Could footnotes be the key to winning the disinformation wars?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karin Wulf at the Washington Post: “We are at a distinctive point in the relationship between information and democracy: As the volume of information dissemination has grown, so too have attempts by individuals and groups to weaponize disinformation for commercial and political purposes. This has contributed to fragmentation, political polarization, cynicism, and distrust in institutions and expertise, as a recent Pew Research Center report found. So what is the solution?

Footnotes.

Outside of academics and lawyers, few people may think about footnotes once they leave school. Indeed, there is a hackneyed caricature about footnotes as pedantry, the purview of tweedy scholars blinking as we emerge from fluorescent-lit libraries into the sun — not the concern of regular folks. A recent essay in the Economist even laid some of Britain’s recent woes at the feet of historians who spend too much time “fiddling with footnotes.”

But nothing could be further from the truth. More than ever, we need what this tool provides: accountability and transparency. “Fiddling with footnotes” is the kind of hygienic practice that our era of information pollution needs — and needs to be shared as widely as possible. Footnotes are for everyone.

Though they began as an elite practice, footnotes became aligned historically with modern democracy itself. Citation is rooted in the 17th-century emergence of enlightenment science, which asked for evidence rather than faith as key to supporting a conclusion. It was an era when scientific empiricism threatened the authority of government and religious institutions and newly developing institutional science publications, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, for example, began to use citations for evidence and reference. In one of Isaac Newton’s contributions to the journal in 1673, a reply to queries about his work on light and the color spectrum, he used citations to his initial publication on the subject (“see no. 80. Page 3075”).

By the 18th century, and with more agile printing, the majority of scientific publications included citations, and the bottom of the page was emerging as the preferred placement. Where scientific scholarship traveled, humanists were not far behind. The disdain of French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes for any discipline without rigorous methods was part of the prompt for historians to embrace citations….(More)”.

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Claire Wardle at Scientific American: “…Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s. But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale. Journalists in the Philippines started raising flags as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, buoyed by intensive Facebook activity. This was followed by unexpected results in the Brexit referendum in June and then the U.S. presidential election in November—all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.

During the past three years the discussion around the causes of our polluted information ecosystem has focused almost entirely on actions taken (or not taken) by the technology companies. But this fixation is too simplistic. A complex web of societal shifts is making people more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy. Trust in institutions is falling because of political and economic upheaval, most notably through ever widening income inequality. The effects of climate change are becoming more pronounced. Global migration trends spark concern that communities will change irrevocably. The rise of automation makes people fear for their jobs and their privacy.

Bad actors who want to deepen existing tensions understand these societal trends, designing content that they hope will so anger or excite targeted users that the audience will become the messenger. The goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give credibility to that original message.

Most of this content is designed not to persuade people in any particular direction but to cause confusion, to overwhelm and to undermine trust in democratic institutions from the electoral system to journalism. And although much is being made about preparing the U.S. electorate for the 2020 election, misleading and conspiratorial content did not begin with the 2016 presidential race, and it will not end after this one. As tools designed to manipulate and amplify content become cheaper and more accessible, it will be even easier to weaponize users as unwitting agents of disinformation….(More)”.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Source: Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking, by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan. Council of Europe, October 2017

Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien: “This book reconnects everyday justice with social rights. It rediscovers human rights in the ‘small places’ of housing, education, health and social care, where administrative justice touches the citizen every day, and in doing so it re-imagines administrative justice and expands its democratic reach. The institutions of everyday justice – ombuds, tribunals and mediation – rarely herald their role in human rights frameworks, and never very loudly. For the most part, human rights and administrative justice are ships that pass in the night. Drawing on design theory, the book proposes to remedy this alienation by replacing current orthodoxies, not least that of ‘user focus’, with more promising design principles of community, network and openness. Thus re-imagined, the future of both administrative justice and social rights is demosprudential, firmly rooted in making response to citizen grievance more democratic and embedding legal change in the broader culture….(More)”.

Today’s Problems, Yesterday’s Toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Beth Noveck and Rod Glover: “Governments of all political stripes are being buffeted by technological and societal change. There is a pervasive sense globally that governments are not doing as well as they ought to solve our biggest policy problems. Pressure has intensified to provide better services and experiences, and deliver measurable results that improve people’s lives. The failure to meet our most pressing challenges help to explain why in Australia, trust in government is at an all-time low. New technologies, however, bring with them the opportunity to rethink how the public sector in Australia might solve public problems by building a workforce with diverse and innovative skills, especially how to use data and actively reach out beyond the public sector itself.

Commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), this report builds on a pioneering survey of almost 400 public servants in Australia and New Zealand, dozens of interviews with senior practitioners, and original research into how governments around the world are training public officials in innovative practices.

The survey findings show that public servants are eager to embrace skills for innovation but receive inadequate training in them….(More)”

Envisioning the ‘Sharing City’: Governance Strategies for the Sharing Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sebastian Vith, Achim Oberg, Markus A. Höllerer and Renate E. Meyer: “Recent developments around the sharing economy bring to the fore questions of governability and broader societal benefit—and subsequently the need to explore effective means of public governance, from nurturing, on the one hand, to restriction, on the other. As sharing is a predominately urban phenomenon in modern societies, cities around the globe have become both locus of action and central actor in the debates over the nature and organization of the sharing economy. However, cities vary substantially in the interpretation of potential opportunities and challenges, as well as in their governance responses. Building on a qualitative comparative analysis of 16 leading global cities, our findings reveal four framings of the sharing economy: ‘societal endangerment,’ ‘societal enhancement,’ ‘market disruption,’ and ‘ecological transition.’ Such framings go hand in hand with patterned governance responses: although there is considerable heterogeneity in the combination of public governance strategies, we find specific configurations of framings and public governance strategies. Our work reflects the political and ethical debates on various economic, social, and moral issues related to the sharing economy, and contributes to a better understanding of the field-level institutional arrangements—a prerequisite for examining moral behavior of sharing economy organizations….(More)”.

Politics, Bureaucracy and Successful Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Inaugural lecture by K.J. Meier: “One of the major questions, perhaps the major question, in the field of public administration is how to reconcile the need for bureaucracy with the democratic process. Bureaucracies after all are not seen as democratic institutions and operate based on hierarchy and expertise rather than popular will (see Mosher 1968). I take a distinctly minority view in the field, seeing bureaucracy not so much as a threat to democracy in existing mature democracies but as a necessary precondition for the existence of democracy in modern society (Meier 1997).

Democracy is a system of governance with high transactions costs that seeks democratic ideals of representation, equity, and fairness with only modest, if any, concern for efficiency. Effective bureaucracies are the institutions that produce the outcomes that build public support for democracy and in a sense generate the surplus that allows democratic processes to survive and flourish. Although bureaucracies may have none of the trappings of democracy internally, their role in contributing to democratic governance means that they should also be considered democratic institutions. Scholars, politicians, and citizens need to be concerned about preserving and protecting bureaucracy just as they seek to preserve and protect our official institutions of democracy.

Within the general theme of bureaucracy and democracy, this lecture will address two major concerns – (1) the failure of politics which severs the crucial link between voters and elected officials and poses major challenges to bureaucrats seeking to administer effective programs, and (2) the subsequent need for bureaucracy to also become an institution that represents the public. Within this concern about bureaucratic representation, the lecture will address how bureaucracies can assess the needs of citizens, and more narrowly how representative bureaucracy can be and is instrumental to the bureaucracy, and finally the limits of symbolic representation within bureaucracies….(More)”.

Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Tony Evans and Peter Hupe: “Actors in public situations are in some ways subject to control while also exercising freedom. Discretion in contemporary societies is increasingly characterized by cross-cutting systems of control as well as by conflicting conceptions of knowledge and expertise. There is also the paradox of the autonomous individual empowered by social media while simultaneously being subject to its algorithms and surveillance. Narrow disciplinary conceptions of discretion—whether they come from law, economics, sociology or politics—are of limited value in understanding the contemporary dynamics of discretion. This chapter describes these phenomena and also seeks to capture the operation of discretion in different settings while examining its role and evaluating its use. It is argued that we need to recognize developing debates within disciplines, cross-fertilization between them and innovative developments at the margins of those disciplines. That enables the conceptualization of the natures, operations and evaluations of discretion as a context-sensitive and dynamic idea….(More)”.

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)”.

The Practice of Civic Tech: Tensions in the Adoption and Use of New Technologies in Community Based Organizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Gordon and Rogelio Alejandro Lopez in Media and Communication: “This article reports on a qualitative study of community based organizations’ (CBOs) adoption of information communication technologies (ICT). As ICTs in the civic sector, otherwise known as civic tech, get adopted with greater regularity in large and small organizations, there is need to understand how these technologies shape and challenge the nature of civic work. Based on a nine-month ethnographic study of one organization in Boston and additional interviews with fourteen other organizations throughout the United States, the study addresses a guiding research question: how do CBOs reconcile the changing (increasingly mediated) nature of civic work as ICTs, and their effective adoption and use for civic purposes, increasingly represent forward-thinking, progress, and innovation in the civic sector?—of civic tech as a measure of “keeping up with the times.”

From a sense of top-down pressures to innovate in a fast-moving civic sector, to changing bottom-up media practices among community constituents, our findings identify four tensions in the daily practice of civic tech, including: 1) function vs. representation, 2) amplification vs. transformation, 3) grassroots vs. grasstops, and 4) youth vs. adults. These four tensions, derived from a grounded theory approach, provide a conceptual picture of a civic tech landscape that is much more complicated than a suite of tools to help organizations become more efficient. The article concludes with recommendations for practitioners and researchers….(More)”.

Governance sinkholes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Geoff Mulgan: “Governance sinkholes appear when shifts in technology, society and the economy throw up the need for new arrangements. Each industrial revolution has created many governance sinkholes – and prompted furious innovation to fill them. The fourth industrial revolution will be no different. But most governments are too distracted to think about what to do to fill these holes, let alone to act. This blog sets out my diagnosis – and where I think the most work is needed to design new institutions….

It’s not too hard to get a map of the fissures and gaps – and to see where governance is needed but is missing. There are all too many of these now.

Here are a few examples. One is long-term care, currently missing adequate financing, regulation, information and navigation tools, despite its huge and growing significance. The obvious contrast is with acute healthcare, which, for all its problems, is rich in institutions and governance.

A second example is lifelong learning and training. Again, there is a striking absence of effective institutions to provide funding, navigation, policy and problem solving, and again, the contrast with the institution-rich fields of primary, secondary and tertiary education is striking. The position on welfare is not so different, as is the absence of institutions fit for purpose in supporting people in precarious work.

I’m particularly interested in another kind of sinkhole: the absence of the right institutions to handle data and knowledge – at global, national and local levels – now that these dominate the economy, and much of daily life. In field after field, there are huge potential benefits to linking data sets and connecting artificial and human intelligence to spot patterns or prevent problems. But we lack any institutions with either the skills or the authority to do this well, and in particular to think through the trade-offs between the potential benefits and the potential risks….(More)”.