social media

Ghost Cities: Built but Never Inhabited

Curated on June 21, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Civic Data Design Lab at UrbanNext: “Ghost Cities are vacant neighborhoods and sometimes whole cities that were built but were never inhabited. Their existence is a physical manifestation of Chinese overdevelopment in real estate and the dependence on housing as an investment strategy. Little data exists which establishes the location and extent of these Ghost Cities in China. MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab developed a model using data scraped from Chinese social media sites and Baidu (Chinese Google Maps) to create one of the first maps identifying the locations of Chinese Ghost Cities….

Quantifying the extent and location of Ghost Cities is complicated by the fact that the Chinese government keeps a tight hold on data about sales and occupancy of buildings. Even local planners may have a hard time acquiring it. The Civic Data Design Lab developed a model to identify Ghost Cities based on the idea that amenities (grocery stores, hair salons, restaurants, schools, retail, etc.) are the mark of a healthy community and the lack of amenities might indicate locations where no one lives. Given the lack of openly available data in China, data was scraped from Chinese social media and websites, including Dianping (Chinese Yelp), Amap (Chinese Map Quest), Fang (Chinese Zillow), and Baidu (Chinese Google Maps) using openly accessible Application Programming Interfaces(APIs).

Using data scraped from social media sites in Chengdu and Shenyang, the model was tested using 300 m x 300 m grid cells marking residential locations. Each grid cell was given an amenity accessibility score based on the distance and clustering of amenities nearby. Residential areas that had a cluster of low scores were marked as Ghost Cities. The results were ground-truthed through site visits documenting the location using aerial photography from drones and interviews with local stakeholders.

The model worked well at documenting under-utilized residential locations in these Chinese cities, picking up everything from vacant housing and stalled construction to abandoned older residential locations, creating the first data set that marks risk in the Chinese real estate market. The research shows that data available through social media can help locate and estimate risk in the Chinese real estate market. Perhaps more importantly, however, identifying where these areas are concentrated can help city planners, developers and local citizens make better investment decisions and address the risk created by these under-utilized developments….(More)”.

When Technology Gets Ahead of Society

Curated on June 20, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tarun Khanna at Harvard Business Review: “Drones, originally developed for military purposes, weren’t approved for commercial use in the United States until 2013. When that happened, it was immediately clear that they could be hugely useful to a whole host of industries—and almost as quickly, it became clear that regulation would be a problem. The new technology raised multiple safety and security issues, there was no consensus on who should write rules to mitigate those concerns, and the knowledge needed to develop the rules didn’t yet exist in many cases. In addition, the little flying robots made a lot of people nervous.

Such regulatory, logistical, and social barriers to adopting novel products and services are very common. In fact, technology routinely outstrips society’s ability to deal with it. That’s partly because tech entrepreneurs are often insouciant about the legal and social issues their innovations birth. Although electric cars are subsidized by the federal government, Tesla has run afoul of state and local regulations because it bypasses conventional dealers to sell directly to consumers. Facebook is only now facing up to major regulatory concerns about its use of data, despite being massively successful with users and advertisers.

It’s clear that even as innovations bring unprecedented comfort and convenience, they also threaten old ways of regulating industries, running a business, and making a living. This has always been true. Thus early cars weren’t allowed to go faster than horses, and some 19th-century textile workers used sledgehammers to attack the industrial machinery they feared would displace them. New technology can even upend social norms: Consider how dating apps have transformed the way people meet.

Entrepreneurs, of course, don’t really care that the problems they’re running into are part of a historical pattern. They want to know how they can manage—and shorten—the period between the advent of a technology and the emergence of the rules and new behaviors that allow society to embrace its possibilities.

Interestingly, the same institutional murkiness that pervades nascent industries such as drones and driverless cars is something I’ve also seen in developing countries. And strange though this may sound, I believe that tech entrepreneurs can learn a lot from businesspeople who have succeeded in the world’s emerging markets.

Entrepreneurs in Brazil or Nigeria know that it’s pointless to wait for the government to provide the institutional and market infrastructure their businesses need, because that will simply take too long. They themselves must build support structures to compensate for what Krishna Palepu and I have referred to in earlier writings as “institutional voids.” They must create the conditions that will allow them to create successful products or services.

Tech-forward entrepreneurs in developed economies may want to believe that it’s not their job to guide policy makers and the public—but the truth is that nobody else can play that role. They may favor hardball tactics, getting ahead by evading rules, co-opting regulators, or threatening to move overseas. But in the long term, they’d be wiser to use soft power, working with a range of partners to co-create the social and institutional fabric that will support their growth—as entrepreneurs in emerging markets have done.…(More)”.

Wikipedia vandalism could thwart hoax-busting on Google, YouTube and Facebook

Curated on June 19, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Funke at Poynter: “For a brief moment, the California Republican Party supported Nazism. At least, that’s what Google said.

That’s because someone vandalized the Wikipedia page for the party on May 31 to list “Nazism” alongside ideologies like “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism” and “Fiscal conservatism.” The mistake was removed from search results, with Google clarifying to Vice News that the search engine had failed to catch the vandalism in the Wikipedia entry….

Google has long drawn upon the online encyclopedia for appending basic information to search results. According to the edit log for the California GOP page, someone added “Nazism” to the party’s ideology section around 7:40 UTC on May 31. The edit was removed within a minute, but it appears Google’s algorithm scraped the page just in time for the fake.

“Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” a Google spokesperson told Poynter in an email. “We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here.”…

According to Google, more than 99.9 percent of Wikipedia edits that show up in Knowledge Panels, which display basic information about searchable keywords at the top of results, aren’t vandalism. The user who authored the original edit to the California GOP’s page did not use a user profile, making them hard to track down.

That’s a common tactic among people who vandalize Wikipedia pages, a practice the nonprofit has documented extensively. But given the volume of edits that are made on Wikipedia — about 10 per second, with 600 new pages per day — and the fact that Facebook and YouTube are now pulling from them to provide more context to posts, the potential for and effect of abuse is high….(More)”.

Data Stewards: Data Leadership to Address 21st Century Challenges

Curated on June 14, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Post by Stefaan Verhulst: “…Over the last two years, we have focused on the opportunities (and challenges) surrounding what we call “data collaboratives.” Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership, in which information held by companies (or other entities) is shared with the public sector, civil society groups, research institutes and international organizations. …

For all its promise, the practice of data collaboratives remains ad hoc and limited. In part, this is a result of the lack of a well-defined, professionalized concept of data stewardship within corporations that has a mandate to explore ways to harness the potential of their data towards positive public ends.

Today, each attempt to establish a cross-sector partnership built on the analysis of private-sector data requires significant and time-consuming efforts, and businesses rarely have personnel tasked with undertaking such efforts and making relevant decisions.

As a consequence, the process of establishing data collaboratives and leveraging privately held data for evidence-based policy making and service delivery is onerous, generally one-off, not informed by best practices or any shared knowledge base, and prone to dissolution when the champions involved move on to other functions.

By establishing data stewardship as a corporate function, recognized and trusted within corporations as a valued responsibility, and by creating the methods and tools needed for responsible data-sharing, the practice of data collaboratives can become regularized, predictable, and de-risked….

To take stock of current practice and scope needs and opportunities we held a small yet in-depth kick-off event at the offices of the Cloudera Foundation in San Francisco on May 8th 2018 that was attended by representatives from Linkedin, Facebook, Uber, Mastercard, DigitalGlobe, Cognizant, Streetlight Data, the World Economic Forum, and Nethope — among others.

Four Key Take Aways

The discussions were varied and wide-ranging.

Several reflected on the risks involved — including the risks of NOT sharing or collaborating on privately held data that could improve people’s lives (and in some occasions save lives).

Others warned that the window of opportunity to increase the practice of data collaboratives may be closing — given new regulatory requirements and other barriers that may disincentivize corporations from engaging with third parties around their data.

Ultimately four key take aways emerged. These areas — at the nexus of opportunities and challenges — are worth considering further, because they help us better understand both the potential and limitations of data collaboratives….(More)”

I want your (anonymized) social media data

Curated on June 13, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anthony Sanford at The Conversation: “Social media sites’ responses to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and new European privacy regulations have given users much more control over who can access their data, and for what purposes. To me, as a social media user, these are positive developments: It’s scary to think what these platforms could do with the troves of data available about me. But as a researcher, increased restrictions on data sharing worry me.

I am among the many scholars who depend on data from social media to gain insights into people’s actions. In a rush to protect individuals’ privacy, I worry that an unintended casualty could be knowledge about human nature. My most recent work, for example, analyzes feelings people express on Twitter to explain why the stock market fluctuates so much over the course of a single day. There are applications well beyond finance. Other scholars have studied mass transit rider satisfaction, emergency alert systems’ function during natural disasters and how online interactions influence people’s desire to lead healthy lifestyles.

This poses a dilemma – not just for me personally, but for society as a whole. Most people don’t want social media platforms to share or sell their personal information, unless specifically authorized by the individual user. But as members of a collective society, it’s useful to understand the social forces at work influencing everyday life and long-term trends. Before the recent crises, Facebook and other companies had already been making it hard for legitimate researchers to use their data, including by making it more difficult and more expensive to download and access data for analysis. The renewed public pressure for privacy means it’s likely to get even tougher….

It’s true – and concerning – that some presumably unethical people have tried to use social media data for their own benefit. But the data are not the actual problem, and cutting researchers’ access to data is not the solution. Doing so would also deprive society of the benefits of social media analysis.

Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this dilemma. Anonymization of data can keep people’s individual privacy intact, while giving researchers access to collective data that can yield important insights.

There’s even a strong model for how to strike that balance efficiently: the U.S. Census Bureau. For decades, that government agency has collected extremely personal data from households all across the country: ages, employment status, income levels, Social Security numbers and political affiliations. The results it publishes are very rich, but also not traceable to any individual.

It often is technically possible to reverse anonymity protections on data, using multiple pieces of anonymized information to identify the person they all relate to. The Census Bureau takes steps to prevent this.

For instance, when members of the public access census data, the Census Bureau restricts information that is likely to identify specific individuals, such as reporting there is just one person in a community with a particularly high- or low-income level.

For researchers the process is somewhat different, but provides significant protections both in law and in practice. Scholars have to pass the Census Bureau’s vetting process to make sure they are legitimate, and must undergo training about what they can and cannot do with the data. The penalties for violating the rules include not only being barred from using census data in the future, but also civil fines and even criminal prosecution.

Even then, what researchers get comes without a name or Social Security number. Instead, the Census Bureau uses what it calls “protected identification keys,” a random number that replaces data that would allow researchers to identify individuals.

Each person’s data is labeled with his or her own identification key, allowing researchers to link information of different types. For instance, a researcher wanting to track how long it takes people to complete a college degree could follow individuals’ education levels over time, thanks to the identification keys.

Social media platforms could implement a similar anonymization process instead of increasing hurdles – and cost – to access their data…(More)” .

Data Detectives: More data and surveillance are transforming justice systems

Curated on June 13, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue by The Economist: “…the relationship between information and crime has changed in two ways, one absolute, one relative. In absolute terms, people generate more searchable information than they used to. Smartphones passively track and record where people go, who they talk to and for how long; their apps reveal subtler personal information, such as their political views, what they like to read and watch and how they spend their money. As more appliances and accoutrements become networked, so the amount of information people inadvertently create will continue to grow.

To track a suspect’s movements and conversations, police chiefs no longer need to allocate dozens of officers for round-the-clock stakeouts. They just need to seize the suspect’s phone and bypass its encryption. If he drives, police cars, streetlights and car parks equipped with automatic number-plate readers (ANPRs, known in America as automatic licence-plate readers or ALPRs) can track all his movements.

In relative terms, the gap between information technology and policy gapes ever wider. Most privacy laws were written for the age of postal services and fixed-line telephones. Courts give citizens protection from governments entering their homes or rifling through their personal papers. The law on people’s digital presence is less clear. In most liberal countries, police still must convince a judge to let them eavesdrop on phone calls.

But mobile-phone “metadata”—not the actual conversations, but data about who was called and when—enjoy less stringent protections. In 2006 the European Union issued a directive requiring telecom firms to retain customer metadata for up to two years for use in potential crime investigations. The European Court of Justice invalidated that law in 2014, after numerous countries challenged it in court, saying that it interfered with “the fundamental rights to respect for private life”. Today data-retention laws vary widely in Europe. Laws, and their interpretation, are changing in America, too. A case before the Supreme Court will determine whether police need a warrant to obtain metadata.

Less shoe leather

If you drive in a city anywhere in the developed world, ANPRs are almost certainly tracking you. This is not illegal. Police do not generally need a warrant to follow someone in public. However, people not suspected of committing a crime do not usually expect authorities to amass terabytes of data on every person they have met and every business visited. ANPRs offer a lot of that.

To some people, this may not matter. Toplines, an Israeli ANPR firm, wants to add voice- and facial-recognition to its Bluetooth-enabled cameras, and install them on private vehicles, turning every car on the road into a “mobile broadcast system” that collects and transmits data to a control centre that security forces can access. Its founder posits that insurance-rate discounts could incentivise drivers to become, in effect, freelance roving crime-detection units for the police, subjecting unwitting citizens to constant surveillance. In answer to a question about the implications of such data for privacy, a Toplines employee shrugs: Facebook and WhatsApp are spying on us anyway, he says. If the stream of information keeps people safer, who could object? “Privacy is dead.”

It is not. But this dangerously complacent attitude brings its demise ever closer….(More)”.

Data for Good: Unlocking Privately-Held Data to the Benefit of the Many

Curated on June 12, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alberto Alemanno in the European Journal of Risk Regulation: “It is almost a truism to argue that data holds a great promise of transformative resources for social good, by helping to address a complex range of societal issues, ranging from saving lives in the aftermath of a natural disaster to predicting teen suicides. Yet it is not public authorities who hold this real-time data, but private entities, such as mobile network operators and business card companies, and – with even greater detail – tech firms such as Google through its globally-dominant search engine, and, in particular, social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Besides a few isolated and self-proclaimed ‘data philanthropy’ initiatives and other corporate data-sharing collaborations, data-rich companies have historically shown resistance to not only share this data for the public good, but also to identify its inherent social, non-commercial benefit. How to explain to citizens across the world that their own data – which has been aggressively harvested over time – can’t be used, and not even in emergency situations? Responding to this unsettling question entails a fascinating research journey for anyone interested in how the promises of big data could deliver for society as a whole. In the absence of a plausible solution, the number of societal problems that won’t be solved unless firms like Facebook, Google and Apple start coughing up more data-based evidence will increase exponentially, as well as societal rejection of their underlying business models.

This article identifies the major challenges of unlocking private-held data to the benefit of society and sketches a research agenda for scholars interested in collaborative and regulatory solutions aimed at unlocking privately-held data for good….(More)”.

Charting a course to government by the crowd, for the crowd

Curated on June 10, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nils Röper at The Conversation: “It is a bitter irony that politicians lament the threat to democracy posed by the internet, instead of exploiting its potential to enhance the existing system. Hackers and bots may help to sway elections, but modern technology has allowed the power of the multitude to positively disrupt the world of business and beyond. Now, crowdsourcing should be allowed to shake up the lawmaking process to make democracies more participatory and efficient.

The crowd clearly can be harnessed, whether it is Apple outsourcing the creation of apps, Wikipedia amassing an encyclopedia of unprecedented magnitude, or National Geographic searching for the Tomb of Genghis Khan. If we can agree that the most important factor of a responsive democracy is participation, then there must be a way to capitalise on this collective intelligence.

In fact, political participation hasn’t been this easy since the first days of democracy in Athens 2,500 years ago. Modern social media can turn into a reality the utopian vision of direct civic engagement on a massive scale. Lawmaking can now be married to public consent through technology. The crowd can be unleashed.

Sharing a platform

Governments haven’t completely missed out. Iceland used crowdsourcing to include citizens in its constitutional reform beginning in 2010, while petition websites are increasingly common and have forced parliamentary debates in the UK. US federal agencies have initiated “national dialogues” on topics of public concern and, in many US municipalities, citizens can provide input on budget decisions online and follow instantaneously whether items make it into the budget.

These initiatives show promise in improving what goes into and what comes out of the process of government. However, they are on too small a scale to counter what many believe to be a period of fundamental democratic disenchantment. That is why government needs to throw its weight behind a full online system through which citizens can easily access all ongoing legislative initiatives and provide input during periods of public consultation. That is a challenge, but not mission impossible. Over 2016/2017 a little over 200 bills were introduced in the UK’s parliament.

It could put the power of participation in the hands of the people, and grant greater legitimacy to government. Through websites and apps, the public would be given an intuitive, one-stop shop for democracy, accessible from any device, and which allowed them to engage no matter where they were – on the beach or on the bus. Registered users would get notifications when new legislation was up for consultation. If the legislation were of interest, it could be bookmarked in order to stay updated.

Users would be able to comment on each paragraph of a draft. Moderators would curate the debate by removing irrelevant and inappropriate content and by continuously summarising the most important and common comments to head off an overflow of information. At the end of the consultation period, the moderators could summarise suggestions, concerns and praise in a memo available to policymakers and the public….(More)”.

Six or Seven Things Social Media Can Do For Democracy

Curated on June 6, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman: “I am concerned that we’ve not had a robust conversation about what we want social media to do for us.

We know what social media does for platform companies like Facebook and Twitter: it generates enormous masses of user-generated content that can be monetized with advertising, and reams of behavioral data that make that advertising more valuable. Perhaps we have a sense for what social media does for us as individuals, connecting us to distant friends, helping us maintain a lightweight awareness of each other’s lives even when we are not co-present. Or perhaps it’s a machine for disappointment and envy, a window into lives better lived than our own. It’s likely that what social media does for us personally is a deeply idiosyncratic question, dependent on our own lives, psyches and decisions, better discussed with our therapists than spoken about in generalities.

I’m interested in what social media should do for us as citizens in a democracy. We talk about social media as a digital public sphere, invoking Habermas and coffeehouses frequented by the bourgeoisie. Before we ask whether the internet succeeds as a public sphere, we ought to ask whether that’s actually what we want it to be.

I take my lead here from journalism scholar Michael Schudson, who took issue with a hyperbolic statement made by media critic James Carey: “journalism as a practice is unthinkable except in the context of democracy; in fact, journalism is usefully understood as another name for democracy.” For Schudson, this was a step too far. Journalism may be necessary for democracy to function well, but journalism by itself is not democracy and cannot produce democracy. Instead, we should work to understand the “Six or Seven Things News Can Do for Democracy”, the title of an incisive essay Schudson wrote to anchor his book, Why Democracies Need an Unloveable Press….

In this same spirit, I’d like to suggest six or seven things social media can do for democracy. I am neither as learned or as wise as Schudson, so I fully expect readers to offer half a dozen functions that I’ve missed. In the spirit of Schudson’s public forum and Benkler’s digital public sphere, I offer these in the hopes of starting, not ending, a conversation.

Social media can inform us…

Social media can amplify important voices and issues…

Social media can be a tool for connection and solidarity…

Social media can be a space for mobilization…

Social media can be a space for deliberation and debate…

Social media can be a tool for showing us a diversity of views and perspectives…

Social media can be a model for democratically governed spaces…(More).