist Joseph Bernstein, in his 2021 Harper’s piece “Bad News,” attributes this perception of social media to “Big Disinfo” — a cartel of think tanks, academic institutions, and prestige media outlets that spend their days spilling barrels of ink into op-eds about foreign powers’ newest disinformation tactics. The technology’s specific impact is always vague, yet somehow devastating. Democracy is dying, shot in the chest by artificial intelligence.

The problem with Big Disinfo isn’t that disinformation campaigns aren’t happening but that claims of mind-warping, AI-enabled propaganda go largely unscrutinized and often amount to mere speculation. There is little systematic public information about the scale at which foreign governments use deepfakes, bot armies, or generative text in influence ops. What little we know is gleaned through irregular investigations or leaked documents. In lieu of data, Big Disinfo squints into the fog, crying “Bigfoot!” at every oak tree.

Any machine learning researcher will admit that there is a critical disconnect between what’s possible in the lab and what’s happening in the field. Take deepfakes. When the technology was first developed, public discourse was saturated with proclamations that it would slacken society’s grip on reality. A 2019 New York Times op-ed, indicative of the general sentiment of this time, was titled “Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe What We See.” That same week, Politico sounded the alarm in its article “‘Nightmarish’: Lawmakers brace for swarm of 2020 deepfakes.” A Forbes article asked us to imagine a deepfake video of President Trump announcing a nuclear weapons launch against North Korea. These stories, like others in the genre, gloss over questions of practicality…(More)”.