I've been thinking about Applebaum's new article on this topic
The piece struggles with the difficulty of writing about systemic failures & social movements through the lens of individual stories. The individual, systemic, & institutional blur together
Described by the accused, it's a story about unexpected consequences for personal mistakes due to "changing social codes."
What if it's also process of fixing broken institutions? People often apply public pressure *in the quest for institutions that work*, as we see with #metoo
The impact of #metoo style movements on law enforcement is *key*. If Applebaum is right & it's anti-democratic mob justice, we should worry.
The other risk: mistakenly painting civic action as anti-democratic, especially when it actually strengthens democratic institutions!
How can we tell if online movements are anti-democratic or an important form of democratic revitalization?
Storytelling from the POV of abusers is fraught with risk. I will always remember a class on Coetzee's Disgrace when I was a student.
We were at a uni with a history of profs abusing power, and I was the only student able to call the protagonist a rapist en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace
If you want to learn more about how social movements make a difference, @mobilizingideas has published a great summary of the science of social movements and what they achieve:
According to this story: 1) If you're targeted for abuse, you can report it, which with consent grants WhatsApp ability to review it 2) They also analyze info other than encrypted messages to identify fraud/abuse
Although this is a remarkable endeavor of reporting, presenting Facebook/WhatsApp as liars actually makes it harder to have the important conversations about how to achieve both meaningful privacy and safety.
No encrypted messaging app can promise that only the parties in the conversation will ever know about the message.
If someone sends me a threatening message, I can tell anyone about it (including law enforcement or WhatsApp) without encryption being compromised, and that's fine
Excited to speak this Friday at @BUQuestrom on "Governing Feedback in Human-Algorithm Behavior"
I'll be there virtually and am missing my chance to be back in Boston, since I used to live on the same block!
If you're at BU, send me a note and I'll see if you can get an invite!
@BUQuestrom People are paying more attention to the challenge of explaining & intervening on mutual influence by humans and algorithms, especially during the pandemic.
This paper by a group of social and computer scientists outlines the stakes.
They ask "will a given algorithm for recommending friends—or one for selecting news items to display—promote or hinder the spread of misinformation online? We do not have access to a theory-driven, empirically verified body of literature to inform a response to such a question.
@LauraEdelson2@cyber4democracy We see Facebook’s actions against NYU as part of a long-standing pattern among large technology firms, all of whom have systematically undermined accountability and independent, public-interest research. Here are some of those stories:
In 2019 Facebook shut down a similar transparency tool created by the news organization ProPublica
So you want to be an activist/citizen/engaged scholar working on pressing societal questions:
- what does that actually look like?
- what challenges will you face?
- how do people overcome them?
1st: what do scholars actually do? Faculty have 3 jobs:
- research
- teaching
- service (often imagined as service to the university and to their field)
Problem: a public mission isn't part of the job, as Boyer points out in this inspiring essay: eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1097206
Boyer observes that:
- academics aren't incentivized by institutions to get out and contribute to society
- governments & other powerful orgs also prioritize conversations with lawyers, activists, and public intellectuals over academics, despite what we have to offer
What can we learn from social/computational science about policies to govern coordinated actors in a world of overlapping platforms and media?
Yesterday, I summarized a few points on how to understand those actors. Tonight, let's take a closer look at the ecosystem.
Most content/behavior policy debates focus on individual platforms, because that's where governance happens. But we live in a *transmedia* world, where civic life spans many media forms
An excellent case study in transmedia is @schock's (open access) Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets, which looks at the immigrant rights movement. The book illustrates a media ecology approach to understanding media practices linked to civic action mitpress.mit.edu/books/out-shad…
How can social / computational science help make sense of content moderation & platform policies? People shared ~30 questions over the last day. Over the next few days, I'll summarize scholarship & point to others doing important ongoing work
If you don't recognize the ecosystem of actors with money, connections, & influence, you can get distracted by what's visible on a single online platform.
@JessieNYC described structures of white nationalist power in her *2009* book on Cyber Racism