Paper by Evelyn Douek: “The Meta Oversight Board was established to oversee one of the most expansive systems of speech regulation in history and to exercise independent review over “some of the most difficult and significant
content decisions” Meta makes. As a voluntary exercise in selfregulation, the Board exercises power over Meta only insofar and for as long as Meta permits it to. And yet, in its inaugural members’ first threeyear term, the Board has in many ways defied its skeptics. The Board has established itself as a regular part of conversations about content moderation governance, receiving significant academic and media attention. It has also instantiated meaningful reforms of Meta’s content moderation systems, and shed light on otherwise completely opaque decisionmaking processes within one of the world’s most powerful
speech regulators. But the Board has also consistently shied away from answering the hardest and most controversial questions that come before it—that is, the very questions it was set up to solve. Although the Board purported to evaluate Meta’s rules under international human rights law, it has almost entirely failed to engage with the necessary the normative question of how international law principles created to constrain governmental power over expression should apply to private content moderation systems. This Essay argues that the Board’s institutional incentives and desire for influence have made it prioritize consensus and simplicity over engagement with the fundamental normative questions that the quest for principled content moderation decisionmaking raises. The result is a tremendous missed opportunity that holds important lessons for the design of future content moderation oversight bodies…(More)”
Governance for Human Social Flourishing
Paper by Jenna Bednar: “Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests. In this essay, I propose a framework for human social flourishing to foster a public policy that rebuilds our connections and care for one another. It is based on four pillars-dignity, community, beauty, and sustainability-and emphasizes not just inclusiveness but participation, and highlights the importance of policy-making at the local level in the rebuilding of prosocial norms.
By many aggregate measures, the human condition has improved spectacularly.1 Life expectancy, gdp per capita, opportunities for self-expression, and the probability of not living in poverty have all surged over the last half century. This period of remarkable advances has scaffolded a neoliberal political economy that prizes self-reliance and prosperity. Yet for all of the successes produced by the prosperity frame, it has proven incapable of meeting the challenges of climate change and bungled a pandemic response, turning what might have been a moment to celebrate scientific achievement and human commitment to care for one another into a time of greater polarization and science skepticism. Racism persists and we are unable to lift people out of lives of despair.2
These failures call into question our focus on economic prosperity metrics like gdp and the constellation of institutions that supports that goal.3 Economic prosperity has a far from perfect correlation with the less material and measurable goals that create meaningful lives: feeling needed by and belonging to a community, having purposeful work and agency in one’s life, and having opportunities to feel satisfaction and joy.
By ignoring these other dimensions, the prosperity frame creates other harms. Its valuation of self-reliance subverts the human drive to mutualism.4 It casts government as a grabbing hand instead of an engine for collective action. In downplaying the importance of our relationships with one another, it undermines the social norms that support democracy, capitalism, and other social institutions.
For these reasons, many now suggest that our political economy needs to expand its frame beyond economic growth to include collective flourishing. But what is flourishing, and what would it take to reorient our political economy to value it?…(More)”.
Science and Ethics of “Curing” Misinformation
Paper by Isabelle Freiling et al: “A growing chorus of academicians, public health officials, and other science communicators have warned of what they see as an ill-informed public making poor personal or electoral decisions. Misinformation is often seen as an urgent new problem, so some members of these communities have pushed for quick but untested solutions without carefully diagnosing ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions. This article argues that attempts to “cure” public opinion that are inconsistent with best available social science evidence not only leave the scientific community vulnerable to long-term reputational damage but also raise significant ethical questions. It also suggests strategies for communicating science and health information equitably, effectively, and ethically to audiences affected by it without undermining affected audiences’ agency over what to do with it…(More)”.
Expanding anticipatory governance to legislatures: The emergence and global diffusion of legislature-based future institutions
Paper by Vesa Koskimaa et al: “Global challenges from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised legitimate questions about the ability of democratic decision-makers to prepare for such crises. Gradually, countries throughout the world have established state-level foresight mechanisms. Most operate under the executive branch, but increasingly such institutions have started to emerge also in legislatures, expanding anticipatory governance towards democratic publics. Drawing on a global survey, official documents and expert interviews, this article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the emergence and diffusion of legislature-based future institutions. We show that, despite the early emergence of a pacesetting institution, such committees have spread slowly and only very recently, and they still exist in only a few countries. For diffusion, the findings highlight the importance of the pacesetter, semi-formal networks of like-minded individuals and personalized agency. Most especially, the role of Members of Parliament (MPs) seems crucial, suggesting that expanding anticipatory governance to legislatures is largely in the hand of legislators…(More)”.
Privacy Decisions are not Private: How the Notice and Choice Regime Induces us to Ignore Collective Privacy Risks and what Regulation should do about it
Paper by Christopher Jon Sprigman and Stephan Tontrup: “For many reasons the current notice and choice privacy framework fails to empower individuals in effectively making their own privacy choices. In this Article we offer evidence from three novel experiments showing that at the core of this failure is a cognitive error. Notice and choice caters to a heuristic that people employ to make privacy decisions. This heuristic is meant to judge trustworthiness in face-to-face-situations. In the online context, it distorts privacy decision-making and leaves potential disclosers vulnerable to exploitation.
From our experimental evidence exploring the heuristic’s effect, we conclude that privacy law must become more behaviorally aware. Specifically, privacy law must be redesigned to intervene in the cognitive mechanisms that keep individuals from making better privacy decisions. A behaviorally-aware privacy regime must centralize, standardize and simplify the framework for making privacy choices.
To achieve these goals, we propose a master privacy template which requires consumers to define their privacy preferences in advance—doing so avoids presenting the consumer with a concrete counterparty, and this, in turn, prevents them from applying the trust heuristic and reduces many other biases that affect privacy decision-making. Our data show that blocking the heuristic enables consumers to consider relevant privacy cues and be considerate of externalities their privacy decisions cause.
The master privacy template provides a much more effective platform for regulation. Through the master template the regulator can set the standard for automated communication between user clients and website interfaces, a facility which we expect to enhance enforcement and competition about privacy terms…(More)”.
Government Audits
Paper by Martina Cuneo, Jetson Leder-Luis & Silvia Vannutelli: “Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government’s ability to observe it and enforce punishments, making auditing most effective in middling state-capacity environments. Consistent with this theory, we survey all the existing credibly causal studies and show that government audits seem to have positive effects mostly in middle-state-capacity environments like Brazil. We present new empirical evidence from American city governments, a high-capacity and low-impropriety environment. Using a previously unexplored threshold in federal audit rules and a dynamic regression discontinuity framework, we estimate the effects of these audits on American city finance and find no marginal effect of audits…(More)”.
Use of Population-Level Administrative Data in Developmental Science
Paper by Barry J. Milne: “Population-level administrative data—data on individuals’ interactions with administrative systems (e.g., health, criminal justice, and education)—have substantially advanced our understanding of life-course development. In this review, we focus on five areas where research using these data has made significant contributions to developmental science: (a) understanding small or difficult-to-study populations, (b) evaluating intergenerational and family influences, (c) enabling estimation of causal effects through natural experiments and regional comparisons, (d) identifying individuals at risk for negative developmental outcomes, and (e) assessing neighborhood and environmental influences. Further advances will be made by linking prospective surveys to administrative data to expand the range of developmental questions that can be tested; supporting efforts to establish new linked administrative data resources, including in developing countries; and conducting cross-national comparisons to test findings’ generalizability. New administrative data initiatives should involve consultation with population subgroups including vulnerable groups, efforts to obtain social license, and strong ethical oversight and governance arrangements…(More)”.
The Economics of Digital Privacy
Paper by Avi Goldfarb & Verina F. Que: “There has been increasing attention to privacy in the media and in regulatory discussions. This is a consequence of the increased usefulness of digital data. The literature has emphasized the benefits and costs of digital data flows to consumers and firms. The benefits arise in the form of data-driven innovation, higher quality products and services that match consumer needs, and increased profits. The costs relate to intrinsic and instrumental values of privacy. Under standard economic assumptions, this framing of a cost-benefit tradeoff might suggest little role for regulation beyond ensuring consumers are appropriately informed in a robust competitive environment. The empirical literature thus far has focused on this direct cost-benefit assessment, examining how privacy regulations have affected various market outcomes. However, an increasing body of theory work emphasizes externalities related to data flows. These externalities, both positive and negative, suggest benefits to the targeted regulation of digital privacy…(More)”.
A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours
Paper by Maèva Flayelle et al: “Gaming disorder was officially recognized as a disorder of addictive behaviour in the International Classification of Diseases 11th revision in 2019. Since then, other types of potentially problematic online behaviour have been discussed as possible candidates for inclusion in the psychiatric nosography of addictive disorders. Understanding these problematic online behaviours requires further study of the specific psychological mechanisms involved in their formation and maintenance. An important but underdeveloped line of research has examined the ways in which technology design features might influence users’ capacity to exert control over how they engage with and use websites and applications, thereby amplifying uncontrolled, and perhaps addictive, use. In this Review, we critically examine the available research on the relationships between technology design features and the loss of control and harms experienced by those who engage in online video gaming, online gambling, cybersexual activities, online shopping, social networking and on-demand TV streaming. We then propose a theory-driven general taxonomy of the design features of online applications that might promote uncontrolled and problematic online behaviours…(More)”.
Common Data Environment: Bridging the Digital Data Sharing Gap Among Construction Organizations
Paper by Yong Jia Tan et al: “Moving into the 21st century, digital data sharing is pertinent towards the construction industry technology advancement. Preeminent digital data sharing revolves around construction organizations’ effective data management and digital data utilization within the Common Data Environment (CDE). Interconnected data is the heart of the construction industry’s future digital utility. Albeit the progressive digitalization uptake, the absence of integrated digital data collaboration efforts due to working-in-silo facet impedes the Malaysian construction organizations capability to capitalize the technology potential at best. To identify the types of digital data and the potential of digital data sharing through Common Data Environment within the Malaysian construction industry, this study adopts thematic analysis methodology on five in-depth case study on CDE adoption among construction organizations. The presented case study further identified through snowball sampling method. The analysis reveals the three main data categories created by construction organization in CDE are graphical data, non-graphical data, and associated construction project documents. Findings further identifies eight potentials of CDE data sharing namely improved efficiency, productivity, collaboration, effective decision making, cost and time savings, security, and accessibility. Ultimately, this study presents insights and explorative avenues for construction stakeholders to transcend advanced technology maximization and boost the industry productivity gain…(More)”.