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We often think of the internet as a levelling, democratising technology - one that extends access to knowledge, education, cultural resources and markets.

But the net also reflects the social and economic divides we find offline.

Released this week, the second report of the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) reports on data covering four years of local online participation across three dimensions: online access, digital ability and affordability. Together, the three dimensions produce a digital inclusion score.

Since 2014, when data was first collected, Australia's overall digital inclusion score has improved by 3.8 points, from 52.7 to 56.5. In 2016-2017 alone, Australia's score rose by 2.0 points, from 54.5 to 56.5.

But there is still a "digital divide" between richer and poorer Australians. In 2017, people in our lowest income households (less than A$35,000 per year) have a digital inclusion score of 41.1, which is 27 points lower than those in the highest income households (above A$150,000) at 68.1.

Read more: Three charts on: the NBN and Australia's digital divide

When the three dimensions are considered separately, the measures of access and digital ability show consistent improvement from 2014 to 2017. However, the affordability measure has registered a decline since the 2014 national baseline (despite a slight bump in the past 12 months).

Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2017, Author provided

The cost of being connected

Affordability is a key dimension of digital inclusion.

Internet connectivity is important for accessing a wide range of education, government, health and business services. A decline in internet affordability means Australians on fixed or low incomes risk missing out on the benefits of digital technologies, and falling further behind more connected Australians.

The ADII shows that the cost of data - for both fixed and mobile internet - has declined over 2014-2017. These findings are in line with the ACCC's ongoing monitoring of prices for telecommunications services, which indicate an average decline in real terms of 3.1% since 2006.

However, when we measure affordability, we are not only looking at the cost of data; we are also interested in what proportion of household income is being dedicated to this service.

The affordability problem with the internet is different from other key household services where there are price pressures, such as electricity and water. The residential consumption of energy has grown very slowly over the last decade, but prices have increased sharply.

With the internet, while we are now getting more data for our dollar, our demand for data has dramatically increased.

A recent report from the Commonwealth Bureau of Communications and Arts Research (BCAR) tracks the affordability of phone and internet use since 2006.

The BCAR report finds that, overall, phone and internet affordability has improved since 2006. However, their data also shows that almost all the gains occurred before 2013, and that, since then, affordability has declined or flat-lined. Further, BCAR's data suggests that the lowest income households in Australia are now spending almost 10% of their incomes on internet and communications services. In contrast, middle income households are spending around 4% of their disposable income on these services, and for wealthier households, the figure is less than 2%.

Increasing reliance on mobile

Some recent and far-reaching changes in our use of technology are evident here: the extent to which the internet has become an integral part of everyday life, the fact that we are spending more time online, and we are doing an increasing range of activities online. In many households, we are also connecting with more devices.

However, the problem of affordability also reflects another recent development that the ADII highlights: one-in-five Australians now only accesses the internet through a mobile device - and we know that mobile data is considerably more expensive than fixed broadband on a per gigabyte basis.

Mobile-only use is correlated with a range of socioeconomic factors. The ADII data shows that people in low income households, those who are not employed, and those with low levels of education, are all more likely to be mobile-only.

Despite the benefits of mobile internet, this group is characterised by a relatively high degree of digital exclusion. In 2017, mobile-only users have an overall ADII score of 42.3, 14.2 points below the national average (56.5).

Digital inclusion is unequal

In the 2017 report, the ACT, followed by Victoria and New South Wales, are the highest scoring states in the overall digital inclusion score, as they were in 2016. Tasmania remains the lowest scoring, followed by South Australia.

Australian Digital Inclusion Index, Author provided

The lowest scoring socio-demographic groups in 2017 were households earning less than A$35,000 per year (overall score of 41.1), Australians aged over 65 (overall score of 42.9) and those with a disability (overall score of 47.0).

Read more: Regional Australia is crying out for equitable access to broadband

The ADII uses data derived from Roy Morgan Research's ongoing, weekly Single Source survey of 50,000 Australians. These are extensive, face-to-face interviews, dealing with information and technology, internet services, attitudes, and demographics.

Calculations for the ADII are based on a sub-sample of 16,000 responses in each 12 month period. The index is a score out of 100: the higher the overall score, the higher the level of digital inclusion. An ADII score of 100 represents a hypothetically perfect level of access, affordability, and digital ability. A score of 65 or over is regarded as high; one below 45 as low.

A focus on improvement

An increasing number of Australians are online, but although the costs of data and devices are falling, there is a risk that issues of affordability will leave some of our most vulnerable behind.

Australians with low levels of income, education and employment are consistently less connected than the rest of the population, with consequences that will become increasingly serious as the digital transformation of government and the economy proceeds.

As an increasing number of essential services and communications move online, the challenge to make the Australian internet more inclusive is becoming more urgent. Affordability is a key area for attention, but so is improving Australians' digital ability.

The issue of affordability suggests a range of possible areas for useful policy intervention. If we think it important to subsidise essential utilities such as electricity for low-income Australians, we may need to consider whether an allowance for internet access for essential services might also be necessary.

For the large number of lower-income Australians who rely entirely on mobile devices for internet connections, we will also need to consider new ways to support digital inclusion. These could include unmetered access to essential health and social services, and the further development of secure, public access wi-fi.

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Lack of internet affordability may worsen Australia's digital divide: new report

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We often think of the internet as a levelling, democratising technology - one that extends access to knowledge, education, cultural resources and markets. But the net also reflects the social and economic divides we find offline.

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How do you prepare students for an unknowable future? - University World News

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How do you prepare students for an unknowable future?

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We all know that there's a change coming in higher education, and it's not only government agencies and Brexit driving it. A new digitally innate generation of students is just beginning to enter our universities, prompting the question: are we ready for this influx of industrious, collaborative and entrepreneurial learners? Welcome to Generation Z, a generation defined by Anne Kingston as "smarter than Boomers, and way more ambitious than the Millennials".

Unlike the generations who have gone before them - Millennials (aka Generation Y), Gen X and Baby Boomers - Gen Z were born after 1995 into a world where the internet, social media and mobile technology always existed. The world as they know it has been blighted by financial, economic and environmental turmoil and they want to make a change.

Generation Z is beginning to appear in the workplace, and they're bringing their new technology and big ideas with them. Outside of higher education their arrival has been expected for some time, with HR specialists considering the impact of Gen Zs in the workplace as early as 2008. So why aren't we thinking about the impact of Gen Zs in higher education? Is anyone in the sector having these conversations? Is the sector failing to forward plan? Or, is the sector still thinking about millennials?

The need to rethink how we engage with our students is supported by renowned sector expert Eric Stoller. He has noted that: "University leaders who understand the connection between digital engagement and student experience will cause dynamic changes within their organisations. Student-focused efforts, led via savvy social media practitioners, will win the day."

This call for collaboration is backed by a leading service design expert with more than 30 years' experience in higher education. In a recent article in Efficiency Exchange, Jean Mutton pointed out that students have a fundamental role to play as change agents in "learning, teaching and professional services", not least because this generation of students has different expectations of technology.

How do we learn to rethink our interactions with this new generation? That's easy, co-creation is key. In simple terms, involve your applicants and students in redesigning your services to meet their needs. As Lancaster design PhD student Hayley Alter notes, we should "collaborate and democratise the design process". We'd go even further and suggest that co-creation isn't just about working with students. It's also about challenging pre-conceptions.

That means looking further afield and learning from organisations outside of the sector. The likes of Apple, Google and Tesla - organisations that develop, innovate and lead where others follow.

Like these innovators, try getting into your students' smartphones. Here at Lancaster University we have achieved this using the iLancaster app. With more than 79,000 users iLancaster engages students from application to enrolment and throughout their time at university. It uses the student journey to offer a more user-centric experience. Importantly, students have been integral to the design and development of the app and that's why it provides them with access to all the information they need. That includes everything from grades and course timetables, to social events, recipe swaps and reminders to put their bins out.

But remember, it's not all about digital developments. Just as the rise of music streaming has coincided with a resurgence in vinyl, the ubiquity of online communications means a rare delivery through the post can have a bigger impact than ever before. At least that's what we found when we asked our students how our welcome communications made them feel.

Change is coming and this new generation of students is leading it. This presents a significant challenge to university leaders, who need to be prepared for the clash of three generations - X, Y and Z, each with their own outlook and habits. Don't be surprised if you encounter fear of the unknown among colleagues.

The best way to manage the change? Work with Gen Zs and involve them in designing your services.
Claire Povah and Simon Vaukins are members of Lancaster University's professional services and over the past year they been working to raise awareness of the impact of generation Z in Higher Education. Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered. And if you have an idea for a story, please read our guidelines and email your pitch to us at highereducationnetwork@theguardian.com. Looking for a higher education job? Or perhaps you need to recruit university staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the higher education specialist
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Generation Z is starting university - but is higher education ready?

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We all know that there's a change coming in higher education, and it's not only government agencies and Brexit driving it. A new digitally innate generation of students is just beginning to enter our universities, prompting the question: are we ready for this influx of industrious, collaborative and entrepreneurial learners?

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Experts are evenly split on whether the coming decade will see a reduction in false and misleading narratives online. Those forecasting improvement place their hopes in technological fixes and in societal solutions. Others think the dark side of human nature is aided more than stifled by technology.

In late 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected "post-truth" as the word of the year, defining it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

The 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the tumultuous U.S. presidential election highlighted how the digital age has affected news and cultural narratives. New information platforms feed the ancient instinct people have to find information that syncs with their perspectives: A 2016 study that analyzed 376 million Facebook users' interactions with over 900 news outlets found that people tend to seek information that aligns with their views.

This makes many vulnerable to accepting and acting on misinformation. For instance, after fake news stories in June 2017 reported Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin had died in a car crash its market value was reported to have dropped by $4 billion.

When BBC Future Now interviewed a panel of 50 experts in early 2017 about the " grand challenges we face in the 21st century " many named the breakdown of trusted information sources. "The major new challenge in reporting news is the new shape of truth," said Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine. "Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people."

Americans worry about that: A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the 2016 election found 64% of adults believe fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion and 23% said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves - sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally.

The question arises, then: What will happen to the online information environment in the coming decade? In summer 2017, Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large canvassing of technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and others, asking them to react to this framing of the issue:
The rise of "fake news" and the proliferation of doctored narratives that are spread by humans and bots online are challenging publishers and platforms. Those trying to stop the spread of false information are working to design technical and human systems that can weed it out and minimize the ways in which bots and other schemes spread lies and misinformation. The question: In the next 10 years, will trusted methods emerge to block false narratives and allow the most accurate information to prevail in the overall information ecosystem? Or will the quality and veracity of information online deteriorate due to the spread of unreliable, sometimes even dangerous, socially destabilizing ideas?
Respondents were then asked to choose one of the following answer options:

The information environment will improve - In the next 10 years, on balance, the information environment will be IMPROVED by changes that reduce the spread of lies and other misinformation online.

The information environment will NOT improve - In the next 10 years, on balance, the information environment will NOT BE improved by changes designed to reduce the spread of lies and other misinformation online.

Some 1,116 responded to this nonscientific canvassing: 51% chose the option that the information environment will not improve, and 49% said the information environment will improve. (See " About this canvassing of experts " for details about this sample.) Participants were next asked to explain their answers. This report concentrates on these follow-up responses.

Their reasoning revealed a wide range of opinions about the nature of these threats and the most likely solutions required to resolve them. But the overarching and competing themes were clear: Those who do not think things will improve felt that humans mostly shape technology advances to their own, not-fully-noble purposes and that bad actors with bad motives will thwart the best efforts of technology innovators to remedy today's problems.

And those who are most hopeful believed that technological fixes can be implemented to bring out the better angels guiding human nature.

More specifically, the 51% of these experts who expect things will not improve generally cited two reasons:

The fake news ecosystem preys on some of our deepest human instincts: Respondents said humans' primal quest for success and power - their "survival" instinct - will continue to degrade the online information environment in the next decade. They predicted that manipulative actors will use new digital tools to take advantage of humans' inbred preference for comfort and convenience and their craving for the answers they find in reinforcing echo chambers.

Our brains are not wired to contend with the pace of technological change: These respondents said the rising speed, reach and efficiencies of the internet and emerging online applications will magnify these human tendencies and that technology-based solutions will not be able to overcome them. They predicted a future information landscape in which fake information crowds out reliable information. Some even foresaw a world in which widespread information scams and mass manipulation cause broad swathes of public to simply give up on being informed participants in civic life.

The 49% of these experts who expect things to generally inverted that reasoning:

Technology can help fix these problems: These more hopeful experts said the rising speed, reach and efficiencies of the internet, apps and platforms can be harnessed to rein in fake news and misinformation campaigns. Some predicted better methods will arise to create and promote trusted, fact-based news sources.

It is also human nature to come together and fix problems: The hopeful experts in this canvassing took the view that people have always adapted to change and that this current wave of challenges will also be overcome. They noted that misinformation and bad actors have always existed but have eventually been marginalized by smart people and processes. They expect well-meaning actors will work together to find ways to enhance the information environment. They also believe better information literacy among citizens will enable people to judge the veracity of material content and eventually raise the tone of discourse.

The majority of participants in this canvassing wrote detailed elaborations on their views. Some chose to have their names connected to their answers; others opted to respond anonymously. These findings do not represent all possible points of view, but they do reveal a wide range of striking observations.

Respondents collectively articulated several major themes tied to those insights and explained in the sections below the following graphic. Several longer additional sets of responses tied to these themes follow that summary.

The following section presents an overview of the themes found among the written responses, including a small selection of representative quotes supporting each point. Some comments are lightly edited for style or length.

Theme 1: The information environment will not improve: The problem is human nature

Most respondents who expect the environment to worsen said human nature is at fault. For instance, Christian H. Huitema, former president of the Internet Architecture Board, commented, "The quality of information will not improve in the coming years, because technology can't improve human nature all that much."

These experts predicted that the problem of misinformation will be amplified because the worst side of human nature is magnified by bad actors using advanced online tools at internet speed on a vast scale.

Tom Rosenstiel, author, director of the American Press Institute and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commented, "Whatever changes platform companies make, and whatever innovations fact checkers and other journalists put in place, those who want to deceive will adapt to them. Misinformation is not like a plumbing problem you fix. It is a social condition, like crime, that you must constantly monitor and adjust to. Since as far back as the era of radio and before, as Winston Churchill said, 'A lie can go around the world before the truth gets its pants on.'"

Michael J. Oghia, an author, editor and journalist based in Europe, said he expects a worsening of the information environment due to five things: "1) The spread of misinformation and hate; 2) Inflammation, sociocultural conflict and violence; 3) The breakdown of socially accepted/agreed-upon knowledge and what constitutes 'fact.' 4) A new digital divide of those subscribed (and ultimately controlled) by misinformation and those who are 'enlightened' by information based on reason, logic, scientific inquiry and critical thinking. 5) Further divides between communities, so that as we are more connected we are farther apart. And many others."

Leah Lievrouw, professor in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed, "So many players and interests see online information as a uniquely powerful shaper of individual action and public opinion in ways that serve their economic or political interests (marketing, politics, education, scientific controversies, community identity and solidarity, behavioral 'nudging,' etc.). These very diverse players would likely oppose (or try to subvert) technological or policy interventions or other attempts to insure the quality, and especially the disinterestedness, of information."

Subtheme: More people = more problems. The internet's continuous growth and accelerating innovation allow more people and artificial intelligence (AI) to create and instantly spread manipulative narratives

While propaganda and the manipulation of the public via falsehoods is a tactic as old as the human race, many of these experts predicted that the speed, reach and low cost of online communication plus continuously emerging innovations will magnify the threat level significantly. A professor at a Washington, D.C.-area university said, "It is nearly impossible to implement solutions at scale - the attack surface is too large to be defended successfully."

Jerry Michalski, futurist and founder of REX, replied, "The trustworthiness of our information environment will decrease over the next decade because: 1) It is inexpensive and easy for bad actors to act badly; 2) Potential technical solutions based on strong ID and public voting (for example) won't quite solve the problem; and 3) real solutions based on actual trusted relationships will take time to evolve - likely more than a decade."

An institute director and university professor said, "The internet is the 21st century's threat of a 'nuclear winter,' and there's no equivalent international framework for nonproliferation or disarmament. The public can grasp the destructive power of nuclear weapons in a way they will never understand the utterly corrosive power of the internet to civilized society, when there is no reliable mechanism for sorting out what people can believe to be true or false."

Bob Frankston, internet pioneer and software innovator, said, "I always thought that 'Mein Kampf' could be countered with enough information. Now I feel that people will tend to look for confirmation of their biases and the radical transparency will not shine a cleansing light."

David Harries, associate executive director for Foresight Canada, replied, "More and more, history is being written, rewritten and corrected, because more and more people have the ways and means to do so. Therefore there is ever more information that competes for attention, for credibility and for influence. The competition will complicate and intensify the search for veracity. Of course, many are less interested in veracity than in winning the competition."

Glenn Edens, CTO for technology reserve at PARC, a Xerox company, commented, "Misinformation is a two-way street. Producers have an easy publishing platform to reach wide audiences and those audiences are flocking to the sources. The audiences typically are looking for information that fits their belief systems, so it is a really tough problem."

Subtheme: Humans are by nature selfish, tribal, gullible convenience seekers who put the most trust in that which seems familiar

The respondents who supported this view noted that people's actions - from consciously malevolent and power-seeking behaviors to seemingly more benign acts undertaken for comfort or convenience - will work to undermine a healthy information environment.

An executive consultant based in North America wrote, "It comes down to motivation: There is no market for the truth. The public isn't motivated to seek out verified, vetted information. They are happy hearing what confirms their views. And people can gain more creating fake information (both monetary and in notoriety) than they can keeping it from occurring."

Serge Marelli, an IT professional who works on and with the Net, wrote, "As a group, humans are 'stupid.' It is 'group mind' or a 'group phenomenon' or, as George Carlin said, 'Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.' Then, you have Kierkegaard, who said, 'People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.' And finally, Euripides said, 'Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.'"

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, distinguished professor of information systems and co-author of the visionary 1970s book " The Network Nation," replied, "People on systems like Facebook are increasingly forming into 'echo chambers' of those who think alike. They will keep unfriending those who don't, and passing on rumors and fake news that agrees with their point of view. When the president of the U.S. frequently attacks the traditional media and anybody who does not agree with his 'alternative facts,' it is not good news for an uptick in reliable and trustworthy facts circulating in social media."

Nigel Cameron, a technology and futures editor and president of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, said, "Human nature is not EVER going to change (though it may, of course, be manipulated). And the political environment is bad."

Ian O'Byrne, assistant professor at the College of Charleston, replied, "Human nature will take over as the salacious is often sexier than facts. There are multiple information streams, public and private, that spread this information online. We can also not trust the businesses and industries that develop and facilitate these digital texts and tools to make changes that will significantly improve the situation."

Greg Swanson, media consultant with ITZonTarget, noted, "The sorting of reliable versus fake news requires a trusted referee. It seems unlikely that government can play a meaningful role as this referee. We are too polarized. And we have come to see the television news teams as representing divergent points of view, and, depending on your politics, the network that does not represent your views is guilty of 'fake news.' It is hard to imagine a fair referee that would be universally trusted."

Richard Lachmann, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, replied, "Even though systems [that] flag unreliable information can and will be developed, internet users have to be willing to take advantage of those warnings. Too many Americans will live in political and social subcultures that will champion false information and encourage use of sites that present such false information."

There were also those among these expert respondents who said inequities, perceived and real, are at the root of much of the misinformation being produced.

A professor at MIT observed, "I see this as problem with a socioeconomic cure: Greater equity and justice will achieve much more than a bot war over facts. Controlling 'noise' is less a technological problem than a human problem, a problem of belief, of ideology. Profound levels of ungrounded beliefs about things both sacred and profane existed before the branding of 'fake news.' Belief systems - not 'truths' - help to cement identities, forge relationships, explain the unexplainable."

Julian Sefton-Green, professor of new media education at Deakin University in Australia, said, "The information environment is an extension of social and political tensions. It is impossible to make the information environment a rational, disinterested space; it will always be susceptible to pressure."

A respondent affiliated with Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society wrote, "The democratization of publication and consumption that the networked sphere represents is too expansive for there to be any meaningful improvement possible in terms of controlling or labeling information. People will continue to cosset their own cognitive biases."

Subtheme: In existing economic, political and social systems, the powerful corporate and government leaders most able to improve the information environment profit most when it is in turmoil

A large number of respondents said the interests of the most highly motivated actors, including those in the worlds of business and politics, are generally not motivated to "fix" the proliferation of misinformation. Those players will be a key driver in the worsening of the information environment in the coming years and/or the lack of any serious attempts to effectively mitigate the problem.

Scott Shamp, a dean at Florida State University, commented, "Too many groups gain power through the proliferation of inaccurate or misleading information. When there is value in misinformation, it will rule."

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the World Economic Forum, commented, "We know how to dramatically improve the situation, based on studies of political and similar predictions. What we don't know is how to make it a thriving business. The current [information] models are driven by clickbait, and that is not the foundation of a sustainable economic model."

Stephen Downes, researcher with the National Research Council of Canada, wrote, "Things will not improve. There is too much incentive to spread disinformation, fake news, malware and the rest. Governments and organizations are major actors in this space."

An anonymous respondent said, "Actors can benefit socially, economically, politically by manipulating the information environment. As long as these incentives exist, actors will find a way to exploit them. These benefits are not amenable to technological resolution as they are social, political and cultural in nature. Solving this problem will require larger changes in society."

A number of respondents mentioned market capitalism as a primary obstacle to improving the information environment. A professor based in North America said, "[This] is a capitalist system. The information that will be disseminated will be biased, based on monetary interests."

Seth Finkelstein, consulting programmer and winner of the Electronic Freedom Foundation's Pioneer Award, commented, "Virtually all the structural incentives to spread misinformation seem to be getting worse."

A data scientist based in Europe wrote, "The information environment is built on the top of telecommunication infrastructures and services developed following the free-market ideology, where 'truth' or 'fact' are only useful as long as they can be commodified as market products."

Zbigniew Łukasiak, a business leader based in Europe, wrote, "Big political players have just learned how to play this game. I don't think they will put much effort into eliminating it."

A vice president for public policy at one of the world's foremost entertainment and media companies commented, "The small number of dominant online platforms do not have the skills or ethical center in place to build responsible systems, technical or procedural. They eschew accountability for the impact of their inventions on society and have not developed any of the principles or practices that can deal with the complex issues. They are like biomedical or nuclear technology firms absent any ethics rules or ethics training or philosophy. Worse, their active philosophy is that assessing and responding to likely or potential negative impacts of their inventions is both not theirs to do and even shouldn't be done."

Patricia Aufderheide, professor of communications and founder of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, said, "Major interests are not invested enough in reliability to create new business models and political and regulatory standards needed for the shift. ... Overall there are powerful forces, including corporate investment in surveillance-based business models, that create many incentives for unreliability, 'invisible handshake' agreements with governments that militate against changing surveillance models, international espionage at a governmental and corporate level in conjunction with mediocre cryptography and poor use of white hat hackers, poor educational standards in major industrial countries such as the U.S., and fundamental weaknesses in the U.S. political/electoral system that encourage exploitation of unreliability. It would be wonderful to believe otherwise, and I hope that other commentators will be able to convince me otherwise."

James Schlaffer, an assistant professor of economics, commented, "Information is curated by people who have taken a step away from the objectivity that was the watchword of journalism. Conflict sells, especially to the opposition party, therefore the opposition news agency will be incentivized to push a narrative and agenda. Any safeguards will appear as a way to further control narrative and propagandize the population."

Subtheme: Human tendencies and infoglut drive people apart and make it harder for them to agree on "common knowledge." That makes healthy debate difficult and destabilizes trust. The fading of news media contributes to the problem

Many respondents expressed concerns about how people's struggles to find and apply accurate information contribute to a larger social and political problem: There is a growing deficit in commonly accepted facts or some sort of cultural "common ground." Why has this happened? They cited several reasons:

Online echo chambers or silos divide people into separate camps, at times even inciting them to express anger and hatred at a volume not seen in previous communications forms.

Information overload crushes people's attention spans. Their coping mechanism is to turn to entertainment or other lighter fare.

High-quality journalism has been decimated due to changes in the attention economy.

They said these factors and others make it difficult for many people in the digital age to create and come to share the type of "common knowledge" that undergirds better and more-responsive public policy. A share of respondents said a lack of commonly shared knowledge leads many in society to doubt the reliability of everything, causing them to simply drop out of civic participation, depleting the number of active and informed citizens.

Jamais Cascio, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, noted, "The power and diversity of very low-cost technologies allowing unsophisticated users to create believable 'alternative facts' is increasing rapidly. It's important to note that the goal of these tools is not necessarily to create consistent and believable alternative facts, but to create plausible levels of doubt in actual facts. The crisis we face about 'truth' and reliable facts is predicated less on the ability to get people to believe the *wrong* thing as it is on the ability to get people to *doubt* the right thing. The success of Donald Trump will be a flaming signal that this strategy works, alongside the variety of technologies now in development (and early deployment) that can exacerbate this problem. In short, it's a successful strategy, made simpler by more powerful information technologies."

Philip J. Nickel, lecturer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, said, "The decline of traditional news media and the persistence of closed social networks will not change in the next 10 years. These are the main causes of the deterioration of a public domain of shared facts as the basis for discourse and political debate."

Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College, City University of New York, predicted, "Disseminating false rumors and reports will become easier. The proliferation of sources will increase the number of people who don't know who or what they trust. These people will drop out of the normal flow of information. Participation will decline as more and more citizens become unwilling/unable to figure out which information sources are reliable."

What is truth? What is a fact? Who gets to decide? And can most people agree to trust anything as "common knowledge"? A number of respondents challenged the idea that any individuals, groups or technology systems could or should "rate" information as credible, factual, true or not.

An anonymous respondent observed, "Whatever is devised will not be seen as impartial; some things are not black and white; for other situations, facts brought up to come to a conclusion are different that other facts used by others in a situation. Each can have real facts, but it is the facts that are gathered that matter in coming to a conclusion; who will determine what facts will be considered or what is even considered a fact."

A research assistant at MIT noted, "'Fake' and 'true' are not as binary as we would like, and - combined with an increasingly connected and complex digital society - it's a challenge to manage the complexity of social media without prescribing a narrative as 'truth.'"

An internet pioneer and longtime leader at ICANN said, "There is little prospect of a forcing factor that will emerge that will improve the 'truthfulness' of information in the internet."

A vice president for stakeholder engagement said, "Trust networks are best established with physical and unstructured interaction, discussion and observation. Technology is reducing opportunities for such interactions and disrupting human discourse, while giving the 'feeling' that we are communicating more than ever."

Subtheme: A small segment of society will find, use and perhaps pay a premium for information from reliable sources. Outside of this group "chaos will reign" and a worsening digital divide will develop

Some respondents predicted that a larger digital divide will form. Those who pursue more-accurate information and rely on better-informed sources will separate from those who are not selective enough or who do not invest either the time or the money in doing so.

Alejandro Pisanty, a professor at UNAM, the National University of Mexico, and longtime internet policy leader, observed, "Overall, at least a part of society will value trusted information and find ways to keep a set of curated, quality information resources. This will use a combination of organizational and technological tools but above all, will require a sharpened sense of good judgment and access to diverse, including rivalrous, sources. Outside this, chaos will reign."

Alexander Halavais, associate professor of social technologies at Arizona State University, said, "As there is value in accurate information, the availability of such information will continue to grow. However, when consumers are not directly paying for such accuracy, it will certainly mean a greater degree of misinformation in the public sphere. That means the continuing bifurcation of haves and have-nots, when it comes to trusted news and information."

An anonymous editor and publisher commented, "Sadly, many Americans will not pay attention to ANY content from existing or evolving sources. It'll be the continuing dumbing down of the masses, although the 'upper' cadres (educated/thoughtful) will read/see/know, and continue to battle."

An anonymous respondent said, "There will be a sort of 'gold standard' set of sources, and there will be the fringe."

Theme 2: The information environment will not improve because technology will create new challenges that can't or won't be countered effectively and at scale

Many who see little hope for improvement of the information environment said technology will not save society from distortions, half-truths, lies and weaponized narratives. An anonymous business leader argued, "It is too easy to create fake facts, too labor-intensive to check and too easy to fool checking algorithms.'' And this response of an anonymous research scientist based in North America echoed the view of many participants in this canvassing: "We will develop technologies to help identify false and distorted information, BUT they won't be good enough."

Paul N. Edwards, Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University, commented, "Many excellent methods will be developed to improve the information environment, but the history of online systems shows that bad actors can and will always find ways around them."

Vian Bakir, professor in political communication and journalism at Bangor University in Wales, commented, "It won't improve because of 1) the evolving nature of technology - emergent media always catches out those who wish to control it, at least in the initial phase of emergence; 2) online social media and search engine business models favour misinformation spreading; 3) well-resourced propagandists exploit this mix."

Many who expect things will not improve in the next decade said that "white hat" efforts will never keep up with "black hat" advances in information wars. A user-experience and interaction designer said, "As existing channels become more regulated, new unregulated channels will continue to emerge."

Subtheme: Those generally acting for themselves and not the public good have the advantage, and they are likely to stay ahead in the information wars

Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.

A number of respondents referred to this as an "arms race." David Sarokin of Sarokin Consulting and author of "Missed Information," said, "There will be an arms race between reliable and unreliable information." And David Conrad, a chief technology officer, replied, "In the arms race between those who want to falsify information and those who want to produce accurate information, the former will always have an advantage."

Jim Hendler, professor of computing sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commented, "The information environment will continue to change but the pressures of politics, advertising and stock-return-based capitalism rewards those who find ways to manipulate the system, so it will be a constant battle between those aiming for 'objectiveness' and those trying to manipulate the system."

John Markoff, retired journalist and former technology reporter for The New York Times, said, "I am extremely skeptical about improvements related to verification without a solution to the challenge of anonymity on the internet. I also don't believe there will be a solution to the anonymity problem in the near future."

Scott Spangler, principal data scientist at IBM Watson Health, said technologies now exist that make fake information almost impossible to discern and flag, filter or block. He wrote, "Machine learning and sophisticated statistical techniques will be used to accurately simulate real information content and make fake information almost indistinguishable from the real thing."

Jason Hong, associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, said, "Some fake information will be detectable and blockable, but the vast majority won't. The problem is that it's *still* very hard for computer systems to analyze text, find assertions made in the text and crosscheck them. There's also the issue of subtle nuances or differences of opinion or interpretation. Lastly, the incentives are all wrong. There are a lot of rich and unethical people, politicians, non-state actors and state actors who are strongly incentivized to get fake information out there to serve their selfish purposes."

A research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University observed, "Defensive innovation is always behind offensive innovation. Those wanting to spread misinformation will always be able to find ways to circumvent whatever controls are put in place."

A research scientist for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT said, "Problems will get worse faster than solutions can address, but that only means solutions are more needed than ever."

Subtheme: Weaponized narratives and other false content will be magnified by social media, online filter bubbles and AI

Some respondents expect a dramatic rise in the manipulation of the information environment by nation-states, by individual political actors and by groups wishing to spread propaganda. Their purpose is to raise fears that serve their agendas, create or deepen silos and echo chambers, divide people and set them upon each other, and paralyze or confuse public understanding of the political, social and economic landscape.

This has been referred to as the weaponization of public narratives. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter appear to be prime battlegrounds. Bots are often employed, and AI is expected to be implemented heavily in the information wars to magnify the speed and impact of messaging.

A leading internet pioneer who has worked with the FCC, the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the General Electric Co. (GE) and other major technology organizations commented, "The 'internet-as-weapon' paradigm has emerged."

Dean Willis, consultant for Softarmor Systems, commented, "Governments and political groups have now discovered the power of targeted misinformation coupled to personalized understanding of the targets. Messages can now be tailored with devastating accuracy. We're doomed to living in targeted information bubbles."

An anonymous survey participant noted, "Misinformation will play a major role in conflicts between nations and within competing parties within nation states."

danah boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society, wrote, "What's at stake right now around information is epistemological in nature. Furthermore, information is a source of power and thus a source of contemporary warfare."

Peter Lunenfeld, a professor at UCLA, commented, "For the foreseeable future, the economics of networks and the networks of economics are going to privilege the dissemination of unvetted, unverified and often weaponized information. Where there is a capitalistic incentive to provide content to consumers, and those networks of distribution originate in a huge variety of transnational and even extra-national economies and political systems, the ability to 'control' veracity will be far outstripped by the capability and willingness to supply any kind of content to any kind of user."

These experts noted that the public has turned to social media - especially Facebook - to get its "news." They said the public's craving for quick reads and tabloid-style sensationalism is what makes social media the field of choice for manipulative narratives, which are often packaged to appear like news headlines. They note that the public's move away from more-traditional mainstream news outlets, which had some ethical standards, to consumption of social newsfeeds has weakened mainstream media organizations, making them lower-budget operations that have been forced to compete for attention by offering up clickbait headlines of their own.

An emeritus professor of communication for a U.S. Ivy League university noted, "We have lost an important social function in the press. It is being replaced by social media, where there are few if any moral or ethical guidelines or constraints on the performance of informational roles."

A project leader for a science institute commented, "We live in an era where most people get their 'news' via social media and it is very easy to spread fake news. The existence of clickbait sites make it easy for conspiracy theories to be rapidly spread by people who do not bother to read entire articles, nor look for trusted sources. Given that there is freedom of speech, I wonder how the situation can ever improve. Most users just read the headline, comment and share without digesting the entire article or thinking critically about its content (if they read it at all)."

Subtheme: The most-effective tech solutions to misinformation will endanger people's dwindling privacy options, and they are likely to limit free speech and remove the ability for people to be anonymous online

The rise of new and highly varied voices with differing agendas and motivations might generally be considered to be a good thing. But some of these experts said the recent major successes by misinformation manipulators have created a threatening environment in which many in the public are encouraging platform providers and governments to expand surveillance. Among the technological solutions for "cleaning up" the information environment are those that work to clearly identify entities operating online and employ algorithms to detect misinformation. Some of these experts expect that such systems will act to identify perceived misbehaviors and label, block, filter or remove some online content and even ban some posters from further posting.

An educator commented, "Creating 'a reliable, trusted, unhackable verification system' would produce a system for filtering and hence structuring of content. This will end up being a censored information reality."

An eLearning specialist observed, "Any system deeming itself to have the ability to 'judge' information as valid or invalid is inherently biased." And a professor and researcher noted, "In an open society, there is no prior determination of what information is genuine or fake."

In fact, a share of the respondents predicted that the online information environment will not improve in the next decade because any requirement for authenticated identities would take away the public's highly valued free-speech rights and allow major powers to control the information environment.

A distinguished professor emeritus of political science at a U.S. university wrote, "Misinformation will continue to thrive because of the long (and valuable) tradition of freedom of expression. Censorship will be rejected." An anonymous respondent wrote, "There is always a fight between 'truth' and free speech. But because the internet cannot be regulated free speech will continue to dominate, meaning the information environment will not improve."

But another share of respondents said that is precisely why authenticated identities - which are already operating in some places, including China - will become a larger part of information systems. A professor at a major U.S. university replied, "Surveillance technologies and financial incentives will generate greater surveillance." A retired university professor predicted, "Increased censorship and mass surveillance will tend to create official 'truths' in various parts of the world. In the United States, corporate filtering of information will impose the views of the economic elite."

The executive director of a major global privacy advocacy organization argued removing civil liberties in order to stop misinformation will not be effective, saying, "'Problematic' actors will be able to game the devised systems while others will be over-regulated."

Several other respondents also cited this as a major flaw of this potential remedy. They argued against it for several reasons, including the fact that it enables even broader government and corporate surveillance and control over more of the public.

Emmanuel Edet, head of legal services at the National Information Technology Development Agency of Nigeria, observed, "The information environment will improve but at a cost to privacy."

Bill Woodcock, executive director of the Packet Clearing House, wrote, "There's a fundamental conflict between anonymity and control of public speech, and the countries that don't value anonymous speech domestically are still free to weaponize it internationally, whereas the countries that do value anonymous speech must make it available to all, [or] else fail to uphold their own principle."

James LaRue, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, commented, "Information systems incentivize getting attention. Lying is a powerful way to do that. To stop that requires high surveillance - which means government oversight which has its own incentives not to tell the truth."

Tom Valovic, contributor to The Technoskeptic magazine and author of "Digital Mythologies," said encouraging platforms to exercise algorithmic controls is not optimal. He wrote: "Artificial intelligence that will supplant human judgment is being pursued aggressively by entities in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Algorithmic solutions to replacing human judgment are subject to hidden bias and will ultimately fail to accomplish this goal. They will only continue the centralization of power in a small number of companies that control the flow of information."

Theme 3: The information environment will improve because technology will help label, filter or ban misinformation and thus upgrade the public's ability to judge the quality and veracity of content

Most of the respondents who gave hopeful answers about the future of truth online said they believe technology will be implemented to improve the information environment. They noted their faith was grounded in history, arguing that humans have always found ways to innovate to overcome problems. Most of these experts do not expect there will be a perfect system - but they expect advances. A number said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure of their platforms. They hope this will simultaneously enable the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.

Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University, said, "I am hopeful that the principal digital information platforms will take creative initiatives to privilege more authoritative and credible sources and to call out and demote information sources that appear to be propaganda and manipulation engines, whether human or robotic. In fact, the companies are already beginning to take steps in this direction."

An associate professor at a U.S. university wrote, "I do not see us giving up on seeking truth." And a researcher based in Europe said, "Technologies will appear that solve the trust issues and reward logic."

Adam Lella, senior analyst for marketing insights at comScore Inc., replied, "There have been numerous other industry-related issues in the past (e.g., viewability, invalid traffic detection, cross-platform measurement) that were seemingly impossible to solve, and yet major progress was made in the past few years. If there is a great amount of pressure from the industry to solve this problem (which there is), then methodologies will be developed and progress will be made to help mitigate this issue in the long run. In other words, if there's a will, there's way."

Subtheme: Likely tech-based solutions include adjustments to algorithmic filters, browsers, apps and plug-ins and the implementation of "trust ratings"

Many respondents who hope for improvement in the information environment mentioned ways in which new technological solutions might be implemented.

Bart Knijnenburg, researcher on decision-making and recommender systems and assistant professor of computer science at Clemson University, said, "Two developments will help improve the information environment: 1) News will move to a subscription model (like music, movies, etc.) and subscription providers will have a vested interest in culling down false narratives; 2) Algorithms that filter news will learn to discern the quality of a news item and not just tailor to 'virality' or political leaning."

Laurel Felt, lecturer at the University of Southern California, "There will be mechanisms for flagging suspicious content and providers and then apps and plugins for people to see the 'trust rating' for a piece of content, an outlet or even an IP address. Perhaps people can even install filters so that, when they're doing searches, hits that don't meet a certain trust threshold will not appear on the list."

A longtime U.S. government researcher and administrator in communications and technology sciences said, "The intelligence, defense and related U.S. agencies are very actively working on this problem and results are promising."

Amber Case, research fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, suggested withholding ad revenue until veracity has been established. She wrote, "Right now, there is an incentive to spread fake news. It is profitable to do so, profit made by creating an article that causes enough outrage that advertising money will follow. ... In order to reduce the spread of fake news, we must deincentivize it financially. If an article bursts into collective consciousness and is later proven to be fake, the sites that control or host that content could refuse to distribute advertising revenue to the entity that created or published it. This would require a system of delayed advertising revenue distribution where ad funds are held until the article is proven as accurate or not. A lot of fake news is created by a few people, and removing their incentive could stop much of the news postings."

Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law at Northeastern University who researches innovation and law, particularly information security, observed, "Software liability law will finally begin to evolve. Market makers will increasingly incorporate security quality as a factor relevant to corporate valuation. The legal climate for security research will continue to improve, as its connection to national security becomes increasingly obvious. These changes will drive significant corporate and public sector improvements in security during the next decade."

Larry Keeley, founder of innovation consultancy Doblin, predicted technology will be improved but people will remain the same, writing, "Capabilities adapted from both bibliometric analytics and good auditing practices will make this a solvable problem. However, non-certified, compelling-but-untrue information will also proliferate. So the new divide will be between the people who want their information to be real vs. those who simply want it to feel important. Remember that quote from Roger Ailes: 'People don't want to BE informed, they want to FEEL informed.' Sigh."
Anonymous survey participants also responded:

"Filters and algorithms will improve to both verify raw data, separate 'overlays' and to correct for a feedback loop."

"Semantic technologies will be able to cross-verify statements, much like meta-analysis."

"The credibility history of each individual will be used to filter incoming information."

"The veracity of information will be linked to how much the source is perceived as trustworthy - we may, for instance, develop a trust index and trust will become more easily verified using artificial-intelligence-driven technologies."

"The work being done on things like verifiable identity and information sharing through loose federation will improve things somewhat (but not completely). That is to say, things will become better but not necessarily good."

"AI, blockchain, crowdsourcing and other technologies will further enhance our ability to filter and qualify the veracity of information."

"There will be new visual cues developed to help news consumers distinguish between trusted news sources and others."

Subtheme: Regulatory remedies could include software liability law, required identities, unbundling of social networks like Facebook

A number of respondents believe there will be policy remedies that move beyond whatever technical innovations emerge in the next decade. They offered a range of suggestions, from regulatory reforms applied to the platforms that aid misinformation merchants to legal penalties applied to wrongdoers. Some think the threat of regulatory reform via government agencies may force the issue of required identities and the abolition of anonymity protections for platform users.

Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, replied, "The 'wild west' state of the internet will not be permitted to continue by those with power, as we are already seeing with increased national pressure on providers/companies by a range of means from law and regulation to moral and consumer pressures."

Willie Currie, a longtime expert in global communications diffusion, wrote, "The apparent success of fake news on platforms like Facebook will have to be dealt with on a regulatory basis as it is clear that technically minded people will only look for technical fixes and may have incentives not to look very hard, so self-regulation is unlikely to succeed. The excuse that the scale of posts on social media platforms makes human intervention impossible will not be a defense. Regulatory options may include unbundling social networks like Facebook into smaller entities. Legal options include reversing the notion that providers of content services over the internet are mere conduits without responsibility for the content. These regulatory and legal options may not be politically possible to affect within the U.S., but they are certainly possible in Europe and elsewhere, especially if fake news is shown to have an impact on European elections."

Sally Wentworth, vice president of global policy development at the Internet Society, warned against too much dependence upon information platform providers in shaping solutions to improve the information environment. She wrote: "It's encouraging to see some of the big platforms beginning to deploy internet solutions to some of the issues around online extremism, violence and fake news. And yet, it feels like as a society, we are outsourcing this function to private entities that exist, ultimately, to make a profit and not necessarily for a social good. How much power are we turning over to them to govern our social discourse? Do we know where that might eventually lead? On the one hand, it's good that the big players are finally stepping up and taking responsibility. But governments, users and society are being too quick to turn all of the responsibility over to internet platforms. Who holds them accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of all of us? Do we even know what those decisions are?"

A professor and chair in a department of educational theory, policy and administration commented, "Some of this work can be done in private markets. Being banned from social media is one obvious one. In terms of criminal law, I think the important thing is to have penalties/regulations be domain-specific. Speech can be regulated in certain venues, but obviously not in all. Federal (and perhaps even international) guidelines would be useful. Without a framework for regulation, I can't imagine penalties."

Theme 4: The information environment will improve, because people will adjust and make things better

Many of those who expect the information environment to improve anticipate that information literacy training and other forms of assistance will help people become more sophisticated consumers. They expect that users will gravitate toward more reliable information - and that knowledge providers will respond in kind.

Frank Kaufmann, founder and director of several international projects for peace activism and media and information, commented, "The quality of news will improve, because things always improve." And Barry Wellman, virtual communities expert and co-director of the NetLab Network, said, "Software and people are becoming more sophisticated."

One hopeful respondent said a change in economic incentives can bring about desired change. Tom Wolzien, chairman of The Video Call Center and Wolzien LLC, said, "The market will not clean up the bad material, but will shift focus and economic rewards toward the reliable. Information consumers, fed up with false narratives, will increasingly shift toward more-trusted sources, resulting in revenue flowing toward those more trusted sources and away from the junk. This does not mean that all people will subscribe to either scientific or journalistic method (or both), but they will gravitate toward material the sources and institutions they find trustworthy, and those institutions will, themselves, demand methods of verification beyond those they use today."

A retired public official and internet pioneer predicted, "1) Education for veracity will become an indispensable element of secondary school. 2) Information providers will become legally responsible for their content. 3) A few trusted sources will continue to dominate the internet."

Irene Wu, adjunct professor of communications, culture and technology at Georgetown University, said, "Information will improve because people will learn better how to deal with masses of digital information. Right now, many people naively believe what they read on social media. When the television became popular, people also believed everything on TV was true. It's how people choose to react and access to information and news that's important, not the mechanisms that distribute them."

Charlie Firestone, executive director at the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, commented, "In the future, tagging, labeling, peer recommendations, new literacies (media, digital) and similar methods will enable people to sift through information better to find and rely on factual information. In addition, there will be a reaction to the prevalence of false information so that people are more willing to act to assure their information will be accurate."

Howard Rheingold, pioneer researcher of virtual communities, longtime professor and author of "Net Smart: How to Thrive Online," noted, "As I wrote in 'Net Smart' in 2012, some combination of education, algorithmic and social systems can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio online - with the caveat that misinformation/disinformation versus verified information is likely to be a continuing arms race. In 2012, Facebook, Google and others had no incentive to pay attention to the problem. After the 2016 election, the issue of fake information has been spotlighted."

Subtheme: Misinformation has always been with us and people have found ways to lessen its impact. The problems will become more manageable as people become more adept at sorting through material

Many respondents agree that misinformation will persist as the online realm expands and more people are connected in more ways. Still, the more hopeful among these experts argue that progress is inevitable as people and organizations find coping mechanisms. They say history validates this. Furthermore, they said technologists will play an important role in helping filter out misinformation and modeling new digital literacy practices for users.

Mark Bunting, visiting academic at Oxford Internet Institute, a senior digital strategy and public policy advisor with 16 years of experience at the BBC and as a digital consultant, wrote, "Our information environment has been immeasurably improved by the democratisation of the means of publication since the creation of the web nearly 25 years ago. We are now seeing the downsides of that transformation, with bad actors manipulating the new freedoms for antisocial purposes, but techniques for managing and mitigating those harms will improve, creating potential for freer, but well-governed, information environments in the 2020s."

Jonathan Grudin, principal design researcher at Microsoft, said, "We were in this position before, when printing presses broke the existing system of information management. A new system emerged and I believe we have the motivation and capability to do it again. It will again involve information channeling more than misinformation suppression; contradictory claims have always existed in print, but have been manageable and often healthy."

Judith Donath, fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, wrote, "'Fake news' is not new. The Weekly World News had a circulation of over a million for its mostly fictional news stories that are printed and sold in a format closely resembling a newspaper. Many readers recognized it as entertainment, but not all. More subtly, its presence on the newsstand reminded everyone that anything can be printed."

Joshua Hatch, president of the Online News Association, noted, "I'm slightly optimistic because there are more people who care about doing the right thing than there are people who are trying to ruin the system. Things will improve because people - individually and collectively - will make it so."

Many of these respondents said the leaders and engineers of the major information platform companies will play a significant role. Some said they expect some other systematic and social changes will alter things.

John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks, replied, "I'm an optimist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think as people born into the internet age move into positions of authority they'll be better able to distill and discern fake news than those of us who remember an age of trusted gatekeepers. They'll be part of the immune system. It's not that the environment will get better, it's that those younger will be better fitted to survive it."

Danny Rogers, founder and CEO of Terbium Labs, replied, "Things always improve. Not monotonically, and not without effort, but fundamentally, I still believe that the efforts to improve the information environment will ultimately outweigh efforts to devolve it."

Bryan Alexander, futurist and president of Bryan Alexander Consulting, replied, "Growing digital literacy and the use of automated systems will tip the balance towards a better information environment."

A number of these respondents said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment through various technological enhancements. They expressed faith in the inventiveness of these organizations and suggested the people of these companies will implement technology to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure and business practices of their platforms, enabling the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.

Patrick Lambe, principal consultant at Straits Knowledge, commented, "All largescale human systems are adaptive. When faced with novel predatory phenomena, counter-forces emerge to balance or defeat them. We are at the beginning of a largescale negative impact from the undermining of a social sense of reliable fact. Counter-forces are already emerging. The presence of largescale 'landlords' controlling significant sections of the ecosystem (e.g., Google, Facebook) aids in this counter-response."

A professor in technology law at a West-Coast-based U.S. university said, "Intermediaries such as Facebook and Google will develop more-robust systems to reward legitimate producers and punish purveyors of fake news."

A longtime director for Google commented, "Companies like Google and Facebook are investing heavily in coming up with usable solutions. Like email spam, this problem can never entirely be eliminated, but it can be managed."

Sandro Hawke, technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, predicted, "Things are going to get worse before they get better, but humans have the basic tools to solve this problem, so chances are good that we will. The biggest risk, as with many things, is that narrow self-interest stops people from effectively collaborating."
Anonymous respondents shared these remarks:

"Accurate facts are essential, particularly within a democracy, so this will be a high, shared value worthy of investment and government support, as well as private-sector initiatives."

"We are only at the beginning of drastic technological and societal changes. We will learn and develop strategies to deal with problems like fake news."

"There is a long record of innovation taking place to solve problems. Yes, sometimes innovation leads to abuses, but further innovation tends to solve those problems."

Consumers have risen up in the past to block the bullshit, fake ads, fake investment scams, etc., and they will again with regard to fake news."

"As we understand more about digital misinformation we will design better tools, policies and opportunities for collective action."

"Now that it is on the agenda, smart researchers and technologists will develop solutions."

"The increased awareness of the issue will lead to/force new solutions and regulation that will improve the situation in the long-term even if there are bound to be missteps such as flawed regulation and solutions along the way."

Subtheme: Crowdsourcing will work to highlight verified facts and block those who propagate lies and propaganda. Some also have hopes for distributed ledgers (blockchain)

A number of these experts said solutions such as tagging, flagging or other labeling of questionable content will continue to expand and be of further use in the future in tackling the propagation of misinformation

J. Nathan Matias, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and previously a visiting scholar at MIT's Center for Civic Media, wrote, "Through ethnography and largescale social experiments, I have been encouraged to see volunteer communities with tens of millions of people work together to successfully manage the risks from inaccurate news."

A researcher of online harassment working for a major internet information platform commented, "If there are nonprofits keeping technology in line, such as an ACLU-esque initiative, to monitor misinformation and then partner with spaces like Facebook to deal with this kind of news spam, then yes, the information environment will improve. We also need to move away from clickbaity-like articles, and not algorithmically rely on popularity but on information."

An engineer based in North America replied, "The future will attach credibility to the source of any information. The more a given source is attributed to 'fake news,' the lower it will sit in the credibility tree."

Micah Altman, director of research for the Program on Information Science at MIT, commented, "Technological advances are creating forces pulling in two directions: It is increasingly easy to create real-looking fake information; and it is increasingly easy to crowdsource the collection and verification of information. In the longer term, I'm optimistic that the second force will dominate - as transaction cost-reduction appears to be relatively in favor of crowds versus concentrated institutions."

A past chairman of a major U.S. scientific think tank and former CEO replied, "[The information environment] should improve because there are many techniques that can be brought to bear both human-mediated - such as collective intelligence via user voting and rating - and technological responses that are either very early in their evolution or not or not deployed at all. See spam as an analog."

Some predicted that digital distributed ledger technologies, known as blockchain, may provide some answers. A longtime technology editor and columnist based in Europe, commented, "The blockchain approach used for Bitcoin, etc., could be used to distribute content. DECENT is an early example." And an anonymous respondent from Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said, "They will be cryptographically verified, with concepts."

But others were less confident that blockchain will work. A leading researcher studying the spread of misinformation observed, "I know systems like blockchain are a start, but in some ways analog systems (e.g., scanned voting ballots) can be more resilient to outside influence than digital solutions such as increased encryption. There are always potential compromises when our communication networks are based on human-coded technology and hardware; this [is] less the case with analog-first, digital-second systems."

A professor of media and communication based in Europe said, "Right now, reliable and trusted verification systems are not yet available; they may become technically available in the future but the arms race between corporations and hackers is never ending. Blockchain technology may be an option, but every technological system needs to be built on trust, and as long as there is no globally governed trust system that is open and transparent, there will be no reliable verification systems."

Theme 5: Tech can't win the battle. The public must fund and support the production of objective, accurate information. It must also elevate information literacy to be a primary goal of education

There was common agreement among many respondents - whether they said they expect to see improvements in the information environment in the next decade or not - that the problem of misinformation requires significant attention. A share of these respondents urged action in two areas: A bolstering of the public-serving press and an expansive, comprehensive, ongoing information literacy education effort for people of all ages.

A sociologist doing research on technology and civic engagement at MIT said, "Though likely to get worse before it gets better, the 2016-2017 information ecosystem problems represent a watershed moment and call to action for citizens, policymakers, journalists, designers and philanthropists who must work together to address the issues at the heart of misinformation."

Michael Zimmer, associate professor and privacy and information ethics scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee commented, "This is a social problem that cannot be solved via technology."

Subtheme: Funding and support must be directed to the restoration of a well-fortified, ethical and trusted public press

Many respondents noted that while the digital age has amplified countless information sources it has hurt the reach and influence of the traditional news organizations. These are the bedrock institutions much of the public has relied upon for objective, verified, reliable information - information undergirded by ethical standards and a general goal of serving the common good. These respondents said the information environment can't be improved without more, well-staffed, financially stable, independent news organizations. They believe that material can rise above misinformation and create a base of "common knowledge" the public can share and act on.

Susan Hares, a pioneer with the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) and longtime internet engineering strategist, now a consultant, said, "Society simply needs to decide that the 'press' no longer provides unbiased information, and it must pay for unbiased and verified information."

Christopher Jencks, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, said, "Reducing 'fake news' requires a profession whose members share a commitment to getting it right. That, in turn, requires a source of money to pay such professional journalists. Advertising used to provide newspapers with money to pay such people. That money is drying up, and it seems unlikely to be replaced within the next decade."

Rich Ling, professor of media technology at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, said, "We have seen the consequences of fake news in the U.S. presidential election and Brexit. This is a wake-up call to the news industry, policy makers and journalists to refine the system of news production."

Maja Vujovic, senior copywriter for the Comtrade Group, predicted, "The information environment will be increasingly perceived as a public good, making its reliability a universal need. Technological advancements and civil-awareness efforts will yield varied ways to continuously purge misinformation from it, to keep it reasonably reliable."

An author and journalist based in North America said, "I believe this era could spawn a new one - a flight to quality in which time-starved citizens place high value on verified news sources."

A professor of law at a major U.S. state university commented, "Things won't get better until we realize that accurate news and information are a public good that require not-for-profit leadership and public subsidy."

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote, "The problem with online news is structural: There are too few gatekeepers, and the internet business model does not sustain quality journalism. The reason is simply that advertising revenue has been untethered from news production."

With precarious funding and shrinking audiences, healthy journalism that serves the common good is losing its voice. Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, wrote, "There are no technological solutions that correct for the dominance of Facebook and Google in our lives. These incumbents are locked into monopoly power over our information ecosystem and as they drain advertising money from all other low-cost commercial media they impoverish the public sphere."

Subtheme: Elevate information literacy: It must become a primary goal at all levels of education

Many of these experts said the flaws in human nature and still-undeveloped norms in the digital age are the key problems that make users susceptible to false, misleading and manipulative online narratives. One potential remedy these respondents suggested is a massive compulsory crusade to educate all in digital-age information literacy. Such an effort, some said, might prepare more people to be wise in what they view/read/believe and possibly even serve to upgrade the overall social norms of information sharing.

Karen Mossberger, professor and director of the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, wrote, "The spread of fake news is not merely a problem of bots, but part of a larger problem of whether or not people exercise critical thinking and information-literacy skills. Perhaps the surge of fake news in the recent past will serve as a wake-up call to address these aspects of online skills in the media and to address these as fundamental educational competencies in our education system. Online information more generally has an almost limitless diversity of sources, with varied credibility. Technology is driving this issue, but the fix isn't a technical one alone."

Mike DeVito, graduate researcher at Northwestern University, wrote, "These are not technical problems; they are human problems that technology has simply helped scale, yet we keep attempting purely technological solutions. We can't machine-learn our way out of this disaster, which is actually a perfect storm of poor civics knowledge and poor information literacy."

Miguel Alcaine, International Telecommunication Union area representative for Central America, commented, "The boundaries between online and offline will continue to blur. We understand online and offline are different modalities of real life. There is and will be a market (public and private providers) for trusted information. There is and will be space for misinformation. The most important action societies can take to protect people is education, information and training."

An early internet developer and security consultant commented, "Fake news is not a product of a flaw in the communications channel and cannot be fixed by a fix to the channel. It is due to a flaw in the human consumers of information and can be repaired only by education of those consumers."

An anonymous respondent from the Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society noted, "False information - intentionally or inadvertently so - is neither new nor the result of new technologies. It may now be easier to spread to more people more quickly, but the responsibility for sifting facts from fiction has always sat with the person receiving that information and always will."

An internet pioneer and rights activist based in the Asia/Pacific region said, "We as a society are not investing enough in education worldwide. The environment will only improve if both sides of the communication channel are responsible. The reader and the producer of content, both have responsibilities."

Deirdre Williams, retired internet activist, replied, "Human beings are losing their capability to question and to refuse. Young people are growing into a world where those skills are not being taught."

Julia Koller, a learning solutions lead developer, replied, "Information is only as reliable as the people who are receiving it. If readers do not change or improve their ability to seek out and identify reliable information sources, the information environment will not improve."

Ella Taylor-Smith, senior research fellow at the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, noted, "As more people become more educated, especially as digital literacy becomes a popular and respected skill, people will favour (and even produce) better quality information."

Constance Kampf, a researcher in computer science and mathematics, said, "The answer depends on socio-technical design - these trends of misinformation versus verifiable information were already present before the internet, and they are currently being amplified. The state and trends in education and place of critical thinking in curricula across the world will be the place to look to see whether or not the information environment will improve - cyberliteracy relies on basic information literacy, social literacy and technological literacy. For the environment to improve, we need substantial improvements in education systems across the world in relation to critical thinking, social literacy, information literacy, and cyberliteracy (see Laura Gurak's book ' Cyberliteracy ')."

Su Sonia Herring, an editor and translator, commented, "Misinformation and fake news will exist as long as humans do; they have existed ever since language was invented. Relying on algorithms and automated measures will result in various unwanted consequences. Unless we equip people with media literacy and critical-thinking skills, the spread of misinformation will prevail."

Responses from additional key experts regarding the future of the information environment

This section features responses by several of the top analysts who participated in this canvassing. Following this wide-ranging set of comments is a much more expansive set of quotations directly tied to the five primary themes identified in this report.

Ignorance breeds frustration and 'a growing fraction of the population has neither the skills nor the native intelligence to master growing complexity'

Mike Roberts, pioneer leader at ICANN and Internet Hall of Fame member, replied, "There are complex forces working both to improve the quality of information on the net, and to corrupt it. I believe the outrage resulting from recent events will, on balance, lead to a net improvement, but viewed with hindsight, the improvement may be viewed as inadequate. The other side of the complexity coin is ignorance. The average man or woman in America today has less knowledge of the underpinnings of his or her daily life than they did 50 or a hundred years ago. There has been a tremendous insertion of complex systems into many aspects of how we live in the decades since World War II, fueled by a tremendous growth in knowledge in general. Even among highly intelligent people, there is a significant growth in personal specialization in order to trim the boundaries of expected expertise to manageable levels. Among educated people, we have learned mechanisms for coping with complexity. We use what we know of statistics and probability to compartment uncertainty. We adopt 'most likely' scenarios for events of which we do not have detailed knowledge, and so on. A growing fraction of the population has neither the skills nor the native intelligence to master growing complexity, and in a competitive social environment, obligations to help our fellow humans go unmet. Educated or not, no one wants to be a dummy - all the wrong connotations. So ignorance breeds frustration, which breeds acting out, which breeds antisocial and pathological behavior, such as the disinformation, which was the subject of the survey, and many other undesirable second order effects. Issues of trustable information are certainly important, especially since the technological intelligentsia command a number of tools to combat untrustable info. But the underlying pathology won't be tamed through technology alone. We need to replace ignorance and frustration with better life opportunities that restore confidence - a tall order and a tough agenda. Is there an immediate nexus between widespread ignorance and corrupted information sources? Yes, of course. In fact, there is a virtuous circle where acquisition of trustable information reduces ignorance, which leads to better use of better information, etc."

The truth of news is murky and multifaceted

Judith Donath, fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, wrote, "Yes, trusted methods will emerge to block false narratives and allow accurate information to prevail, and, yes, the quality and veracity of information online will deteriorate due to the spread of unreliable, sometimes even dangerous, socially destabilizing ideas. Of course, the definition of 'true' is sometimes murky. Experimental scientists have many careful protocols in place to assure the veracity of their work, and the questions they ask have well-defined answers - and still there can be controversy about what is true, what work was free from outside influence. The truth of news stories is far murkier and multi-faceted. A story can be distorted, disproportional, meant to mislead - and still, strictly speaking, factually accurate. ... But a pernicious harm of fake news is the doubt it sows about the reliability of all news. Donald Trump's repeated 'fake news' smears of The New York Times, Washington Post, etc., are among his most destructive non-truths."

"Algorithms weaponize rhetoric," influencing on a mass scale

Susan Etlinger, industry analyst at Altimeter Research, said, "There are two main dynamics at play: One is the increasing sophistication and availability of machine learning algorithms and the other is human nature. We've known since the ancient Greeks and Romans that people are easily persuaded by rhetoric; that hasn't changed much in two thousand years. Algorithms weaponize rhetoric, making it easier and faster to influence people on a mass scale. There are many people working on ways to protect the integrity and reliability of information, just as there are cybersecurity experts who are in a constant arms race with cybercriminals, but to put as much emphasis on 'information' (a public good) as 'data' (a personal asset) will require a pretty big cultural shift. I suspect this will play out differently in different parts of the world."

There's no technical solution for the fact that 'news' is a social bargain

Clay Shirky, vice provost for educational technology at New York University, replied, "'News' is not a stable category - it is a social bargain. There's no technical solution for designing a system that prevents people from asserting that Obama is a Muslim but allows them to assert that Jesus loves you."

'Strong economic forces are incentivizing the creation and spread of fake news'

Amy Webb, author and founder of the Future Today Institute, wrote, "In an era of social, democratized media, we've adopted a strange attitude. We're simultaneously skeptics and true believers. If a news story reaffirms what we already believe, it's credible - but if it rails against our beliefs, it's fake. We apply that same logic to experts and sources quoted in stories. With our limbic systems continuously engaged, we're more likely to pay attention to stories that make us want to fight, take flight or fill our social media accounts with links. As a result, there are strong economic forces incentivizing the creation and spread of fake news. In the digital realm, attention is currency. It's good for democracy to stop the spread of misinformation, but it's bad for business. Unless significant measures are taken in the present - and unless all the companies in our digital information ecosystem use strategic foresight to map out the future - I don't see how fake news could possibly be reduced by 2027."

Propagandists exploit whatever communications channels are available

Ian Peter, internet pioneer, historian and activist, observed, "It is not in the interests of either the media or the internet giants who propagate information, nor of governments, to create a climate in which information cannot be manipulated for political, social or economic gain. Propaganda and the desire to distort truth for political and other ends have always been with us and will adapt to any form of new media which allows open communication and information flows."

Expanding information outlets erode opportunities for a 'common narrative'

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote, "Over time, the general trend is that a proliferation of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has led to a proliferation of opportunities for different viewpoints and perspectives, which has eroded the degree to which there is a common narrative - indeed, in some ways, this parallels a trend away from monarchy toward more democratic societies that welcome a diversity of perspectives - so I anticipate the range of perspectives to increase, rather than decrease, and for these perspectives to include not only opinions but also facts, which are inherently reductionist and can easily be manipulated to suit the perspective of the author, following the old aphorism about statistics Mark Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli ['There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.'], which originally referred to experts more generally."

'Broken as it might be, the internet is still capable of routing around damage'

Paul Saffo, longtime Silicon-Valley-based technology forecaster, commented, "The information crisis happened in the shadows. Now that the issue is visible as a clear and urgent danger, activists and people who see a business opportunity will begin to focus on it. Broken as it might be, the internet is still capable of routing around damage."

It will be impossible to distinguish between fake and real video, audio, photos

Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, predicted, "It's not going to be better or worse but very different. Already we are developing technologies that make it impossible to distinguish between fake and real video, fake and real photographs, etc. We will have to evolve new tools for authentication and verification. We will probably have to evolve both new social norms as well as regulatory mechanisms if we want to maintain online environment as a source of information that many people can rely on."

A 'Cambrian explosion' of techniques will arise to monitor the web and non-web sources

Stowe Boyd, futurist, publisher and editor-in-chief of Work Futures, said, "The rapid rise of AI will lead to a Cambrian explosion of techniques to monitor the web and non-web media sources and social networks and rapidly identifying and tagging fake and misleading content."

Well, there's good news and bad news about the information future ...

Jeff Jarvis, professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, commented, "Reasons for hope: Much attention is being directed at manipulation and disinformation; the platforms may begin to recognize and favor quality; and we are still at the early stage of negotiating norms and mores around responsible civil conversation. Reasons for pessimism: Imploding trust in institutions; institutions that do not recognize the need to radically change to regain trust; and business models that favor volume over value."

A fear of the imposition of pervasive censorship

Jim Warren, an internet pioneer and open-government/open-records/open-meetings advocate, said, "False and misleading information has always been part of all cultures (gossip, tabloids, etc.). Teaching judgment has always been the solution, and it always will be. I (still) trust the longstanding principle of free speech: The best cure for 'offensive' speech is MORE speech. The only major fear I have is of massive communications conglomerates imposing pervasive censorship."

People have to take responsibility for finding reliable sources

Steven Miller, vice provost for research at Singapore Management University, wrote, "Even now, if one wants to find reliable sources, one has no problem doing that, so we do not lack reliable sources of news today. It is that there are all these other options, and people can choose to live in worlds where they ignore so-called reliable sources, or ignore a multiplicity of sources that can be compared, and focus on what they want to believe. That type of situation will continue. Five or 10 years from now, I expect there to continue to be many reliable sources of news, and a multiplicity of sources. Those who want to seek out reliable sources will have no problems doing so. Those who want to make sure they are getting a multiplicity of sources to see the range of inputs, and to sort through various types of inputs, will be able to do so, but I also expect that those who want to be in the game of influencing perceptions of reality and changing the perceptions of reality will also have ample means to do so. So the responsibility is with the person who is seeking the news and trying to get information on what is going on. We need more individuals who take responsibility for getting reliable sources."

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The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online

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Experts are evenly split on whether the coming decade will see a reduction in false and misleading narratives online. Those forecasting improvement place their hopes in technological fixes and in societal solutions. Others think the dark side of human nature is aided more than stifled by technology.

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It's up to universities to produce well-rounded students, but when courses are forced upon students, they end up doing the opposite. In the US, as it is everywhere, there are more and more students who go to university without a clue of what they want to do with their life. After graduation, many more end up in jobs that have nothing to do with their degree. When they start university, they are forced to sit through a series of subjects they have no interest in because it is said this will help guide them into their career. But these compulsory general-education courses have become pure academic profit-seeking. Instead of swaying students into a career path, they have led to increased apathy and confusion among students.

As tuition fees continue to increase, many students put their university experience on hold to complete their general-education courses at junior colleges instead. Those who do choose to enter into a four-year school immediately often have to endure a series of courses that add no additional value to their course path. For me, on a journalism course, my first-year classes in algebra and art history did nothing to enhance my skills. They just got me in more debt.

Universities have become far less about the enjoyment of learning and far more about their own financial survival - and this is taking its toll on students. I've watched many of my classmates switch back and forth between degrees - they wonder which they should aim for or whether the university route was right for them at all. Having students continue to pay for courses that may or may not help them further adds to the confusion. And that confusion doesn't end when they graduate. It's rare these days to come across someone who works in the field they went to school for.

Most of my classmates are enthusiastic about the courses that relate to their degree, but often resent the general-education classes they are forced into. Students, including me, often end up spending only a small fraction of time on coursework that does not relate to their chosen subject. These courses are wasted money that feed the ubiquitous disinterest on campus.

At most US universities, you progress down the path to a degree by fulfilling a list of general-education courses that come in limited options. Even in my last year, I'm still paying for classes that don't benefit my course route except for ticking the box in my degree qualifications. There were several classes I wanted to take that held my interest, but I was unable to because they would not fit the criteria for my degree. Instead, I had to pick whichever classes that were not already full, and which would get me the credits I needed. Many of the courses I was required to take I had already studied before entering university, rendering them redundant and repetitive.

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Universities must rediscover the passion for knowledge

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It's up to universities to produce well-rounded students, but when courses are forced upon students, they end up doing the opposite. In the US, as it is everywhere, there are more and more students who go to university without a clue of what they want to do with their life.

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For most students, choosing a university is as simple as counting up Ucas points, checking a league table or two, and signing up to a few open days to whittle the list down. But things are more complicated for distance learners, for whom studying off-campus brings a whole new set of considerations.

What's the learning platform like?

"The technology can vary widely between courses," says Tom Taylor, head of degrees at work at Anglia Ruskin University. "Students want to know what it will be like to learn online; whether they will get to communicate with other students, and how interactive the course will be."

To get a feel for the learning environment, you should ask universities if they offer a taster session, according to Ian Myat, director of educational enterprise at Birmingham University: "Some providers allow students to sample a module and try the course in the same way you would if you were enrolled," he says.

Is it the real deal?

Fake institutions are an ongoing issue with internet degree courses, so it's worth taking the time to make sure a course you've chosen is the real deal. You can do this quickly on the gov.uk website.

With traditional degree courses, university league tables are a popular way to get a feel for a institution's reputation. But Myat warns that these may not include some of the best online courses. "Newer courses may not feature in league tables as there is not yet enough data, but these often take advantage of new technology like video conferences and streaming," he says. "So it's a trade off for students between the security of established courses that might be less cutting-edge, and newer, more advanced courses."

Many providers will also let you talk to current students or give you information about graduate paths. Worried that her Open University qualification wouldn't be seen as a "real" degree, Georgina Crop, who is studying for a BA in English literature and language at the Open University, did her due diligence: "I checked its accreditation and also read success stories about recent graduates," she says.

How much does it cost?

Another factor to consider is budget. Although online learners can often cut the cost by being based off-campus and working alongside their degree, tuition fees still tend to be in the thousands.

"There is sometimes a perception that online learning is free," says Myat. "In fact, the costs are often similar to campus courses and if you want to gain a recognised qualification, you should expect to pay for it." Prices fluctuate based on where an institution sees itself in the market, so costs can be a rough indication of quality.

Are there any offline options?

If you like the idea of doing part of your course on campus, it is sometimes facilitated and can even be compulsory. "Some subjects, such as sports science, have elements that are harder to teach online and require a face-to-face module," says Taylor.

Is it flexible enough?

One of the big draws of distance learning is that there are fewer timetabled events and study can be fit around your lifestyle. "My course allowed me to go Kärsämäki in Finland for six months, doing European Voluntary Service," says Crop, who also spent time in Greece on an Erasmus young entrepreneur programme. "No traditional university course would've allowed me to do that while studying," she says.

But if you want to fit work, travel or volunteering around your studies, find out whether your schedule will actually allow it. "Although most online study is part-time, the concentration of the hours you need to put in can vary between institutions and courses," says Myat.

Everyone's requirements are different and universities will be happy to give you as much information as they can. The main thing, Myat says, is to remember that online learning is changing all the time. "It's an evolving market, so I'd encourage students to speak to course providers and ask lots of questions," he says.

Follow Guardian Students on Twitter: @GdnStudents. For graduate career opportunities, take a look at Guardian Jobs. Topics

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Here's what to consider before choosing an online degree

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For most students, choosing a university is as simple as counting up Ucas points, checking a league table or two, and signing up to a few open days to whittle the list down. But things are more complicated for distance learners, for whom studying off-campus brings a whole new set of considerations.

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Opinion

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Credit Credit Lilli Carré

Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We're too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans' trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.

Just how bad is our reading problem? The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated, but it offers a picture of Americans' ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story. Of those who finished high school but did not continue their education, 13 percent could not perform simple tasks like these. When things got more complex - in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers - 95 percent failed.

There's no reason to think things have gotten better. Scores for high school seniors on the National Assessment of Education Progress reading test haven't improved in 30 years.

Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate - they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider "I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn't let me bring my Rubik's Cube to the library." The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik's Cubes make noise; kids don't resist tempting toys very well. If you don't know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you'll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library.

Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year's celebrated fake-news headline, "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President," is unambiguous - no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you're aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write. Just tell us that libraries are quiet. But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. "Write for your audience" means, in part, gambling on what they know.

These examples help us understand why readers might decode well but score poorly on a test; they lack the knowledge the writer assumed in the audience. But if a text concerned a familiar topic, habitually poor readers ought to read like good readers.

In one experiment, third graders - some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor - were asked to read a passage about soccer. The poor readers who knew a lot about soccer were three times as likely to make accurate inferences about the passage as the good readers who didn't know much about the game.

That implies that students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test. One experiment tested 11th graders' general knowledge with questions from science ("pneumonia affects which part of the body?"), history ("which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?"), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores.

Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It's treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children's lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.

Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic? If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom - knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.

Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design. The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know - the document valorizes reading skills. State officials should go beyond the Common Core Standards by writing content-rich grade-level standards and supporting district personnel in writing curriculums to help students meet the standards. That's what Massachusetts did in the 1990s to become the nation's education leader. Louisiana has recently taken this approach, and early results are encouraging.

Don't blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans' poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.

Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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Opinion Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We're too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans' trouble with reading predates digital technologies.

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Artificial intelligence and automation are bringing changes to higher education that will challenge, and may even threaten, in-person learning

smithsonian.com

Automation and artificial intelligence technologies are transforming manufacturing, corporate work and the retail business, providing new opportunities for companies to explore and posing major threats to those that don't adapt to the times. Equally daunting challenges confront colleges and universities, but they've been slower to acknowledge them.

At present, colleges and universities are most worried about competition from schools or training systems using online learning technology. But that is just one aspect of the technological changes already under way. For example, some companies are moving toward requiring workers have specific skills trainings and certifications - as opposed to college degrees.

As a professor who researches artificial intelligence and offers distance learning courses, I can say that online education is a disruptive challenge for which colleges are ill-prepared. Lack of student demand is already closing 800 out of roughly 10,000 engineering colleges in India. And online learning has put as many as half the colleges and universities in the U.S. at risk of shutting down in the next couple decades as remote students get comparable educations over the internet - without living on campus or taking classes in person. Unless universities move quickly to transform themselves into educational institutions for a technology-assisted future, they risk becoming obsolete.

Existing alternatives to traditional higher ed

Enormous amounts of information are now available online for free, ready for watching, listening or reading at any time, by anyone who's connected. For more than a decade, private companies, nonprofits and universities alike have been experimenting with online courses, often offered for free or at low cost to large numbers of students around the world. Research has shown that it's as effective for students to use a combination of online courses and traditional in-classroom instruction as it is to just have classes in person.

Providers of massive open online courses (often called " MOOCs") are refining ways for people who complete the classes to present their accomplishments in ways employers can understand easily. For example, students in certain classes from major MOOC provider edX can get an official Arizona State University transcript listing their courses and grades. An employer would never know the person studied online. (There's another threat to universities' business model, too: Students can take the classes and get their grades for free; they only need to pay if they are happy with their grades, and if they want official college credit.)

This is a period of rapid change unlike what universities have dealt with for centuries.

The evolution of the university

Medieval European universities trained would-be clergy members in canonical law, theological discussion and religious administration. These institutions amassed huge repositories of knowledge, storing and indexing them in libraries, which became the focal point of the campus.

As European countries explored the world and established overseas colonies starting in the 15th and 16th centuries, universities evolved to train officers to manage those territories, study navigation across the oceans and look after colonists' health. After the Industrial Revolution, colleges changed again, teaching workers how to use new scientific and technological methods and tools.

In the 21st century, the workplace is transforming once more; what businesses, governments and society need from education is shifting, and technology has made the brick-and-mortar library obsolete. It used to be that users of a technology needed to know how it works. In the early days of driving, for instance, it was important for a driver to be able to fix a car that broke down on the side of the road, perhaps far from any expert mechanic.

But in the current post-industrial economy, that has changed: Even a car mechanic uses a computer to connect to car systems to identify what is not working properly. Very few people need to know how these internal computer systems work; they just need to be able to interpret sensor readings and error messages.

A changing job market

Now, the number of jobs mostly involving routine skills - both physical and cognitive - is shrinking over time. Increasing automation at factories is rapidly replacing workers at factories, even in low-wage countries like China. Artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning and computer vision are permanently eliminating high-skill jobs in offices, too. Many world economies - including in the U.S. - are turning from manufacturing to service, in which most new jobs do not require advanced education.

The remaining jobs will involve fewer routine tasks. The people doing that work will still need some education beyond high school. But they may not have as much need to attend classes at, or even live on, a physical university campus. Colleges that are outside the very top tier of quality and name recognition - and those that have taken on large amounts of debt to build physical facilities - will suffer as demand for their services lessens.

Competition between colleges

Another factor challenging universities' existence is the rapidly rising cost of a traditional college education. So far, in the U.S. demand for degrees from residential colleges has remained high because government-backed loans are easy to get. But student loan debt in the U.S. has reached US$1.45 trillion - and as many as 20 percent of borrowers may not be earning enough to pay them back.

Universities might highlight intangible values of in-person learning, like personal contact and nonverbal communication, but the costs are becoming a larger factor. Parents and students in the U.S. are increasingly asking whether it's worth spending around $30,000 - or even more than $60,000 - for less than 240 days of school in an elite private residential college - more than $250 a night.

Private colleges' main competition at the moment comes from public universities. Their prices are two-thirds lower, but studying still involves taking many courses that are just as easily taught online.

Soon students will want to take a variety of courses from different universities, choosing each class and school for its particular merits and benefits. That will stiffen competition between institutions, lowering students' costs - and universities' revenues.

Courses will become shared experiences for online learning communities. Some colleges might seek to charge students for special in-person learning experiences, but these will be extras for those who can afford them, not the higher education norm they are today.

Finding a new way to teach

Some universities - those at the top, with the most money and expertise - are responding to the coming changes to higher education. Some are forming partnerships with international universities and online teaching companies, or building remote-learning programs on their own. Some of these, like the Harvard Extension School, are high-tech adaptations of correspondence courses people used to take by mail.

Harvard Extension School enrolls nearly 2,000 degree candidates and over 13,000 non-degree students, who take classes online, on campus or a mix of both. Students can earn a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree in extension studies. At an estimated cost of $49,500, a four-year degree is cheaper than a single year on campus at Harvard.

But the vast majority of people who take its classes never get a degree at all. They're just looking for one particular course, or maybe a few, customizing their own education.

Employers will soon take advantage of options like this, too: Universities will find themselves asked to build specific programs for particular companies. And universities will find themselves needing to explore other ways artificial intelligence technologies can help reduce the cost of education.
Subhash Kak, Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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Will Traditional Colleges and Universities Become Obsolete?

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smithsonian.com Automation and artificial intelligence technologies are transforming manufacturing, corporate work and the retail business, providing new opportunities for companies to explore and posing major threats to those that don't adapt to the times. Equally daunting challenges confront colleges and universities, but they've been slower to acknowledge them.

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The first two digital revolutions - computing and communications - transformed society. Now comes the third, which is fabrication, argues the new book, Designing Reality. The authors say that computerized fabrication such as 3-D printing is the beginning of a trend to change data into objects. But like any revolution, not all populations will benefit equally. The book, which is aimed at helping people prepare for the next tech wave, was written by three brothers: Alan Gershenfeld, president of E-Line Media and former chairman of Games for Change; Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a professor at Brandeis University; and Neil Gershenfeld, who heads The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Alan Gerhsenfeld and Cutcher-Gershenfeld talked about their book on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the full podcast using the player at the top of this page.)
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: What started this third digital revolution?

Alan Gershenfeld: It's actually a continuum. We've had a revolution in digital computation, we've had a revolution in digital communication, and both have changed the world. We use Gordon Moore's 1965 paper as a powerful point, where he was looking back 10 years at the doubling of digital computing performance and projecting what would happen 10 years forward if that exponential curve continued. He predicted things like mobile phones and smart cars, not because he was Nostradamus. He was simply observing a past trend of technology doubling and projecting forward.

Well, it's happened for 50 years with close to a billion-fold improvement. Our middle brother, Neil, who wrote the book Fab that introduced a lot of this technology to the world, has also looked back 10 years and seen the doubling of digital fabrication performance. When we project forward 10, 20, 30 or 40 years and a potential billion-fold improvement in digital fabrication performance, it will once again change the world. That is the third digital revolution.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where will average people be able to see these changes?

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld: If you're involved in a community fabrication lab or maker space, you are starting to see it already. Most people barely see it except for press reports on 3-D printing, which is just one small piece of the puzzle. But where this is headed will affect how we live, learn, work and play. Imagine communities being able to design and make what they need locally, cutting global supply chains, still being globally connected but locally self-sufficient.

There are a growing number of communities that are beginning to embrace this rapid prototyping technology as a vehicle to make hydroponics for food, to make furniture, to make other things and, ultimately, to rethink the very nature of who owns the means of production. It started with Barcelona three years ago, and now there are about 14 cities in two countries that have set a goal of being globally connected but locally self-sufficient by 2040.

"The third digital revolution, much like the first two digital revolutions back in 1965, is largely going unnoticed or not fully understood." -Alan Gershenfeld

Gershenfeld: There are pockets of knowledge, but the third digital revolution, much like the first two digital revolutions back in 1965, is largely going unnoticed or not fully understood. 3-D printing is a very powerful additive technology and one component of a fab lab. But there are some subtractive processes like laser cutters and shop bots, and there's embedded computing. Right now the fab lab, as an integration of additive, subtractive, embedded computing, with a global network that is sharing a similar footprint of not just hardware but computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), creates a footprint that is interoperable, and you have something of an internet of bits and atoms.

That is partially what enables the exponential propagation of fab labs and global sharing with local self-sufficiency. Amidst all of the hype around 3-D printing, that landscape is misunderstood. The book gives a peek around the corner into the future of the research roadmap for digital fabrication, which goes from community fabrication to personal fabrication to ubiquitous and universal fabrication. In that process, there's a switch from the materials used.

Now you use various forms of wood or MDF, plastics that are both environmentally friendly and unfriendly. Over time, those materials will become smarter. You'll have smart digital materials that can form and reform, and that's also part of the roadmap to sustainability. While there is awareness and press around 3-D printing, fab labs and maker spaces, folks don't necessarily understand the full capability of a fab lab and the roadmap within the next 10, 20, 30 years.

Knowledge@Wharton: What exactly is a fab lab?

Cutcher-Gershenfeld: If you walk into a typical fab lab, it might be twice the size of a woodworking or metalworking shop. You would see some computers for design, a laser cutter, a 3-D printer, a milling machine, a 3-D scanner. You would see a space where you could do electronics and make circuit boards to make programmable products. It wouldn't look that different from the rapid prototyping facility that a manufacturing organization would have. The difference, of course, is that it would be open to the community. It might be in a school, a library, a community college, a university or a museum.

The important thing is that the roadmap extends 30, 40, 50 years. But there are things that you can do right now. Let's take Pittsburgh, for example. It's a steel city that had fallen on hard times with the decline of traditional manufacturing. About 10 years ago, a series of pancake breakfasts brought educators together because they said kids weren't learning the way they used to. They shifted to focus more on project-based learning.

Today there are 2,000 educators in that region, which includes western Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio. There are also about 200 fab labs and maker spaces, and they're connected to the local schools, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. This digital fabrication capability is part of a new project-based way of learning that is integral to that emerging ecosystem.

Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like education is a major component of the third revolution.

Cutcher-Gershenfeld: That's exactly right. Fab labs are a great place to design and make things. It also turns out they're a great place for people to connect and collaborate, both locally and internationally, because people are sharing designs and ideas all around the world through the digital communications connections. So, fab labs turn out to be centers for collaboration that really bridge across generations, across communities, in ways that are very special.

"Could there be a debilitating fab divide that actually makes the current digital divides even worse?" -Alan Gershenfeld

Knowledge@Wharton: Explain the process of writing this book together as three brothers who have complementary skills?

Gershenfeld: It was an interesting experience. Neil has always been on the vanguard of technology and digital fabrication technology and this nexus between bits and atoms. But he is a techno-utopist like a lot of people on the vanguard of technology. One thing that Joel and I do is look at the challenges and tensions in the global fab-lab ecosystem. As Joel mentioned, when you go to a fab lab it's an exhilarating experience. A well-run fab lab has all of the benefits of experiential learning and community empowerment. You're connected to a global community that loves to make things. It really is a powerful experience. But digital fabrication is hard.

First, we talk about access. Right now, there are over 1,000 fab labs reaching a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps a few million people, but there are 7 billion people on the planet. Could there be a debilitating fab divide that actually makes the current digital divides even worse? We go into a deep dive as to how to start to think about avoiding a fab divide now. Imagining going back to 1965, reading Gordon Moore's paper and saying, we need to start thinking about a digital divide now, not 20, 30 years later.

We also look at literacy. Right now, digital literacy is still something we're trying to define a half-century after Moore's paper. What does it mean to be fab literate when that's going to mediate so much of how things are made in the future? We look at things like an enabling ecosystem, how to cultivate fab mentors, how to cultivate interoperability. Right now there's a lot of friction in the CAD, CAM, additive, subtractive, embedded computing process because they are very different. These traditionally have been different systems that don't necessarily work well together. Designing standards and protocols is much easier early rather than later when they become hardened.

Lastly, we look at risk mitigation. That's everything from bad people making bad things in a fab lab, which certainly you start to see press around, to other areas of risk that could emerge in the ecosystem. Again, now is the time to begin addressing those.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is it hard to look so far down the road without being retrospective and almost behind the curve?

Cutcher-Gershenfeld: In society, institutions hold what you might call the rules of the game. Institutions are a product of patterned behaviors that essentially become codified into how we do it. The institutions around digital communication and computation were slow to emerge. As a result, we're playing catch-up now on all of the online bullying, complicated weaponized information and just the basic digital divides around access and literacy.

What we're saying in the book is that now is the time to begin thinking about these patterns. Institutions need to do two things: They need to help create value, and they need to mitigate risk. Creating value is all about people being able to design and make what they need. There are serious risks. Probably the most troubling is bio-fab, which is using digital fabrication capabilities to create biological things. It's beneficial if you can print a new liver, which in labs people can do. It's not so good if you print a disease that gets out of the lab into the community. We need to create the institutional patterns, the new arrangements, to have conversations, to have advocacy, to have voice, to have agency with respect to the technology.

"We're playing catch-up now on all of the online bullying, complicated weaponized information and basic digital divides around access and literacy." -Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld

Knowledge@Wharton: How will the third digital revolution change the way we work?

Cutcher-Gershenfeld: We think of work as getting paid to do a job, going to a workplace, having a supervisor, having a hierarchical structure and having a person who is the boss or owner. In some respects, there will still be services and things that you will need to do for which paid labor will be important in the years to come. It will be a blended economy.

But what's interesting is that increasingly there are things that you can design and make for barter and exchange. The very notion of work itself may be that you can do paid work less and consume less, and instead create more.

Gershenfeld: For years, indigenous communities have been able to understand their environment, understand their local materials and largely make what they consume. I think a global movement, like the fab cities movement, that is looking back to that sort of true north. How can we increasingly use local materials to largely make what we can consume? As Joel mentioned, that leads to a really interesting blend that is going to emerge. There's the idea that, with making more of what you consume, with more protections around the gig economy, you can have a more blended lifestyle where it's not this dichotomy of work and not work.

Knowledge@Wharton: How will all of this affect societal norms?

Cutcher-Gershenfeld: Let's take a function in the workplace that we know well: human resources. Human resources ensures fair treatment in the workplace, health and safety, helps define career paths, attends to training and development. All of those things depend on there being something called a workplace in the first place. These fab labs aren't a workplace, so they're not subject to health and safety regulations, the laws governing fair treatment, discrimination, and so on. Yet people are spending a lot of time there, and those issues and needs are real. That's a place where the institutions needs to be realigned to match the new realities to protect against the parts of our human nature that are not always the best version of ourselves.

At the same time, the technology itself will eventually move out of the lab as we go along this roadmap into more personal technology, which could be located anywhere. How do we ensure fair treatment, safe conditions and other societal norms that we value in a world where the ability to make things is increasingly mobile?

Gershenfeld: Right now in society, there seems to be this big dichotomy between globalism and localism. Fab labs are almost a boundary object where bits can be global and we can share global knowledge, but atoms can be local and self-sufficiency can be local. I think it's a way to break down some of those hardened divides.

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Are You Ready for the Third Digital Revolution? - Knowledge@Wharton

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The first two digital revolutions - computing and communications - transformed society. Now comes the third, which is fabrication, argues the new book, Designing Reality. The authors say that computerized fabrication such as 3-D printing is the beginning of a trend to change data into objects.

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Very recently, Facebook might have looked like it was "winning" social media. It has over 2 billion users. Its duopoly with Google grabbed about 75% of U.S. digital ad revenue last year. It's created ( limited) internet access for users who otherwise might not have connections at all. But it's never seen bigger challenges. Thanks to its attention-hacking algorithms, hesitations to moderate content, unchecked ad-buy procedures and data leaks that might have swung an election, the platform is under fire for creating a hellhole of fake news and wasted time.

Facebook is certainly looking to change. Now that the Cambridge Analytica scandal has knocked its share value down more than 10%, investors are suing. Angry users are saying they'll delete their accounts. Zuckerberg's 2018 goal-of-the-year - previously fun challenges like learning Mandarin or running a mile a day - is to fix fake news on his platform.

But change comes slowly. Is this a big opportunity for competitor platforms? . Snapchat is massively undercut by (Facebook-owned) Instagram stories and keeps seeing its value crash because Vero swung in with lots of cash, PR, and an uninteresting product that was quickly panned Kylie Jenner or Rihanna says something mean about it. But there are a number of smaller companies - many hesitant to even characterize themselves as "social media"- capitalizing on an opportunity to offer more thoughtful places for conversations online. It seems unlikely they'll steal serious market share soon, but they do offer some alternative monetization models worth watching now.
Are.na: An "Intellectual Pinterest" Nearing Freemium Profitability
"I still feel optimistic and utopian about the internet as being a place to access an infinite amount of weird information." Charles Broskoski tells me, in an upscale Manhattan cafe he remembers as a "super normal" deli from his days as a Parsons art student. "There's a general connotation that going on Twitter, going on Facebook, is ultimately wasting time. It's not like you can't find things that are interesting, but you have to claw through garbage to get there."

Broskoski is a cofounder of , a platform that allows users - researchers, academics, artists, and other deep-cuts internet explorers - to collaboratively collect and curate links, text, and images. I've heard people call it an "intellectual Pinterest," a description that's reductive, but pretty accurate. Instead of "boards" titled "Dream Wedding" users make multimedia "channels" on topics like " "Arena Influences" channel quotes Decolonize Design " and " Abstract Formalist Comics ." The intention, says Broskoski, is a " social platform that doesn't feel performative, doesn't feel like you're just sending things to a newsfeed for other people to consume. It's more for yourself." It's a place to "build a context about what you're actually interested in, and what other information is in the universe around that particular topic." The Louis Rossetto: "in the age of information overload, THE ULTIMATE LUXURY IS MEANING AND CONTEXT." Wired founder

Are.na also champions the luxury of an ad-free user experience. Since its 2015 launch, it's avoided any monetization of users' attention spans and personal data. Rather, it charges ($45/year) for additional "private" channels that are hidden from the wider community. That alone has the platform on track to be profitable by the end of this year. It also makes a modest income off "F*** an algorithm" merch and just launched a " Kickstarter for equity " through a platform called Republic. Broskoski says, over email, "We've seen how enormous institutional investments have compromised other platforms' missions in the name of growth. We don't want to make the same mistake, so we're raising funds directly from like-minded people who believe in us."

And more people seem to be becoming aware of mainstream social's shortcomings now. The platform grew from about 12,000 to 41,000 users in the past year. They've made over 28,000 collections with almost 500,000 pieces of content in the first quarter of 2018. Chris Barley, who in May 2017 invested $150,000 and joined Broskoski as a cofounder (along with Daniel Pianetti, Chris Sherron, and Damon Zucconi), thinks the growth is related to a growing awareness of how social media businesses don't typically have users' best interests in mind. " Something about the current attitude toward social media is starting to intersect with what our product is," says Barley. "We don't want our day to be about creating an addictive product and artificial growth for our investors, we want our day to be about making a better product for our users."

"The internet doesn't have to be this way," he continues. "It this way because of choices that people have made about how to grow their businesses and how to structure their business models. Unless those people change that structure, are willing to change their business models, it won't be different."
Relevant: Devaluing Trolls And Creating Curatorial Cryptocurrencies
Relevant is another social media challenger turning to its community to create new value systems. The app aspires to be a troll-proof riff on Reddit: your upvotes and downvotes on a stream of shared articles are weighted based on your previous interactions and "relevance" in the topic. So if you share an article on feminism, an upvote from someone who regularly gets upvoted for his feminist comments counts much more than a downvote from someone who hasn't built credibility on the topic. Relevant is a closed-beta app now, and is working towards launching a cryptocurrency to reward relevant users for their contributions.

Cofounders Analisa Teachworth and Slava Balasanov, who run a creative agency called 4REAL, started working on the project because another one took an unexpected turn that ended up fueling fake news. In 2015, they released a tool called Clone Zone that made it easy to edit headlines and images on publications like The New York Times. "Our intention was to cultivate an online space where users could play, create, manipulate the system, essentially take back the internet and use it for alternative purposes." Teachworth says. "It was an effort to mix things up." But Clone Zone's convincing fakes were soon confusing readers and inviting avalanches of cease-and-desist letters from publishers.

"We saw a problem with clickbait, sensational headlines, the attention economy before the general public realization," says Teachworth. So 4REAL started exploring how to create a positive impact, rather than wreaking havoc, in online journalism and social media. Balasanov says they wanted to "give users more agency in curation and consumption and not have to rely on a single algorithm designed to extract as much user data as possible. In many ways it involves rethinking the business structure of social media."

Relevant launched last April to "test reputation and incentive models." I've been on it about as long as it's been live and have continued to enjoy finding and sharing articles there. It's on my iPhone homescreen. I'm ranked #1 in #Reality, #2 on the topic of #Facebook. Because the app is currently available by invitation only, it's certainly populated by a small group of people interested in media and technology, and has less risk of being overrun by trolls. But I do notice that, when "likes" are replaced by this thematic ranking system, people seem to stay on-topic and make more thoughtful contributions. I can count on certain users for updates on AI, others for comments on biohacking. When I share, I tend to make it a place for thinking and analysis, rather than selfies or jokes I think will get likes.

"Gaining relevance is more of a personal challenge, it's like earning importance or clout," says Teachworth. "A like is more of a temporary engagement and relevance refers to an overall score and creates the foundation of profile versus a gratification model."

The next step, the cofounders hope, is to make overall scores and communities map to cryptocurrency value. They've started designing decentralized protocols "that will facilitate users to create their own communities for curating and sharing information and retain ownership of any economic output they produce." Balasanov explains, " Each community [on a certain topic] would generate its own token system, and as more people want to join the community and buy tokens, the price goes up. So if you start a community and are curating great content, the token price goes up. But if someone starts spamming it, the token price goes down. I t shows community isn't healthy." Users have a clear incentive to contribute thoughtful commentary, and an incentive to do their own community policing - in the form of downvoting - if the conversation goes off the rails. And unlike Steemit, another crypto-based content and curation platform, users are rewarded for the quality, not quantity, of their contributions. Your ability to vote is limited, and is commensurate with how "relevant" you are in the community.

Like Are.na, Relevant aims to give users a better place to discover and make sense of all the media available to them. Facebook created what once seemed like an unshakable model for monetizing attention, but has left many feeling let down. Now's the time to look for new forms of discovery and interaction online. "I think curation is the fundamental problem that exists," Balasanov says. "It's not like there's a lack of quality material out there. It's the distribution and the way it's consumed."

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'The Internet Doesn't Have To Be This Way' -- Small Sites Pursuing Saner Social Media

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Very recently, Facebook might have looked like it was "winning" social media. It has over 2 billion users. Its duopoly with Google grabbed about 75% of U.S. digital ad revenue last year. It's created ( limited) internet access for users who otherwise might not have connections at all.

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Fake news can be divided into three genres, Associate Professor of English and American Studies Elizabeth Losh told the audience attending her Tack Faculty Lecture on March 22.

But first, she explained that the manner in which we consume news today is essential to the proliferation of something that has evolved from the advent of the printing press to radio and is now deeply a part of our current culture.

"We once consumed news through a morning daily newspaper then a nightly news broadcast before going to sleep," she said. "During that intervening time, no news consumption took place. But with the rise of internet browsers and social network sites and news apps for smart phones, people are consuming news every hour, maybe every minute."

Video: Fake news: Soccer, Trump and peanut-butter cups.

Initially launched in April 2012, the Tack Faculty Lecture was established through a commitment by Martha ('78) and Carl Tack ('78). The commitment creates an endowment for the series and speakers, who are William & Mary faculty members.

A playful fake news

Widespread use of the internet has led to the creation of three genres of fake news - 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

"Fake news 1.0 would be satire that seems to make fun of the political theater," she said. The Daily Show starring Jon Stewart ('84) was such a glowing example of this era that Stewart was once introduced as "the most trusted man in fake news."

"But it didn't undermine media literacy," said Losh, quoting a 2007 Pew Center report that Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers were actually more likely to know elected representatives or members of the president's cabinet than people who did not watch, or viewers of PBS.

However, as with all aspects of this seemingly increasingly complicated topic, there are exceptions. Losh pointed to a "story" in The Onion purporting that Congress would move out of Washington if a new capitol building weren't constructed.

Absurd as it seems, the report was picked up and spread by some American news services. Social science researchers have been looking into why.

"An important factor seems to be that people care less and less about the source of online news and more and more on the content," she said. "So it's less about context and more about content for those consumers."

That, she said, plays into fake news 2.0, which "lacks the jocularity of 1.0."

The darker version

"It imagines a dark, paranoid world in which information is a weapon," Losh said. "One needs to protect oneself by using information in this negative way."

Following the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, there was a spike in internet stories that were fake news. The film "Loose Change," initially was released for free on the internet. It seems to be a documentary that raises questions about the Sept. 11 attack. It suggests, she said, that the World Trade Center was brought down by a controlled demolition. It argues that the people on the airplanes must have been actors because it would be impossible for people to use cell phones to communicate with loved ones from the air.

"It generally offers pieces of seeming evidence to sow doubt about the events of Sept. 11," she said. "It has been watched over one million times."

But the rest of the story is this: The person who made the film, Dylan Avery, created it initially as fiction. The plot was intended to be that thieves use the terrorist attack as a distraction that would allow them to steal a large amount of gold.

Video: Fake news: Radio, printing presses and the 'dystopian' future.

"But he thought it would be more convincing if he presented it as a documentary," she said. "It proved so successful that multiple versions of it appeared, and some of them were produced by Alex Jones of 'Info Wars,' who then distributed it to his very large office."

Jones, Losh said, maintains a philosophy that there is a "deep state" that is bent on taking away people's weapons and wants to defang the Second Amendment as a way to put an authoritarian regime in charge.

Fake news 3.0 encompasses the modern situation where traditional news organizations are mistrusted and disparaged. The most obvious participant in this is President Donald Trump's administration, and for Losh it took flight when Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway talked about "alternate facts."

"I don't want to demonize the Trump administration because it is not productive," Losh said, "but it is important that there is confusion about what fake news is, that it's being used to describe traditional news organizations. The grounds for truth when it comes to journalistic standards are no longer clear.

"News organizations issue corrections and retractions all of the time; you'd think that would make a news source more credible because they are doing their due diligence. And yet it gives people who doubt traditional journalism in the first place a cause to doubt it even more," she said.

Why policing fake news is difficult

Losh addressed some potential solutions put forth by social media companies, but also noted their obvious drawbacks. The biggest problem is that social network sites have no financial incentive to control fake news.

"The profit model of a social network site depends on two things, targeted advertising and harvesting data," Losh said. "Fake news stories give them more information that they can profit from than a real news story.

"At the same time, fact-checking sites are struggling financially. They have no profit model."

The government can't regulate fake news, she said, because the political parties are so polarized that any legislation one party introduces is shot down by the other.

European countries do a better job of introducing young people to news literacy curricula than the United States, but they have a different attitude about free speech and censorship.

The answer, if there is one, could be found in teaching the humanities because they are critical for identifying fake news, she said.

"It's really useful to know something about history," Losh said. "It's really useful to know something about context, to know something about rhetoric, to know philosophy so that you can critically analyze arguments. And it's useful to know foreign languages because many fake news stories travel because people do not speak the languages that are depicted in them."
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Separating news from fake news | Williamsburg Yorktown Daily

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Fake news can be divided into three genres, Associate Professor of English and American Studies Elizabeth Losh told the audience attending her Tack Faculty Lecture on March 22. But first, she explained that the manner in which we consume news today is essential to the proliferation of something that has evolved from the advent of the printing press to radio and is now deeply a part of our current culture.

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India is rising, but 60 percent of Indians don't have access to the internet and many large pockets are not penetrated by the information highway. Your Story explores the state of the internet in India and lists down the opportunities ahead for internet-based consumption.
In metros and major Indian cities, the buzzwords are artificial intelligence and Blockchain. But in the 6,00,000 villages and 7,935 towns, the buzzwords remain loan waivers, subsidies, and political power struggles. For the internet has not penetrated rural India as deeply as religion or politics.

India's internet consumption - though on the rise - largely remains an urban phenomenon. In December 2017, internet penetration in urban India was at 64.84 percent as compared to 60.6 per cent in December 2016. In rural India, however, internet penetration was at 20.26 percent in December 2017, from 18 percent in 2016. The report, titled Internet in India 2017, was released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Things have changed radically in urban areas in the last decade, but have been slow in rural areas. It's the next 10 years that promise to transform India's hinterlands.

To bridge the digital divide, the Narendra Modi-run BJP government has disbursed Rs 34,000 crore to lay high-speed internet in 150,000 villages by 2019. But the Bharat Net Programme, earlier called the National Optic Fibre Network, whose high-speed optic fibre network aims to change the lives many Indians through internet services is yet to make an impact. Only 67,271 villages have been covered till now and the government needs to double its efforts in one year to reach the target . Even then only 30 percent of Indian villages will have internet coverage.

A Deloitte India report released in January 2018 revealed that with only 17 percent internet penetration, rural India is lagging behind in connectivity owing to challenges in deployment of fixed broadband networks.

But despite that, things are positive.

Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education, says: "Digital connectivity is going to make Indians productive. Information will change the way people work, there will be several new businesses and ideas that will make policy makers play catch-up, and eventually support this new wave of growth in the country."

Betting on the internet

These seeds of change were sown way back in 2005 with several businessmen betting on the future of India.

Kishore Biyani, the Founder of the Future Group, was among them. In December 2005, when retail was becoming the next big thing, he conceived an online play to catch consumers on the internet. In April 2006, he launched FutureBazaar.in, which became a Rs 120 crore business by 2009. Back then, internet penetration in India was as low as 5 million people, but Biyani was right to bet on consumption.

"India's consumption will continue to grow as incomes are on the rise," Kishore says.

Although the limelight of the retail internet was stolen by Flipkart, Snapdeal, and several others by 2014, there was no denying that the bets made by Biyani, on the country's fortunes, remain relevant even a decade later.

According to TRAI, the number of broadband connections in India is 276.52 million.

While this data tells us how India has leap-frogged into the digital era, consumption today largely remains an urban phenomenon. It may have touched the lives of 90 million Indians in 10 years, but what of the 450 million middle-class Indians living across the country? Will they take less than a decade to use the internet? Also, around 600 million rural Indians are poised to adopt the consumer internet. The question is how and why are middle-class and the rural households poised to go digital?

Sreedhar Prasad, KPMG Partner and Head of Consumer Markets at the consulting firm, has a thought. "It is going to increase manifold because of four or five things. It will be led by aspirations of the rural consumer, because of inexpensive data plans, and fall in smartphone prices," he says.

KPMG's Sreedhar says the following is bound to happen in two to three years:

Middle school kids in cities will consume the internet on smartphones.

Native language content will be consumed by migrant workers.

Data plans of all telecom operators will be fall.

Smartphone costs will drop to below Rs 4,000.

Urban Indians will begin to subscribe to content on the internet (Amazon Prime, WYNK, Byjus).

Indians, who used the net for marriages and jobs, will now use it to explore content.

There will be internet-first brands (in FMCG, apparel and electronics).

Democratising consumption

According to PWC, the internet has gone from a mere 75 million users in 2010 to 450 million people in 2017. This number is expected to exceed 600 million by 2020. Large-scale adoption of the internet has enabled several new businesses to push products and services over it.

Chetan Anand, Director, PWC, says, "Internet has brought the convenience of communication, education, shopping, entertainment, banking, and a host of other services into the hands of every individual. It has actually democratised consumption and has played a pivotal role in changing the lives of Indians." He adds that consumption is not restricted to e-commerce powered physical products but also data-driven virtual services.

The Indian ecommerce industry, according to PWC, was worth about $4 billion, in 2010, and is worth $50 billion by Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in 2017. The growth in B2C ecommerce is testimony to the increased consumption.

Professor S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT-B, says: "Today, the internet has built services where people don't really have to own assets. Businesses like Uber, Ola, Oyo Rooms, Flipkart, and Amazon have shown that you can build a great business without really owning any asset." He adds that technology is at the forefront of every industry and for Indian businesses, be it family or corporate, which are learning from global changes.

Internet in the other India

In rural areas of India, smartphones and not laptops are becoming the primary consumption devices. According to a recent report released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), most people in rural areas access the internet for entertainment, followed by online communication and social networking. But across small towns and villages, the internet is driving growth in various industries and sectors.

Bhaskar Bonepalli, owns about 10 trucks, and is an agent to 100 truck owners in the agricultural market town of Hoskote, just outside Bengaluru. His is a cash business; he is contacted by logistics companies to hire trucks and provide cargo delivery schedules to truck drivers. He gets several calls from brands, but has no knowledge of how many trucks are available. He grapples with not being able to use all the 110 trucks at his disposal. So he goes online. Downloading an app called LOBB gives him access to the demand and supply side of the business.

"I can seamlessly connect all my trucks to the demand made available on the LOBB platform; it increases my truck utilisation and keeps my network happy. I even transfer payments online via the unified payment interface," says Bhaskar, who owns Bhavya Roadlines.

The tech company that is working with 10,000 such truckers and 200-odd brands is LOBB. Venu Kondur and Jayaram Raju, both veterans of the tech and logistics industry, created this platform to increase faster movement of goods across the country.

"Only when goods move faster across the country will the GDP grow faster, and technology is an enabler for that growth," says Jayaram Raju, Co-founder of LOBB, the company whose ARR is going to be $15 million by the end of FY2018.

Venkatesh Kumar, from Kuppam, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, works at Bengaluru airport as a taxi driver. He uses his smartphone to consume political and entertainment news. He subscribes to Daily Hunt, a news aggregator for local language content. "I get two trips a day, at the airport, I spend a minimum of five hours reading content in Telugu," he says.

Veerendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of Dailyhunt, says: "We are focussed on ensuring that our audiences get a great personalised experience when they come to the platform."

This form of smartphone-based consumption and communication is also impacting small retail stores spread across India.

There are more than 12 million small stores, according to the Retail Association of India, and technologies are transformation.

Roshan Setty , a fourth-generation small department store owner, in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, owns Venkateshwara Stores and has enabled digital POS in his store. He uses SMS and WhatsApp to promote offers and even has a digital TV, where FMCG companies compete for ads and customer eyeballs.

"For a very long time my family was working on 3 percent net margins; life was about savings and putting money back into adding product category. We did not connect with our customers through any technology. Using the internet and apps, we have been able to work with brands better and serve customers faster. We have doubled our margins in the process," Roshan says.

Prem Kumar, Founder & CEO, SnapBizz, whose technology works with small stores, says, "The ubiquitous kirana or the small retail store, which is taking care of every neighborhood's small and significant requirements has leapfrogged from a calculator to cloud for day-to-day operations." SnapBizz, which has raised $10 million, works with more than 3000 kirana stores and has brought them into the cloud.

Smaller stores have adopted technology to automate supply chain and enhance consumer engagement. Within the confines of a traditional setup, digital tools such as SMS offers and in-store LED screens are making an impact on customer perception and sales. Kirana stores are now being transformed into a virtual supermarket, providing customers with an enhanced shopping experience.

According to a survey conducted by Snapbizz, of over 600 kirana stores spread across urban India, almost "half are sending promotional offers via WhatsApp and SMS using our push offer service".

Promotional messages account for 53 percent of the total SMSs sent to customers. In Mumbai alone, more than 5 lakh text messages were shared with customers. Some stores have noticed increased sales with the help of customised texts and visual engagement solutions. About 23 percent shop owners communicate and engage with customers beyond the regular communication by sending across festive greetings and store information.

"We have noticed that the changes at the macro-economic level, including digital India, inclusion, and skilling of the bottom of the pyramid as well as at the store level where the new generation enters the business with a renewed outlook, are steering the appetite to adopt technology to simplify business," says Prem Kumar.

Shreedhar Prasad, of KPMG, states that "children in Grade 8 grade will start consuming content through smartphones". Studies show this may well be true.

A study by Google and KPMG says:

The online education industry, worth $247 million today, is expected to grow to $1.96 billion by 2021.

280 million kids will enroll in schools by 2021 and with parents focusing on digital interventions, this will mean a 39 percent market share.

Online reskilling is very popular in India with 38 percent market share.

"Education will be hybrid, which will be a mix of the online and offline world," says Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal Education.

In the heat of Tirunalveli, a Tier IV city in Tamil Nadu, Benjamin Raja toils 14 hours a day, ensuring that the right amounts of water are in his 100-acre farm and the right amount of fertilizers are injected into the crop. He grows vegetables and fruit for retail stores in cities like Bengaluru. He has increased the yield of watermelon from 2 tonnes per acre to 6 tonnes per acre, with the help of IoT devices.

"I use the networks to get information on cropping patterns and soil conditions to increase yields," says Benjamin Raja of Farm Again. He has aggregated 5,000 acres of farms across India and uses the internet to collect real-time information on crops from farmers across India to give them advice on cropping, fertiliser use, and market linkages. His business supplies to Reliance Retail and Future Group.

Reghu Kumar, Ravi Kumar, and Shrinivas Viswananth started Upstox with the objective of making retail stock trading democratic.

"India is going to grow in a totally different way than the US did. In the US, you saw the economy boom first and then the internet gave it a new strength. In India, you are seeing the internet boom first, which will then be followed by an economic boom," Shrinivas says.

In India, services like payments have leap-frogged; an individual can send money to someone instantly with government infrastructure. In the US, it still takes a few days to clear payments. The other impressive thing about the Indian payment ecosystem is that the US is focused on low-volume, high-value transactions. In India, it's the reverse.

"We use the internet for a lot for high-volume, low-value transactions. The story is not the same, but there is growth; look at the economic growth numbers," Shrinivas says.

Upstox is increasingly looking at Tier II cities as there's a new aspirational class growing in these areas.

"A lot of young adults with their first or second job are looking to take a foreign trip or buy luxury goods. For them, the traditional areas of savings such as gold and real estate have lost their lustre," Shrinivas says. With internet connectivity mushrooming in every part of the country, these people are just as connected to the world as someone living in Delhi or Mumbai.

It's a big shift that's happening in a short period of time and there are market opportunities everywhere. No wonder Amazon India serves even the remotest parts of India these days.

Akhil Saxena, Vice President, India Customer Fulfilment, Amazon India, says, "We have now launched our own delivery services in Leh-Ladakh, Lakshadweep, Tripura, Jharkhand, and Meghalaya. This will ensure that customers in these regions now have the benefit of faster, reliable Amazon deliveries. We have seen significant new customer acquisition from Tier II, III, and IV cities, including Prime memberships,"

For Amazon, this growth in the delivery network will also create numerous opportunities for local entrepreneurs to scale their business under Amazon's "I Have Space" and Service Partner Programmes. Amazon has added 5,000 IHS partners and 100 Service Partner nodes in the last few months, strengthening their last-mile capability.

The Service Partner programme is one of the last mile models by Amazon Logistics where entrepreneurs act as Amazon's local distribution network providers and create the last mile delivery footprints. The company now has over 350 Service Partner nodes across the country, including in Agartala, Nagercoil, Allepey, Havelock islands, Shillong, Porbandar, Lonavala, Faridkot, Jind, Haldwani, and Bhilai to name a few.

So, let us just jump back to cities for the moment, consumers are already using payment platforms like Perpule and BluPay for self-checkouts in physical stores. It is only a matter of time where consumers in rural regions to will begin to use digital modes of payment Perpule for example integrates UPI and all form of payment for individuals to use the network to go cashless and check out without a line. Over 60000 customers use Perpule on a regular basis to avoid lines in retail stores such as HyperCity, SPAR and More.

Ultimately, consumption is increasing as GDP is growing at 7.2 percent. If India continues expanding its consumer base, the internet will play a major role in winning new consumers in all verticals. It took a decade to have 90 million internet-based consumers; it will now take less than five years to possibly double that number and in two decades may be will have networks cover all individuals in India (rural and urban).

"All this depends on growth supported by good governance. If incomes rise, the internet businesses will succeed and India will continue to grow in physical and digital environments," Mohandas Pai says.

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internet and mobile association of india

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Internet penetration may be rising, but the urban-rural digital divide remains a reality in India

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India is rising, but 60 percent of Indians don't have access to the internet and many large pockets are not penetrated by the information highway. Your Story explores the state of the internet in India and lists down the opportunities ahead for internet-based consumption.

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You might think someone who gets paid to predict the future would be mad for gadgets and forever spouting off on social media. But you'd be wrong. Writer and futurist Richard Watson may teach London business students and Silicon Valley tech companies how to think about crafting tools for tomorrow, but he's not even on Twitter.

What's more, Watson doesn't really follow the news in any conventional way. He reads Sunday newspapers, in print, retrospectively. He's not trying to catch up but to check and see which of the many headlines turned out to be relevant a few weeks or a month later. In other words, Watson isneutral about current events. He's placing any given moment in a much greater context than the day or the week. Watson's scale is grand and includes all of human history and its possible futures. In this very long view, nothing is such a big deal, although anything may become relevant eventually.

Instead of focusing on what everyone is already talking about, Watson hunts down unusual knowledge. He shared with Quartz his approach to creating a smart information filter-a net that captures what's happening and what really matters without making you a slave to information of fleeting importance.

1. "Practice selective ignorance"

You can't read or think about everything, so keep that in mind when choosing materials and pick quality over quantity, and try to create a wide context. In other words, triangulate between breadth and depth. The more information is available, the less we tend to digest, and people are increasingly tuning out even while they consume, so it makes sense to consume less and better data.

2. "Burst the bubble"

Watson advises that we randomly pick up books and magazines, and strike up conversations with strangers. These random acts of interest in strangers and unusual communications break your information consumption routines and expose you to unique insights.

3. Find the "tall poppies"

The futurist advises that each of us cultivate a network of curious and remarkable people who are hungry for interesting information and can guide our thinking. Such remarkable characters are called "tall poppies" in some companies, and Watson believes collecting these human blooms drives success.

4. Hit the road

"Travel. But again take the path untrodden," Watson urges. "We are herd animals and the temptation is always to follow the herd. Try not to."

5. Find sources you trust

Follow reliable, thoughtful, forward-looking publications and journalists online and let them do the heavy lifting, finding the most interesting info for you. If the publication or person is focused on thoughtful analysis and not panic news, you'll hear worthwhile insights. Watson especially recommends perusing weekend editions of quality newspapers.

6. Chill out

"Relax," writes the futurist. "The important news will find you. It will." Watson is confident that relevant information makes its way to us, and that much of what we fuss over daily is just stuff that will soon be forgotten.

7. Carve out designated reading time

"Have a think week every year," Watson says. Microsoft founder Bill Gates takes time to reflect on the future of technology from deep in a forest, for example. He reads dozens of academic papers during a solitary and studious retreat in the woods, which helps to fuel innovative thinking all year long.

8. Embrace silence

"Learn how to look and listen deeply," Watson recommends. "Stop talking. Start listening. Be curious all the time." Find quiet settings that elicit a certain reverence, like deserts, mountains, and even churches, places where reflection and contemplation come easily.

9. "Get off social media"

Common knowledge is common, and there's a glut of it online. But surprising info collected by curious oddballs is precious, valuable, and worth hunting down. Watson says, "Become cynical about trends. Watch for counter-trends. Visit the fringe."

10. Go dark

Finally, switch communications off once a week and every evening. If you are brave, Watson says, dare to own no cellphone.

Watson's approach is counterintuitive but consistent, and can be basically summed up in one principle: Be contrarian. Get smart by not worrying about where the crowd is going.

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How to read less news but be more informed, according to a futurist

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You might think someone who gets paid to predict the future would be mad for gadgets and forever spouting off on social media. But you'd be wrong. Writer and futurist Richard Watson may teach London business students and Silicon Valley tech companies how to think about crafting tools for tomorrow, but he's not even on Twitter.

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We have all heard, the phrase 'You are what you eat,' but what counts the most? Quantity? Quality? Total number of calories? There is so much information out there on the internet, it can be confusing to sort through it all!

When it comes to a sustainable lifestyle change, there are many things to take into consideration, such as food preferences, work/life schedule, body type and so on. However, there are a few key principles that impact everyone across the board.

Food is a key pleasure in our life. It is okay to use food to nourish your body and indulge every so often. I use the 80/20 rule, where 80% of my food comes from whole food sources and 20% is 'fun food.' Where we run into a problem is when we eat too much, too quickly and low quality food.

Here are 3 ways you may not realize you are sabotaging your healthy eating plan and the solutions to help:

1. Eating too much

Plain and simple-portion sizes that are too big. Going back for second and third helpings contributes to consuming extra calories. Consuming extra calories through drinks, dressings, sauces, and picking at your kids chicken nuggets, adds up. Repeat this enough and you will gain weight. It takes 3500 excess calories to gain 1 pound. Some people are 'weekday dieters' and only follow their nutrition plan on the weekdays. They then go out on weekends and consume excess amounts of alcohol, and eat out at restaurants. Others may not know that their portions are, in fact, too big. Bringing awareness to how much you are consuming through food logging is one way to stay on track.

Weight gain has a simple equation:
Calories consumed > calories burned = weight gain
Calories consumed < calories burned = weight loss

Solution s:

Change your environment. If you take your food to the couch to eat and watch television, change it up. Be present and sit at a table.

Start measuring and weighing your food. Don't just guess that something is 3 ounces, Measure it! Foods like nuts or peanut butter are easy to estimate and go overboard on since fats are more calorie dense.

If you are out at a restaurant and don't want to bring your handy-dandy scale, use the My Plate Method. This will help ensure you are getting a balanced meal. Use a 9" plate and mentally divide the plate in half. Half of the plate should consist of leafy green vegetables, or another non-starchy vegetable like carrots or string beans. The other half of the plate can mentally be divided in two. One-quarter of the plate will be a lean protein such as chicken, fish, turkey, tofu or another vegetarian option for protein. The other one-quarter will be a starchy carbohydrate like a sweet potato, brown rice or whole grain bread. Viola! You have your meal!

2. Eating too quickly
Eating while distracted could mean looking at your phone, being on your computer or on a phone call. Eating too quickly also means your brain doesn't have time to register to your stomach that it is full. This feeds back into number 1. A meta-analysis of 24 studies showed data that distracted eaters consume up to 50% more than their attentive counterparts! ¹
Solutions:

Put your fork down in between each bite. Do your best to chew your food 20 times before swallowing it. Chewing your food aids in digestion and metabolism.

Put all electronics away and on silent or airplane mode. Be fully present with your meal. If you have a family dinner, have everyone put their phones in a basket until the meal is done. Distraction can cause you to consume more than you think.

3. Eating low quality food - Continuously eating low quality, nutrient depleted food leads to poor health. Garbage in, garbage out. If you are eating poor quality food, you won't have energy. Limit processed foods such as baked goods, pretzels, candy and pretty much anything that has ingredients you can't pronounce.
Processed foods have more than 5 ingredients and the first one listed is the most concentrated in the product. Anything with less than 5 ingredients is minimally processed or a whole food source. Ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, MSG or food dyes are the more popular offenders that need to be avoided. Studies have shown a direct link between consumption of high fructose corn syrup and obesity.2

Opt instead for whole food sources, which include many plant-based foods found in nature, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains etc. When looking at meat options, choose grass-fed beef, or organic, hormone-free chicken, as these options will have a higher nutrient value and less added hormones.

Solutions:

Be aware of where your food is coming from and read Nutrition Labels. Even if a package 'looks' healthy, always read the Nutrition Facts and the ingredient list. The more you are aware of the ingredients, calorie content or nutrient quality, the better decisions you can make to stay healthy.

Utilize the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of your food can be from 'fun foods' or anything that isn't a whole food source. It is about moderation, not deprivation.

References

1. Raven, K. Distracted eaters likely to take in more calories. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eaters-snacks/distracted-eaters-likely-to-take-in-more-calories-idUSBRE92E10G20130315. Published March 15, 2013. Accessed April 2, 2018.

2. Bray, George A et al. Am J Clin Nutr, Volume 79, Issue 4, 1 April 2004, Pages 537-543, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/79.4.537. Accessed April 2, 2018.

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Food for Thought: 3 Simple Solutions For Your Biggest Food Challenges

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We have all heard, the phrase 'You are what you eat,' but what counts the most? Quantity? Quality? Total number of calories? There is so much information out there on the internet, it can be confusing to sort through it all!

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A water-level meter, inside a water tank above a large apartment building, monitors the water level in the tank. If the level falls below a threshold, a pump is started and water is replenished, or the administration is alerted and they order water tankers to be brought in. The meter measures the water level every few minutes and sends this information via the internet to software that starts a motor or sends out a text message. This is an example of an internet-of-things (IoT) device that collects data at a steady rate and processes it for action. IoT devices are spreading to many different types of uses, across industries, homes, hospitals, educational institutions and governments. One of their biggest by-products is data. Even though the water meter simply measures the water level in the tank, it also records how much water is consumed, when, and when water is replaced. Directly and indirectly it collects and processes data about the residents of the building, their habits and patterns of behaviour. The water meter was not designed for this purpose and yet that is how its use is playing out.

The challenge for governments and regulators is to understand the ways in which data is created and the many ways in which it may be used. With the widespread use of IoT, social media, mobile phones and other devices, data is being produced at a massive rate. A widely quoted estimate is that 2.5 billion billion units (bytes) of data are produced per day in the world. Consider a few issues that arise with regard to the use and storage of such a large volume of data.

- The firm that installs and runs the water meter collects the data. Does it have the right to sell this data, perhaps to firms that have complementary products? Though the answer seems to be a simple matter of having appropriate contracts in place, the issue becomes complex when analysis is involved. If not the raw data, can the firm sell the analysis of the data?

- Can the firm analyze the data for purposes other than water management? Can it estimate, for example, living and consumption patterns from the data? Will this, in any way, violate the privacy rights of the residents, something that is now asserted as a fundamental right by the Supreme Court of India.

- Once the data is collected and used, and serves the purpose for which it was collected, for how long should the data be stored? Should the firm store the data for as long as it is cost effective to do so? Or should it be mandated by governments that all data after a certain duration of time should be automatically purged from servers?

- If the data is stolen from the firm, possibly by rival firms or by hackers, then what recourse do the residents of the building have to protect themselves? Is the firm obligated to report to its clients that their data is stolen?

- Should the firm inform its clients about the manner in which the data is used, how it is analysed, whether it will be sold to others, and how well protected it is? In other words, should the firm inform its customers about all the ways in which data is collected, analysed and stored? If yes, then how should it do so? Will everyone be in a position to understand the myriad consequences of data collection, use and abuse?

Many governments around the world are grappling with regulations that address some of the issues highlighted above. As are firms that are in the business of collecting and analysing data. As data is now considered to be the new 'oil' of the digital world, a resource with boundless potential for revenue generation, regulations that address these issues become all the more relevant. A few principles that help guide such regulations are outlined below. As these regulations are being formulated by the government of India, they remain an active area of discussion within academia, civil society and commercial firms.

First, the basis of any policy on data should have the person or citizen as the core entity. Data about the individual is most important and should be safeguarded and used for her/his benefit.

Second, any regulation should address the entire life cycle of data, from its capture and inception, its use, its storage, and its destruction. The focus has to be more than just on capture and use.

Third, informing citizens and users should be based on simple language, not technical or legal jargon that is incomprehensible to most. Where possible, citizens should be made aware of when data is being collected and how it is being used. The information should also specify what are potential liabilities of loss or theft of data.

Fourth, data can and should help with innovations in products and services. It should help governments and private firms to provide benefits to citizens at large and not to a select few.

As we move towards a data-rich future, these principles should help in understanding how to regulate and manage the considerable challenges data poses. For a water-level meter is not just a simple device for starting a pump, it is the source of a resource that poses many challenges for its management and use.
Rahul De' Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor, IIM Bangalore
[This article has been published with permission from IIM Bangalore. www.iimb.ac.in Views expressed are personal.]

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The challenges of managing data | Forbes India

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A water-level meter, inside a water tank above a large apartment building, monitors the water level in the tank. If the level falls below a threshold, a pump is started and water is replenished, or the administration is alerted and they order water tankers to be brought in.

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International Women's Day on March 8 brought to the forefront conversations that centre the unique challenges of women to access their full human rights -- from the right to equal pay (e.g., the pay gap or uncompensated care work), to the right to move freely and unbothered in public space (e.g., gendered street and workplace harassment), to the right of equal treatment under the law (e.g., missing and murdered Indigenous women cases).

Since our organization deals with digital rights, we want to look at how the right of free expression is yet to be fully realized for women online. In 2016, the Minister of Status of Women in Canada recognized online and technology-facilitated violence as a specific form of gender-based violence -- meaning that it was a form of violence that affected women and gender non-conforming individuals in a particular and disproportionate way. From online threats of harm and sexual assaults, to public shaming, to exposure of personal information, and hostility in public platforms, these forms of online violence are an obstacle for women to fully exercise their right to express themselves in the online platforms that have become a staple of our everyday lives.

Who is targeted? A Pew Research Center survey found that women aged 18-24 suffer from particularly severe forms of online harassment, with 25 per cent of the surveyed participants reporting having been the target of online sexual harassment (in contrast to 13 per cent of men) and 26 per cent reported having been stalked online (as opposed to seven per cent of men). Overall, while young men are slightly more likely to suffer from harassment online (likely due to the gender gap in internet usage), the types of abuse that women experience are reported to be more severe in impact.

The cost of this form of gendered online violence is huge. A 2015 report on the matter by the United Nation's Broadband Commission, has called attention to the "chilling effect on free speech and advocacy" that stems from gender-based violence online. The high levels of impunity for these forms of online violence don't help either. With online platforms increasingly being a site of public discourse in democratic societies, these obstacles silence and make invisible a key sector of society in the public sphere through either backlash or by incentivizing self-censoring to avoid abuse.

Online gendered violence, the UN report says, also fosters the gendered digital divide, warning that "complacency and failure to address and solve [violence against women online] could significantly impede the uptake of broadband by women everywhere." This also means unequal access to digital economies, participation in democratic processes, creation and consumption of media, and other benefits that the internet and information and technology communications bring.

The internet reflects and amplifies the inequalities found offline, and while the government recognizing online gendered violence as an issue is an important step, it is clearly not enough. We need a cohesive and collective strategy to tackle this problem.
Know of any people or organizations addressing this issue? Let us know @OpenMediaOrg on Twitter or by emailing us at contact@openmedia.org. Marianela Ramos Capelo is a graphic designer and part of the communications team at OpenMedia, a community-based organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. Photo: Christopher Sessums/Flickr

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The cost of free expression online for women

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International Women's Day on March 8 brought to the forefront conversations that centre the unique challenges of women to access their full human rights -- from the right to equal pay (e.g., the pay gap or uncompensated care work), to the right to move freely and unbothered in public space (e.g., gendered street and workplace harassment), to the right of equal treatment under the law (e.g.,

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In my previous article I argued that the growing concerns regarding the internet's social impact is rooted in many different causes: from underlying social problems, to bad science, to bad incentive structures put in place by big platforms, to the ongoing process of centralization that affects the web (the content layer that sits on top of the internet).

I defined centralization as the process through which intermediaries reshape the architecture of the web, increasing their gatekeeping power over the information that circulates through it.

I argued that the centralization of the web is creating the single point of failure that the original decentralized architecture sought to avoid, and that this should be the key concern of policy-makers hoping to deal with citizen concerns regarding the online. The centralization of the web is creating the single point of failure that the original decentralized architecture sought to avoid... this should be the key concern.

The culture of fail fast and iterate that has boosted innovation over the past decades has become highly problematic. In a centralized architecture problems are no longer localized and easy to neutralize. In a centralized architecture failure spreads too quickly, and can cause a lot of harm.

Constant evolution

How does centralization take place? The web's architecture is always and only becoming. It is in constant evolution. Each link that is made, each server that is set up to host content is part of this process.

But some actors have bigger wrenches than others. There are gatekeepers at a network, device, browser, and platform level. They have the capacity to influence the decisions of millions of people who produce and consume content, and - through them - how the entangled web evolves, and how we understand the world we live in.

These brokers are not merely replacing the traditional media in their role as information brokers. Their power is qualitatively superior. Whereas traditional media managed a one-way stream of information (media-->consumer), new information brokers also harvest a LOT of real-time data about the information recipients (new media <-->user). They can leverage this process and direct users to certain content instead of others, or limit their access to links all-together.

This can be more subtle than the usual censorship cases. See for example what happens when you post a link on Instagram, one of the rising social networks owned by Facebook.

Intermediation continues to grow in breadth and depth, fuelling the process of centralization

Intermediation is not in itself a bad thing. Search engines, for example, have become a key ally in enabling the web to scale by helping users find relevant information in the ever-growing web of content. But it can, nevertheless have problematic effects.

There are several ways in which intermediation can take place. It can be structurally embedded, such as through algorithms that automatically sort information on behalf of the user, or as part of the interfaces that wrap the content that is being transmitted from one user to another over a platform.

Intermediation can also operate within the previously mentioned structure in somewhat organic ways, such as when users unknowingly interact with networks of bots (automated accounts)controlled by a single user or group of users, or armies of trolls paid to disseminate specific information, or disrupt dialogue. In these cases, the bots and trolls act as intermediaries for whoever owns or created them.
But how did we get to this point where centralization is giving the internet a bad name? Intermediation, centralization and inequality

Part of it is an "organic" cycle whereby the more central a player is the more personal data it can collect, enabling such player to further optimize intermediation services. This optimization and personalization can in turn make services more attractive to users, pushing competitors out of the market, and thus organically reducing the range of providers to which users can migrate. An example of the rich-get-richer dynamic.

The other key dynamic occurs beyond the set of existing rules, and I would call it outright illegitimate. That is, intermediaries often leverage their position as a tool to prioritize their own services, allowing them to further increase their market share.

The perils of centralization and a way forward

New technological developments - such as smart assistants, and augmented and virtual reality - will likely increase the breadth and depth of intermediation. This in turn threatens to accelerate and further entrench the process of centralization.

Whereas in the past, the user was presented with a list of websites of interest, smart assistants increasingly skip that step and provide the user with specific contents or services, without providing the bigger picture.

A winner takes all approach. With AR and VR the user is placed in an even more passive role, where she might be "force-fed" information in more seamless ways than through today's online advertising. Whoever operates the code will blend the curated digital world into the physical environment in which our species evolved over millions of years. No contours on your phone, TV or cinema-screen. No cover on your book to remind you of the distinction between worlds.

New technologies are offering intermediaries the possibility of taking personalisation to a new level. Smart assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are making agreements with companies producing smart devices (cars, refrigerators, thermostats, etc) to allow users to control these swarms of smart objects through these smart assistants.

This means the smart assistant gets access to more quantity and quality data about users. Developments in technologies such as AR and VR are capable of further isolating people into algorithmically curated silo-worlds, where information flows are managed by the owners of these algorithms. This means the smart assistant gets access to more quantity and quality data about users.

This would reduce the probability of people facing random or unanticipated encounters with information - such as a protest on the streets or a bus conversation with a stranger about her daily struggles - that might allow people to connect and empathize with others in ways that are relevant for social movements.

Having further isolated and uncommunicated groups would erode the common set of experiences and knowledge required to nurture a sense of belonging and trust within the broader society, which is key for the coordination of big social projects, and to ensure a fair distribution of the benefits of such coordination.

Those in control of the information silos are gaining too much control over what conversations and encounters can and will take place. As intermediaries' power increases it becomes evident that whatever fixes they try to implement they are met with distrust and criticism. At the root of these reactions there seems to be a sense that these corporations have outgrown the shell society had granted them, and the legitimacy of the power they exercise today is slim (if any).
Will this impact person-to-person communication?
The internet has not merely reduced the cost of one-to-one person communication; it has offered a qualitative leap in communications. Whereas the newspaper, radio and TV enabled one-to-many communications, and telephone facilitated one-to-one communications, the internet has facilitated group communications, sometimes referred to as many-to-many communications.

This is what we observe in places like Twitter and chat rooms, where thousands if not millions of people interact with millions in real time. The deployment of effective many-to-many communications often relies on curatorial algorithms to help people find relevant conversations or groups. This means that some of the challenges faced in the realm of search affect person to person communications.

Yet centralization also poses a distinct set of risks for these communications, amongst them, risks to the integrity of signifiers (representations of meaning, such as symbols or gestures), and their signified (meaning).

Intermediation in person-to-person communications
A. The intermediary's responsibility to respect the integrity of a message
Millennials might notice that when texting with a new lover it is often the case that a word or emoji is misinterpreted. This often leads to an unnecessary quarrel, and we need to meet up physically to clear things up. Oh, no! That's not what I meant...What I wanted to say is... Conveying meaning is not simple, and we often require a new medium or set of symbols to explain and correct what went wrong.

Now imagine that someone could tamper with your messages, and you might not have that physical space to fix things... And that it's not your lover you are communicating with, but the electorate or a group of protesters.

The internet facilitates engagement by bringing people closer together. The apparent collapse of the physical space between users is achieved by slashing down the time between the moment in which a message is and received, until it's close enough to real time. And for millions of years the only type of real-time communications we've had as a species involved physical presence. This illusion often makes us forget that someone is managing the physical infrastructure through which the message is transported. It is fundamental that any and all parties who control these channels respect the integrity of the message that is being delivered. It is fundamental that any and all parties who control these channels respect the integrity of the message that is being delivered.

Centralization which leaves communication channels under the control of a handful of actors could effectively limit parties from exchanging certain signifiers. If virtual and augmented reality are the future of communications, then we should bear in mind not merely spoken or written language will be sent over communication channels. These communications will include a wide array of signals for which we still have poorly defined signifiers. This includes body gestures and - potentially - other senses, such as smell and taste. To get a sense of the complexity of the task ahead of us, think about the gap between experiencing a movie through descriptive noise captioning and the standard hearing experience of the same content.

In the past the debate was focused over the legitimacy of the frames traditional intermediaries such as newspapers applied to political events and discourse. With new intermediaries come new risks. By reducing (or eliminating) the availability of alternative mediums of communication between parties, centralization could limit the sender's ability to double-check with the receiver whether or not a message's signifiers were appropriately received. Distributed archives... based on Bitcoin's blockchain model, offer a glimpse of hope in this battle.

Distributed archives, such as those currently being developed based on Bitcoin's blockchain model, offer a glimpse of hope in this battle. It must be noted that the phase between the message's production and its transcription onto the ledger is subject to some of the same risks of meddling present in our current model. Blockchain as such could nevertheless protect the message's integrity from ex-post tampering.
B. The effect of centralization on the fluidity of the decoding process
A second issue affecting person-to-person communication is the process through which the relationship between signifier and signified comes to be ( point B on the diagram).

The process of information consumption is not automatic or passive. The receiver plays a role in the decoding process. The word cat triggers a different set of connections to a cat owner, than it does to a person who is allergic to cats.

The receiver constructs meaning by relying on her own experiences as well as recalling instances in which members of the community managed to coordinate a conversation by relying on what could be deemed the agreed-upon meaning of this concept. Through this process individuals and groups play an active part in the construction of reality.

This active interpretation enables language to be fluid, relationships between signifier (symbol, such as a word) and signified (meaning) to shift over time. The system is open. The A noisiness of the process through which we interpret and discuss our world provides the flexibility necessary for critical social changes to be possible. A reflective capacity comes embedded within language. reflective capacity comes embedded within language.

With cat the process is quite straightforward. Now shift from cat to more abstract concepts - like justice and war, or muslim and latinx - and things get much trickier. Since people do not necessarily deal with these concepts directly, third parties - such as the mass media and the state education system - purvey greater control over their meaning.

Much like the elites in charge of writing definitions in a dictionary, mass media often takes over the process of rooting the signifiers onto a broader set of signifiers to construct meaning. The process of constructing meaning is deeply political.

Reiterated associations between muslim or latinx to negative concepts can over time lead people to trigger mental responses associated to the negative frame even when the frame itself is not present.

A centralized web of content, where the few define which frames should be applied and distributed, becomes a liability - the opposite of the open space the web was meant to create, and which many of us still believe can democratize the exercise of power by redistributing widely the power to construct meaning, and therefore the way we understand our identity, our relationships, and the world we live in. A centralized web of content, where the few define which frames should be applied and distributed, becomes a liability.

Let's think how this might play out in 20 years. Many resources are currently devoted to the development of brain-computer interfaces. Brain-computer interfaces imply tending a bridge across the air gap that currently exists between people and their devices (as well as the intermediaries that manage traffic over the internet and onto these devices).

Eliminating such air gaps might imply limits to the receiver's capacity to diverge in the way she processes the signifier: the computer would arguably take over the decoding role, and with it our subject's ability to decode and reconstruct signifiers into - mistakenly or purposefully - novel and critically transformative meanings.

Every step towards the large-scale roll out of these technologies strengthens incentives for intermediaries to ensure that they can operate these systems unchecked.
Next week: Part Three - how we should coordinate to solve the mess we are getting into before it's too late.

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The present and future of a centralized internet

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In my previous article I argued that the growing concerns regarding the internet's social impact is rooted in many different causes: from underlying social problems, to bad science, to bad incentive structures put in place by big platforms, to the ongoing process of centralization that affects the web (the content layer that sits on top of the internet).

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The recent Facebook scandal highlights the ways our privacy doesn't exist online

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook was trending on social media last week, raising awareness of how much private information the platform knows about its users. It began when the reported that the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users was obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm. The data was used during the 2016 American presidential elections to profile voters, predict their behaviours and target them with personalized political advertisements. Similar tactics were used for the Leave campaign leading up to the Brexit vote, reported the Observer.

According to Global News, Cambridge Analytica worked for U.S. senator Ted Cruz's campaign as well as Donald Trump's campaign. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower, told the Observer the firm acquired data and used a software system to target specific Facebook users' "inner demons." On top of that, Global News reported that Facebook has since stated there is proof Cambridge Analytica hasn't deleted the data used during those political campaigns, which is problematic. Why are they still holding on to that information?

It's not surprising that Facebook's response is trying to draw attention away from the platform itself. Nor is it surprising that Facebook was involved in this type of scandal to begin with. As Facebook reiterates its commitment to privacy, users need to be smart and stop burying their heads in the sand. Everyday, I witness users sharing their most personal thoughts and details about their life on Facebook. People need to realize just how accessible Facebook is to strangers and how privacy settings only do so much in the age of big data. How can users be upset about this situation if they are basically an open-book on Facebook?

Ever since I've had access to the internet, my parents always told me to be careful about what I post on social media. We live in a technological era where it's easy to go on a computer and find someone's personal information. Users must always be aware of the dark side of social media platforms like Facebook.

Facebook is a double-edged sword. It allows people to connect with whomever they like, but it also makes their personal life publicly available. It's hard to ignore that social media, specifically Facebook, has a creepy reputation of knowing its users activities.

I believe Facebook needs to strengthen its privacy settings to gain back the trust of its users. Third parties like Cambridge Analytica should not be able to obtain data-especially without the users' permission or knowledge. Nonetheless, private information will always be more easily accessible on the internet, and I believe society will have to deal with these kinds of problems more frequently. Everything about a person's life can be found on the internet, which has become an extension of the individual.

People's entire lives are plastered across the online world. But even knowing the dark side of social media, I will not delete Facebook. I am aware of the privacy risks, but to me, the perks surpass the downsides. Of course, I always think twice before posting or liking anything on Facebook, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

I think the hashtag #DeleteFacebook is legitimate for everyone who felt betrayed by the platform. I understand why these users are angry. People's Facebook profile data had been stolen to fuel political agendas without their permission, which is just plain wrong.

Even though Facebook is to blame for lacking safeguards to protect user data, these users have a duty to be informed about what happens when they publish information online and agree to use a website. It's important to not blindly trust Facebook or other social media platforms. I take it upon myself to make smart decisions and be critical about how I interact with my Facebook feed-everyone should do the same.
Graphic by Zeze Le Lin

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The dark side of social media platforms - The Concordian

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The recent Facebook scandal highlights the ways our privacy doesn't exist online The hashtag #DeleteFacebook was trending on social media last week, raising awareness of how much private information the platform knows about its users. It began when the reported that the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users was obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm.

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I just received an email from Apple telling me my iCloud storage is almost full and warning that dire things would happen if I didn't do something about it. At least I think that's what the email said.

From what I could figure out, I need a certain number of GBs, but all I have are MBs and that's bad.

Fortunately there was an easy solution to my problem. For a small monthly fee, I could increase my iCloud storage capacity so that all my digital files would remain safe and available. I guess when it comes to MBs and GBs, there comes a point when there are no more freebies.

The solution - to pay Apple $2.99 a month for more storage - seemed obvious until I started to wonder what I was actually paying for. After all, nobody really knows exactly what the Cloud is. Even if you "think" you "know" how the "Cloud" "works," please do not write to explain it to me because either a) you're faking it, or b) your answer will give me a headache. Besides, I take pride in the fact that my "technological ignorance" is "state-of-the-art." If, on the other hand, you would like to write to tell me I use too many quotation marks for no good reason, you are certainly within your rights to do so.

Of course, I'm joking when I say I don't know what the Cloud is because everyone knows the Cloud is where Siri lives. She spends her days floating on the Cloud in something called the ether, and hanging out with her friend Alexa, who lives somewhere over the rainbow. Life on the Cloud must be pretty great because whenever I ask Siri about something, she either says she can't help me right now or she doesn't know what I mean. She won't answer my questions even when I ask nicely and time my request so it doesn't interrupt her dinner.

Now I realize Siri doesn't have time to talk to me because she's too busy trying to organize and store all the stuff I've put in the Cloud. It must be hard figuring out what to do with 327 identical pictures of my cat, all in the exact same pose, and all of which would be really cute if any of them were in focus. And she probably doesn't have time to eat dinner because I keep cluttering up her Cloud with all the recipes I've downloaded but will never make.

It makes sense that my digital filing cabinet is overflowing because every drawer, closet and cabinet in my house is overflowing, too. That's because I like to hold onto things even when I don't really need them, like every rubber band that has ever entered our house, cellulite, and grudges. It's a genetic curse I inherited from my mother. And what my mother doesn't want to hold onto any more, she gives to me.

Like the box I pulled up from our basement this week that was filled with old canning jars and a book on canning, because apparently my mother has never met me and she honestly thought I might want to take up canning some day. There were also some empty mayonnaise jars, which should come in handy if all the grocery stores suddenly close and I'm forced to make my own mayonnaise from scratch. Even the box they were in was old because there was a return address from a house we lived in 25 years ago. So I guess I'm like my mom's Cloud for actual stuff. Maybe I should start charging her $2.99 a month.

She doesn't hold onto everything, though. She has no sentimentality when it comes to digital stuff. I recently learned that her email inbox is nearly empty and she deletes every text the minute she reads it. I, on the other hand, save every text I receive, even the wrong numbers, and the amount of emails in my inbox is a number that requires multiple commas. Maybe with all the time I'm saving not canning my own food, I could take some lessons from my mother on how to clean out the Cloud.

But it's probably easier to just pay Siri a living wage and cough up the $2.99 a month. Besides, I want to keep her on my good side, otherwise the Cloud may open up and rain down a lot of blurry pictures of my cat. Which, if you squint just right, look really cute.
Betsy Bitner is a Capital Region writer. bbitner1@nycap.rr.co-m

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I just received an email from Apple telling me my iCloud storage is almost full and warning that dire things would happen if I didn't do something about it. At least I think that's what the email said. From what I could figure out, I need a certain number of GBs, but all I have are MBs and that's bad.

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Over half of households in the Country are not connected to the internet as majority find no need to use it ,government data shows.

The Kenya Integrated Households Budget Survey has found out that 70.1 per cent or 7.99 million households countrywide are without internet connection.

Only 3.42 million households are connected to the internet nationally, 1.07 million in rural areas and 2.34 million households in Urban areas.

This is despite the Communications Authority of Kenya announcing in its latest 2017/2018 sector statistics report that Internet is penetration in Kenya stands at an estimated at 112.7 per cent as at September 201.

Of the total households without internet connection, 50.4 per cent of them (5.75 million) do not see the need to use internet while a surprising 3.45 million homes have no knowledge on how internet is used.

The fï"¿ï"¿findings further reveal significant variations between rural and urban areas, where the proportion of households without Internet connection in rural areas was found to be 83.1 per cent compared to 52.5 per cent in urban areas.

Total households at the National level stood at 11.42 million, 6.44 million in rural areas and 4.97 million in urban areas.

Also attributed to the high number of households without internet connection is the high cost of internet equipments and service at 3.2 and 8.7 per cent respectively at the National level.
COUNTY CONNECTIONS
At the County level, Busia had the highest proportion of households citing no need to use the internet standing at 89.6 per cent. It was follows closely with Kirinyaga and Nakuru at 86 and 71. 2 per cent respectively.

A high proportion of households who cited lack of knowledge on the use of internet was reported in West Pokot at 85.1 per cent, Siaya-83.3 per cent, Kitui 78.9 per cent and Machakos-73.3 per cent.

In Counties with major cities such as Nairobi, 57.6 per cent of households said they do not need to use internet ,while 26.2 per cent of household lack the knowledge on how internet is used.

Mombasa had only 10.7 per cent of its households without internet connection due to lack of knowledge on how to use internet, 24.1 per cent of its households saying they do not need to use internet while over half-57.9 per cent attributing the lack of internet connection to a high cost of maintenance.

Kisumu County had the highest proportion of households with Internet connection at 67.6 per cent. However it had 92,000 homes without internet connections while 87,000 of its households found no use of internet, and 81,792 of the homes saying they have no skills or knowledge on how internet is used.

Nairobi was second with the highest number of households connected to the internet at 66.1 per cent and placed third was Kiambu at 42 per cent.

Overall, mobile phone was the most common type of Internet connection as reported by 94.1 per cent of the households with Internet connection. It was followed by mobile broadband at 10.8 per cent.

The least used form of Internet connection was terrestrial fixed wireless at 0.8 per cent followed by fixed wired broadband at 1.4 per cent.

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Home internet not a priority for Kenyans

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Over half of households in the Country are not connected to the internet as majority find no need to use it ,government data shows.The Kenya Integrated Households Budget Survey has found out that 70.1 per cent or 7.99 million households countrywide are without internet connection.Only 3.42 million households are connected to the internet nationally, 1.07 million in rural areas and 2.34 million households in Urban areas.

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Having lived through Apartheid and its surveillance mechanisms, there is an eerie recollection for South Africans about the Cambridge Analytica scandal which has revealed just how deep Facebook's surveillance economy goes.

As shocked as America and the United Kingdom were to discover that they had been manipulated by political operators using social media - be they Russian agents or data analytics companies - the usurpation of these democratic communication platforms are unfortunately all too familiar to us. We've lived through attempts by corrupt leaders trying to manipulate how they covered in the media, and now social media.

When the National Party, which instituted Apartheid, could not get positive coverage for its racist policies in the 1970s it employed tactics that now seem familiar to how Russian agents used Facebook to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections.

Dr Connie Mulder, the Minister of Information, and Dr Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of the Department of Information, used state resources to fight a propaganda war, including attempts to buy the Washington Star newspaper and trying to bribe foreign news organisations to get more positive coverage.

In what ultimately became known as the Information Scandal or Muldergate, which was exposed by the iconic Rand Daily Mail newspaper, Mulder and Rhoodie also set up a South African newspaper called The Citizen, which was the only English-language paper to print anything positive about the "Nats". This was ultimately exposed and then Prime Minister B.J. Vorster was forced to resign. It was found, by the Erasmus commission of inquiry in 1979, that Vorster " knew everything about the misuse of funds".

The terrifying difference with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the depth of Facebook's data mining of our personal information is that this is not a repressive regime that has exerted its control over citizens using brutal force as we lived through in South Africa.

Facebook is an opt-in service whose customers are not its users - but the advertisers who market to those users. What Cambridge Analytica did - by exploiting the personal data of 50-million users, mostly American voters - may be spinning an election, which we used to call propaganda before online advertising and Facebook became the biggest media platform in the world. But it's no different to how Facebook has been harvesting our personal preferences to better target us for advertising.

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What Do Cambridge Analytica, Russian Trolls, Political Manipulation In South Africa Have In Common?

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Having lived through Apartheid and its surveillance mechanisms, there is an eerie recollection for South Africans about the Cambridge Analytica scandal which has revealed just how deep Facebook's surveillance economy goes.

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Journalists Need to Fact-Check and Ask the Right Questions
Follow @sav_eden_s

Graphic Caroline Tran

Mainstream coverage of far-right groups, both in Quebec and beyond, has left something to be desired.

In the United States, since Donald Trump's election, we saw the birth of a new trend in news outlets-the glorification of the new face of the far-right.

Profiles of alt-right leaders that marvel at their style, articulation, and impeccable hair suddenly became en vogue, like the Mother Jones profile on Richard Spencer that begins with the white supremacist in a hotel lounge "deftly plucking" togarashi-crusted ahi with chopsticks as he explains that being of a different race is the equivalent to being of a different species.

The intention of these profiles was perhaps not to glorify, but all the same, that is exactly what they do. They legitimize and give a platform to groups with racist agendas that they are actively trying to enact.

To varying degrees, many prominent news outlets have fallen into the trap of legitimizing far-right groups through their coverage. Here in Quebec we've seen it after far-right protests in Quebec City in August and November 2017. It may not be intentional, but through a search for sensationalism, a thirst for a good story, misrepresentation of the issues and simply lazy reporting, mainstream media has successfully given these groups validity in public discourse.

And here's the danger to that: if far-right groups are to be taken seriously, they know that they have to be palatable to the public. That is how they recruit new members-by giving their ideology a way to be identified with.

Dan Feidt and Wendy Parker, journalists from the American media collective Unicorn Riot, highlight various methods used by alt-right groups in the United States to try to make their platform accessible to newcomers in a 2017 episode of the podcast Delete Your Account. There, Feidt and Parker discuss meme pages as a method used by the alt-right.

Another tactic they say is used by American far-right groups to recruit is the manipulation of public perception through the media.

In Quebec, La Meute has been very successful at this. Xavier Camus, professor in philosophy at Collège Ahuntsic and political writer, points out that journalists frequently rely on the sanitized message of the spokespeople of this group, but ignore the racist discourse of the membership which is more in line with the true nature of these groups.

"These groups take care of their public image, presenting themselves as legitimate and moderate groups. But when you look at their private forums, the hateful messages become more visible and uninhibited," said Camus. "Right now, larger media outlets prefer to just parrot exactly what the leaders of these groups hope to have communicated."

He points out the laziness of this style. "If journalists don't have time to investigate and fact-check the propaganda, then at least seek the opinion of experts who will give a clearer perspective."

In an article for iPolitics, Martin Patriquin elaborates on this trend in Quebec media.

"If La Meute is enjoying a certain sheen of legitimacy these days, it's in large part due to a mostly credulous press," he wrote.

"Over the last year, much of the coverage of the group has glossed over its demonstrable hatred of Islam, instead presenting La Meute's members as a bunch of hardscrabble rogues deeply troubled by religious extremism."

He uses a December 2016 CBC feature by Jonathan Montpetit as an example. While he commends Montpetit's coverage of the group at a time when not many other journalists in the province were, he points out that the article only touches on the surface of the group's views on race, and ignores the outwardly racist discourse present in their Facebook group.

Franklin Lopez, who runs the anarchist, anti-capitalist media platform subMedia, highlights the danger of journalists not properly contextualizing the racism present in the discourse of these groups: "Their vision of America is to have a state for white people. They would like to kick out by any means necessary anyone who doesn't have this full European bloodline."

"When [the media] use these terms like 'white nationalist' and don't really explain the actual views of these folks, it creates a situation where people say 'Well, these are people who might be a little radical but they just have a different point of view,'" he explained.

Patriquin also posited, and Camus agreed, that there tends to be an exaggeration of La Meute's membership based on the traffic their Facebook page gets.
Patriquin points out that mainstream media has been reporting very large membership numbers: CBC reported 40,000, and Radio-Canada reported 60,000. "On its face, it's an impressive number-roughly the population of Cornwall, Ontario," he wrote. However, he explains many of the names listed on the page were added without the person knowing.

Camus said that once again, lazy reporting has led to this inflation of the numbers.

"There is no objectivity in journalism and anybody who tells you that exists is deluding themselves."
-Franklin Lopez

"Journalists give a platform to racist groups without taking the time to fact-check, which leads to shameless lies being published. La Meute says they have around 60,000 members, when the truth is they probably have around 1,000, when you observe the interactions on their private forums," he said.

Camus explained that those roughly 1,000 members are members who participate in the group by liking a post or commenting at least once a month. Out of those members, about 400 are really active, as they participate five or more times a month.

"If La Meute really had 60,000 members, how can we explain that they are only 150 to 200 people at their demonstrations?" said Camus. "Journalists are coming across as very naïve when they don't take the time to investigate further."

According to Lopez, all this-news outlets relying on the comments of these groups' spokespeople, not taking the time to contextualize the level of racism present in the discourse of their membership, and the misinformation reported-shows how Canadian media is manipulated into providing far-right groups with a platform, just like in the United States.

"By failing to reveal the more extreme views of what these groups have, what the mainstream media has done over the past year and a half [...] is that they have given a platform, they have created a visibility for these groups and this is exactly what these groups want," Lopez explained. "These folks are not dummies. I think Richard Spencer is a highly intelligent person who is very good at manipulating the media. And the media has been manipulated."

Not only have far-right groups been misrepresented and given a platform, anti-fascist groups and individuals have been severely misrepresented as well, and denied access to a platform.

"The media portrays them as violent folks who mask themselves and basically just want to wreck havoc," said Lopez.

He went on to explain that the reality is that people involved in anti-fascist efforts are people who are studied in history and see the need to remove these groups from the public discourse as they are forming, before they gain prominence and numbers.

"It's not an exaggeration to say that there was a moment in history that if these groups would have been stamped out in their infancy, the course of human history would have been quite different," he said.

"These are folks who are risking a lot by doing this work, their own safety, and they're doing this voluntarily because they really care about the state of the world."

So why are they portrayed as violent street gangs, then, if that's not the case?

"That visual is very enticing to the media who usually likes to cover things in a very sensationalistic way, but it's also a very lazy image," explained Lopez.
It's a lazy image because it is only a small portion of what antifascist efforts look like, yet it is certainly the most inflammatory.

"Because when you look at the work that anti-fascists do, the grand majority of the work is not street actions, I think that's the part that you can take a photo of and you can take some video of," he furthered.

He said that a lot of the work anti-fascists do is research to expose fascists, find out where they get their funding, and how to dismantle their infrastructure.

"It's a lot of thankless work and a lot of people who do this work are not in the media, they're not talking to the media, they're actually doing their work undercover because it's very dangerous work. And the same goes for the people wearing the masks," said Lopez.

The foundation of journalism as we know it is the principle of objectivity, of reporting without individual bias and "getting both sides." But more and more experts and journalists in the field are pointing out the shortcomings of this: how can a reporter completely separate themselves from their biases when they are what make up their entire world view?

"There is no objectivity in journalism and anybody who tells you that exists is deluding themselves," said Lopez.

How a journalist chooses to cover a story will inherently be influenced by their personal biases.

Lopez also explained that the topics reported on will depend on the political stance of the media outlet. The CBC, being a pro-Canadian nation state outlet, will report in a way that promotes Canada's industries, and runs the risk of ignoring the potential negatives of those industries unless there is significant pushback from the population.

How the far-right and anti-fascist efforts are covered in mainstream media reflects this.

"If we want to cover 'both sides,' let's give a voice to all of society, the vast majority of which opposes the far-right," said Camus. "The media gives the microphone to the spokespeople who conceal their message so they can appear moderate and reasonable. Peddling lies and propaganda is certainly not up to the high standards of objectivity sought out by journalists. Analysts and experts should be consulted to decode these messages."

"I think that we just have to be honest with ourselves if we're going to be media makers that we definitely want to give people their fair say. But we also have to be honest about what we want to see in the world," said Lopez.

He believes that journalists need to start asking far-right groups the hard questions. "'What do you think about migrants? What do you think about Jewish people? What do you think about women's role in society?'"

When asked why these questions are not being asked, Lopez posited that perhaps it has to do with the lack of diversity in mainstream media.

"They don't want to get into a position of having to address the fact that a lot of these media outlets are run by white people, and they're run by white men generally. I think that maybe going into these lines of questioning can actually lift the veil on the hypocrisy."

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Mainstream Media Is Giving the Far-Right Exactly What They Want | Special Issue

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Follow @sav_eden_s Graphic Caroline Tran Mainstream coverage of far-right groups, both in Quebec and beyond, has left something to be desired. In the United States, since Donald Trump's election, we saw the birth of a new trend in news outlets-the glorification of the new face of the far-right.

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Peter Greenberger, global director for news partnerships at Twitter, addresses the Arab Media Forum in Dubai on Tuesday. Pawan Singh / The National

The rise of artificial intelligence to generate fake news is fast evolving into an arms race between legitimate news outlets and sponsored websites seeking to distribute false information.

It is one of the biggest challenges of the digital new age, and was at the heart of the conversation on the first day of the Arab Media Forum, attended by journalists and government leaders including Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai.

From subtle manipulation of global elections through misinformation on social media, to more blatant distorted truths about celebrity lifestyles to feed demand, news has been one of the biggest stories of the past two years.

As the media landscape continues to change, forum experts speaking on impactful media trends said artificial intelligence can be used to help real news thrive, if used correctly.

"It is the most interesting development in making newsrooms more efficient that they are now," said Lisa Gibbs, director of news partnerships at the Associated Press.

"Trust in media is becoming an arms race between those using artificial intelligence to generate fake news and those who would use it to create high quality news and call out this kind of information.

"That is the most fascinating relationship between news and AI and how that will work in the future."

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid pictured at the Arab Media Forum on Tuesday. Ali Haider / EPA

News stories currently generated with the help of AI and published by AP are usually data driven, and carry a disclaimer informing the reader that the technology has been used to help generate the content.

It is a tool that could become more familiar as news continues to migrate online.

"We don't believe that the kind of human interest journalism that is popular can or will be replaced by AI," said Ms Gibbs.

"If we can get our journalists away from producing articles about simple data, they can then focus on telling the personal human stories that take more time to produce and resonate with readers.

"We are going to have so many new tools available to journalists to verify their information and show how they disclose their methods in creating a story."

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Read more: Governments must control the rise of artificial intelligence, experts say Brussels considers new powers to battle 'fake news' during elections Macron slams Facebook and Google as 'too big to be governed'
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Some of the most read snippets of fake news in 2017 included the conflicting death toll as a result of the Grenfell tower block fire in London, and the severity of a so called 'force six' hurricane to strike the Americas.

Both stories were shared millions of times on social media, but were wildly inaccurate.

Google is working with news organisations around the world to help journalists spot fake news and images that may not be genuine to help protect themselves and their readers.

In January, the tech firm revamped its 'snippets' feature, that appears at the top of a search results after asking Google a question, to help human raters more accurately identify hoaxes, false information and conspiracy theories.

Carlo Biondo, president of EMEA strategic partnerships at Google said there has been a big issue with fake news, quality information and their complexities.

"This has led to us starting a project called fact check, to attach a label to the search engine so people will know what information is trusted - It is an important interface," he said.

"Google has launched the global news initiative, based on three principles to listen to the press and find out how Google can help it to be more successful using the web."

Google has committed to train 4,000 journalists in the region by the end of 2019, and the use of new technological tools to encourage genuine news stories at the centre of that training.

"It is clear that privacy is important and that needs to be protected, but by exchanging data it is an easy way to give people the information that is most important to them," Mr Biondo said.

"Data is the new order, and the currency of the future. Sharing data with the press is the best way to understand users and what they want from quality journalism."

Representatives from Twitter were also speaking at the Dubai forum, extolling the virtues of the social media platform as the biggest source of breaking news.

In 2017, there were 330,000 live video broadcasts on Twitter, with the Middle East at the forefront of Twitter's global growth, with 1.2 billion videos viewed on the platform daily.

"We have become the world's watercooler where people gather to discuss the news of the day," said Peter Greenberger, global director of news partnerships at Twitter.

"Twitter has become the go to source for news and information, and often the fastest and only global real time platform."

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Tech firms committed to fight back in war on 'fake news'

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The rise of artificial intelligence to generate fake news is fast evolving into an arms race between legitimate news outlets and sponsored websites seeking to distribute false information.

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States take action in the 'absence of the federal government'

Aims to prevent spread of misinformation on social media

California has proposed legislation that would require social platforms like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to identify automated accounts, or bots, amid a push by state lawmakers to police the technology companies that have proven vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of fake news.

Bots, which can be purchased or created by individuals or organizations, have been used to inflate influence or amplify divisive opinions in politics and national tragedies. In the recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, for example, bots with suspected links to Russia released hundreds of posts to weigh in on the gun control debate. Russia-linked bots on Twitter shared Donald Trump's tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election campaign, compared with fewer than 50,000 retweets for Hillary Clinton's account.

"We need to know if we are having debates with real people or if we're being manipulated," said Democratic State Senator Bob Hertzberg, who introduced the bill. "Right now we have no law and it's just the Wild West."

The proposed bill would would make it illegal for bots to communicate with a person in the state with "the intention of misleading and without clearly and conspicuously disclosing that the bot is not a natural person." It would require the social platforms to let people report violations, respond to those reports, and provide bimonthly details of those violations to the state Attorney General. The legislation is scheduled to go through two committees in California this month.

States -- especially California, where many of the tech companies are based -- are moving ahead to regulate social media in the face of slow progress from the federal government. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic-dominated state Assembly are working to push through a law that would require election ads on social media to reveal the identity of the buyer. California State Assemblyman Marc Levine, a democrat, introduced a bill similar to Hertzberg's, requiring tech companies to brand bots with a disclaimer and link those accounts and advertising purchases to " verified human accounts."

"California feels a bit guilty about how our hometown companies have had a negative impact on society as a whole," said Shum Preston, the national director of advocacy and communications at Common Sense Media, a major supporter of Hertzberg's bill. "We are looking to regulate in the absence of the federal government. We don't think anything is coming from Washington."

Legislation with bipartisan support in Congress, the Honest Ads Act, has focused on regulating online election ads. The Federal Election Commission is also considering a proposal to require online ads to carry the same disclaimers from sponsors as do radio, television and print ads. California's proposals would address the broader problem of manipulation on the technology platforms, but they would be difficult to enforce. The platforms say they can't always easily identify what accounts are bots, as software programs become more sophisticated and mix human interactions with automation.

Recent revelations have forced Facebook and Twitter to come to grips with the extent of malicious software programs on their platforms that have real-life consequences. Researchers have estimated that as many as 15 percent of Twitter's active accounts are bots and Facebook has estimated that as many as 150 million people were exposed to Russian propaganda through fake accounts on issues from gun rights to immigration and race relations.

Twitter has been escalating efforts to combat bots, by tweaking its algorithms and suspending more automated accounts that break the rules. Facebook and Google have also taken steps to increase transparency, including hiring more people to review content.

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California Would Require Twitter, Facebook to Disclose Bots

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California has proposed legislation that would require social platforms like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to identify automated accounts, or bots, amid a push by state lawmakers to police the technology companies that have proven vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of fake news.

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Impact of 'psychographics' and social media on democracy has probably been over-hyped, writes Bill Jamieson.

Is democracy in danger? It certainly looks so. News headlines and TV current affairs programmes have been dominated by charges of personal data abuse. Claims are rife that the internet and social media are being manipulated to target voters, stoke fears, divide the country, twist election outcomes and manipulate emotion over arguing the facts.

What might have been dismissed as losers' sour grapes has morphed into something more far-reaching and serious. The immediate charges are now the subject of parliamentary scrutiny, regulatory enquiry and appeals to the courts.

But the questions raised reach wider. Has our electoral system kept up with the challenges posed by the explosion of digital media and the ability through data mining to tag and target millions of unsuspecting voters? What is fair and unfair influence in a democratic system? Is there any system free from covert - and not so covert - profile targeting?

These concerns are by no means limited to recent elections in America and the UK. "In many parts of the world", charge academic authors Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas in their book, How to Rig an Election, out next month, "election rigging is now not the exception but the norm ... Around the world, democracy is being hijacked. And unless the Western democracies start to care, election quality will continue to decline. The facade of democracy is being turned into a tool of oppression because an increasing number of leaders have worked out how to rig an election - or hire someone to do it for them.

"This threatens to undermine the very idea of democracy, turning these elections into an empty ritual that the government always wins. The Cambridge Analytica revelations are the tip of the iceberg. This isn't about one company or a handful of elections, it is about a concerted attack on democracy by a powerful alliance of authoritarian leaders and multinational companies. It has gone unnoticed and unanswered for too long."

READ MORE: SNP calls for investigation into shady business of Vote Leave funding

Immediate concern has centred on Cambridge Analytica and the use of 'psychographics' - targeting users with messages associated with their personality type. Personality tests posted on Facebook invite people to respond. By cross-referencing people's responses against their Facebook Likes, the researchers have sought to create algorithms that can determine intimate details of millions of other users who hadn't taken the survey.

Michal Kosinski, one of the pioneers of this approach, co-published a study in 2013 showing how easily accessible digital records of behaviour can be used to predict sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. It's easy to see how this emotion-driven targeting can appear sinister and manipulative. For example, a survey respondent who scored highly on 'neuroticism' would receive a message emphasising dangers.

But is this a new phenomenon in the world of voter influence, or no more than an extension into the digital era of emotional manipulation evident throughout the history of democratic systems? What election campaign in history has not played to our emotions - our feelings of insecurity, pride, ambition, envy, fear and greed? In our national story, jingoistic campaigns have incited us to support war and aggression; have played on our fears of immigration; have encouraged us to raise taxes on the rich and help the poor; have fed our atavistic desires for economic advancement and stirred feelings of pride and nationalism.

READ MORE: Facebook whistleblower 'convinced' of Tory's Brexit collusion

The charge is that the UK referendum and the US presidential election were skewered by data abuse and insidious influence. Our emotional buttons are being pushed by carefully targeted messages. But for decades UK party political campaigners and strategists have played on our emotions like artful violinists, launching themselves on trips to the US to study how the richly funded and sophisticated Democrat and Republican campaigns targeted and motivated voters.

There is not an election broadcast by a major political party now that is not thoroughly researched and targeted to release a compelling message - for example in the 2016 election, a heart-rending depiction of homelessness from Labour while, targeted at different voters, an upbeat broadcast from the Cameron-led Conservatives featuring 'give-aways' in terms of free childcare, NHS investment, education and pensions while also making reference to some tax cuts.

As Laura Perrins noted on the Conservative Woman website this week, "the fact is that political parties and their machines have been using emotion over fact for a very long time now. When you hear the next media frenzy that big data and social media are stoking fears, dividing the nation and manipulating emotion over arguing the facts, remember that elections have always been run on this basis".

There is certainly much to be done to bring election regulation up to speed with the digital age. But the elimination of 'undue' or emotional influence targeted at certain voter types - that is, I would argue, deeply woven into democratic systems - is impossible to achieve. All elections involve targeted persuasion of one sort or another, and information is used or abused by democrats and dictators alike.

There is no such thing as a totally sterilised democracy.

How effective this sophisticated targeting has been in influencing voters has long been a matter of contention. And the debate over electronic or digital targeting is even more so. How do we know that 'clicks' on digital advertising result in swayed votes? For decades claims have been made by public relations firms and political consultants that their campaigns swayed the vote or turned the election. But how can such self-serving claims be proven?

Concludes Jamie Bartlett, author of The People Vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how to save it), due out on April 19, "It's almost impossible to ever know what precisely made a difference when it comes to campaigning and advertising ... The importance of psychographics as a technique is probably overhyped. But don't let the focus on this dubious method obscure bigger challenges recent events highlight: of micro-targeting, data use and our outdated analogue election law." Hmmm. Good luck with that.

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Bill Jamieson: Voter manipulation is an age-old art

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Impact of 'psychographics' and social media on democracy has probably been over-hyped, writes Bill Jamieson. Is democracy in danger? It certainly looks so. News headlines and TV current affairs programmes have been dominated by charges of personal data abuse.

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The ability of the media to secure democracy is being challenged by great disruptions: ad funding doesn't work that well anymore and large, non-transparent platforms are increasingly central in our information flow. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, thinks public service media may be about to play its most important role since World War II.

Facebook and Google have taken over not only an increasing share of the attention, but also much of the ad market. This has taken away another large chunk of the revenue that supports journalism, following classified ads in the unbundling of the business model that once made newspapers a thriving business.

The rise of subscription models and paywalls has begun to inject fresh money in some media houses, but those who aren't subscribing to journalistic media could be left worse off. It's no longer a matter of picking up a single newspaper copy at a newsstand; a paywalled news industry limits information to those able to make a long-term financial commitment, one that usually involves disclosing your personal data. And that personal data has become a commodity, being used to target everything from advertising to political manipulation.

At this year's SXSW conference, I met Bell, who before founding the Tow Center, worked for many years as an award-winning journalist, digital pioneer, and later digital editor of The Guardian. She worries that we're entering a period where the messages we receive are individually adapted, and we no longer have access to the same information.

"In a way, that's what we think we've seen in the 2016 election cycle: Certain people getting certain messages, others getting different ones, and not really knowing where it's coming from, who's deploying it, and with no kind of transparency," she said. "We are being made to feel a particular way by the media we're consuming, and it is not an organic, cultural phenomenon, but a highly manipulated political phenomenon. Unless you can have free high-quality news, you don't have an antidote; you really don't have an antidote."

More of our conversation, edited slightly for length and clarity, is below.

Anders Hofseth: What happens in a society where media doesn't work?

Emily Bell: You can just run down the Committee to Protect Journalists' list of countries where press freedom is at its worst. Places like China, Russia, Turkey...You might have a functional economy, but you don't have citizens who are engaged in proper self-governance.

I think we assumed that it's not going to happen to us, and that may be why we've been fairly poor stewards of the media ecosystems. We're at a point now where there's an enormous amount of disruption to the economics of media. You need a durable, predictable model which continues to deliver that fundamental mission, and it's become very hard for commercial companies to do that.

One of the things I found hardest as a digital editor to figure out was: Which thing is the change? What's the body of water that's moving, and what's the foam on top of the wave? If you're on top of the wave, it will be very distracting and make the wave seem bigger than it was. But really, it's the moving water you have to pay attention to.

The thing that I completely got wrong is that I did think advertising would be much more durable. I don't think anybody really anticipated the scale or pace at which the ad market would change under Facebook.

Hofseth: Is there no "rebundling" of media for more-or-less useable general journalism?

Bell: No, I don't think so. I've been to a number of countries in the past year, including Norway, Switzerland, South Korea. Every single market seems to be experiencing exactly the same trauma, which is: "You're not big enough on the Web, you're just not big enough." Scale has broken the business model and it isn't going to come back.

News is hard, it's not cheap to produce, and it needs to be consistent. And you need certain things for long-horizon stories, teams of people - maybe sometimes even generations of people - to understand them and keep following them. That sustainability has always come out of a mix of the public and the private.

When you think about the institutions that contain that, maybe it's perfectly sensible when people say post-war profitability in news was a blip. It didn't make money beforehand and hasn't made money for a few years. Maybe we had fifty years of it just throwing out cash. Now that's coming to an end, and we can't expect those functions to really be profitable.

Hofseth: Maybe because there was a time when news was "good enough" as entertainment for the price...and now you have something which is more interesting.

Bell: I have so many great things on my phone that I would rather be doing than looking at the news.

Hofseth: The two of us would maybe use news as entertainment anyway, because we are sick people.

Bell: Yes, we are entertained - we are sick people who are entertained mainly by the news which makes us very sick! But we are also...

Hofseth: We are marginal.

Bell: Yeah. We are not representative of the general public.

Hofseth: How do you see the role of public service in this?

Bell: Everyone in public service journalism comes to work every day with a mission to inform the citizens of their country, and to try and reach everybody. Even people who can't pay, even people who don't necessarily think they need the news, or people who are left out of decision-making because they don't fit the socio-demographic profile that means they would normally be included.

To me, right now, there is almost nothing more important than having robust public service media available to citizens.

I think public service broadcasters can do anything because they have longevity and security of funding. But they're not always as imaginative as we need them to be at this particular time.

Existing political systems and public service broadcasters need to be free to imagine the kinds of information ecosystems that they'd want at the nation/state level and then real freedom to experiment with and find new paths to deliver that.

And also to think about themselves oriented in a world where it could well be that large-scale technology platforms - designed, built, operated in America - will be taking over much of what your information ecosystem looks like over the next decade.

Hofseth: Do you think there is a viable long-term financial model for commercial media?

Bell: I think there's a very viable long-term financial model for commercial media. But I don't necessarily think that applies directly to journalism.

If you are creating viral native advertising, you might have a future. If you are doing scripted shows or certain types of high-quality video material, you definitely have a commercial future. I mean, look at all the money that's coming through platforms at the moment to commission scripted shows.

Actually, I think you do see certain general journalism outlets being more sustainable now through reader revenues, and I think that that's definitely a model for some of them.

We don't know much about payment mechanisms yet, how they will develop, and what people will pay for. So I don't think that there is a viable advertising-supported model for free journalism - there just isn't. It's not going to happen.

And if it still should happen, it's not going to happen for some years. Many of the digitally-born sites living within the social ecosystem, they've had a terrible time. Much worse than almost anybody else, including legacy media.

Hofseth: Do you think there is a long-term viable model for any kind of general news media that would be read by the broader public?

Bell: Well, it's always traditionally been supported by advertising. The advertising has gone to Google and Facebook so, unless they want to make it, then, no.

Or - again - this is where public media has a big role. Traditionally, the impact of public media has been much more around who does it reach, what parts of the population are reading it, or viewing it, or listening to it. What are they getting from it? There's a huge mission for those companies to reach those sections of society with accurate facts that people can make sensible decisions on.

Google and Facebook have hoovered up everything. The ad departments just didn't see it coming. We missed that trend much more profoundly than we did the editorial trends which we've beaten ourselves up about - Oh, we're not digitizing quickly enough.

What I have not changed my mind about is something which I was really concerned about at The Guardian - which former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was also champion of and I think Kath Viner is now a real champion of - is we have to make high-quality news available to everybody. As long as The Guardian can afford to put its best journalism in a place where you don't have to transact for it, and the more we can persuade people to generate revenue which enables us to do that, the better it is. I just think that that is a huge challenge now.

At the moment, I think public service media has got the most important role to play that it's had at any point since the end of the second World War.

In America, we're not quite so alert to the facts of the big wars in Europe. The First World War really caused the formation of the BBC. You were in an incredibly insecure period of global politics that was threatening and dangerous and appalling for most people.

Hofseth: Some commercial companies say that the public service organizations should stick to their original platforms and leave the written Internet to the commercial side of the business.

Bell: First of all, public service media has to really understand why public service media is different from commercial media. In Britain with the BBC, there were times when it really didn't practice its public service mission in everything it did, it looked much more like an aggressive commercial company.

If you are a public service media company, you really need to be welded to your mission and understand what that means.

But at the same time, I think the commercial companies, who are interested in servicing their shareholders, aren't necessarily the right people to decide what the correct format for a communications ecosystem that benefits all people is. In fact, they might be the worst people to decide that.

And you have to be very careful. I'm well aware of the arguments that people like Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail constructed in the U.K. to undercut the BBC.

Now, that doesn't mean the BBC should never be reformed. But it should be reformed in a way which is efficient for the population, not in a way that benefits commercial media ahead of public service media.

To say that they should just stick to their traditional platform seems to be willfully ignorant of what's actually happening in the political ecosystem, when everybody deserves access to high-quality information, and I don't see commercial media necessarily delivering that consistently enough.

Public service media is there for such an important and vital function, and, if it's doing its job properly, it's indispensable.

Hofseth: Why do you think some media companies try to limit the public service?

Bell: Because I think they probably have a misconception that, if you get rid of public service...In the U.K., about a third of all revenues in the media went through the BBC. It's probably even more now because the advertising market has collapsed.

We used to study this a lot at The Guardian - whether or not the BBC's website was disadvantaging the web presence of The Guardian. And the truth of it is, actually, that if you have a healthy and thriving mixed media economy, it tends to benefit everybody. A combination of regulation and strong public media is probably why television news in the U.K. is significantly better than television news in the U.S. Generally speaking, a strong and good public service broadcaster with high standards would drag up the standard of the rest of the media.

Photo of Emily Bell by Anders Hofseth used under a Creative Commons license.

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Emily Bell thinks public service media today has its most important role to play since World War II

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The ability of the media to secure democracy is being challenged by great disruptions: ad funding doesn't work that well anymore and large, non-transparent platforms are increasingly central in our information flow. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, thinks public service media may be about to play its most important role since World War II.

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How will my data be used against me?

That's the question on many minds in the wake of recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica, its extraction of Facebook data, and the use of that Facebook data by the Trump campaign. While these data collection and marketing practices came as no surprise to many people working in the digital marketing industry (myself included), they have shocked a great many people into re-evaluating how they use social media, and have even led some people (and some companies) to withdraw from Facebook.

If you ask me, that's a mistake. The reality is that vast swaths of the internet are built on the collection of user data, and on the use of that data to deliver targeted advertising. Withdrawing from Facebook doesn't get you out of the hands of data collectors, and as I have previously written here, I think there is little hope for building an alternative Facebook that operates any differently. And I for one would hate to see a world in which the power of social networking is available only those who are unconcerned about issues like personal privacy and media integrity.

Targeted Advertising Isn't New

But there's no getting around the fact that our access to the miracle of global connectivity comes at a very high price: the protection of personal privacy and autonomy.

We should be worried about the garden variety manipulation of our purchase decisions, social interactions, and information environment, all of which are shaped every day by social media algorithms and targeted advertising. It's worth remembering that there were significant concerns with the broader impact of targeted advertising long before digital data gathering and social media ad targeting became the norm. All the way back in 1997, marketing experts N. Craig Smith and Elizabeth Cooper-Martin found that when it came to targeted advertising, "[w]omen, nonwhites, and older and less educated consumers are more likely to be concerned about targeting and express disapproval." That reflects their finding that targeted advertising is of greatest concern when it affects vulnerable or less privileged people -a consideration that should inform our thinking about the way today's vastly more sophisticated targeting may have radically different effects on different social groups.

How the Government Could Help

The Atlantic Council think tank has usefully framed the challenge in its recent report, "The MADCOM Future: How Artificial Intelligence Will Enhance Computational Propaganda, Reprogram Human Culture, And Threaten Democracy...And What Can Be Done About It." That report defines MADCOMs as "the integration of AI systems into machine-driven communications tools for use in computational propaganda," and predicts that MADCOMs "will gain enhanced ability to influence people, tailoring persuasive, distracting, or intimidating messaging toward individuals based on their unique personalities and backgrounds, a form of highly personalized propaganda."

The Council's prescription, as articulated in " The Emergence of MADCOMs," focuses on potential government intervention, including recommendations that:

The Department of Homeland Security should expand its cybersecurity mission to include protection of the US public from foreign computational propaganda...

The Department of State should develop a computational engagement strategy for defending against online foreign propaganda...

Federal, state, and local governments should develop tools for identifying adversary computational propaganda campaigns, and for countering them with measures other than counter-messaging against the US public.

That all sounds great, but it only focuses on the specific (if important) scenario in which targeted messaging is perceived as a foreign threat. Even though the Cambridge Analytica story has landed in the middle of a massive investigation into Russian intervention in the United States presidential election, it would be an enormous mistake to think that psychographic profiling and ad targeting only happen-or are only problematic-when they are used in the context of a political campaign, or wielded by a foreign power.

We have developed a collective suspicion of persuasion in all forms.

And indeed, we have developed a collective suspicion of persuasion in all forms-particularly in the political sphere. As political science and communications scholar Diana C. Mutz points out in a thoughtful piece on the gap between the myth and reality of media influence on politics:

The entire purpose of election campaigns is to provide politicians with opportunities to expose the public to their persuasive arguments. Persuasion, rather than coercion or violence, was thought by our Founders to be a preferable means of conducting politics. But today we are ambivalent, at best, about this core part of our political system.

With enough public pressure and political will, it's conceivable that we will someday move towards protecting vulnerable people from manipulation by regulating the biggest platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. I'm far less optimistic that we'll develop robust, effective regulations that could address the range of smaller social networks that might attract Facebook defectors. That's one of the reasons I'd like to see people stay on Facebook: I'd rather deal with one gorilla on a chain than a thousand wild monkeys.

Why We Have to Get Smarter

If we don't expect government to step in, and we don't want to abandon Facebook to the trolls and the marketers, what can we do?

The solution is simple-and difficult. If we can't meaningfully limit the way our data is harvested, and we can't effectively constrain the way that data is used to tailor and target the ads and content we see, there's only one place we can fight the insidious and manipulative effects of near-psychic advertising: in between our ears. We have to become smarter news and advertising consumers, and learn to resist the unceasing stream of slanted messages that come our way.

As the Atlantic Council put it in their report:

Individuals must become savvier consumers of information and advocate for stronger personal privacy protections from their politicians. Collective intelligence systems for determining truth from fiction can be useful, and paying for quality news is an effective way to incentivize high-value information.

That's a lot harder than it sounds. People consistently underestimate the extent to which their consumption choices or political views are affected by media coverage or advertising, even when they believe that other people can be manipulated. Researchers refer to this as the "third person effect": As communications scholars Jeremy Cohen, Diana Mutz, Vincent Price, and Albert Gunther note in their article on the third person effect in defamation law, "The third-person effect suggests that people tend to believe that they are not affected by media messages as strongly as are others exposed to the same message. As Davison put it, people believe the media's 'greatest impact will not be on "me" or "you", but on "them"-the third persons'."

That media hubris means that we worry about protecting other people from fake news and targeted messages, without asking whether we ourselves are being manipulated. And there are certainly some systemic differences in how vulnerable we are to manipulation. In their article on " Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election," economics scholars Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow found significant differences in who believed the kind of fake news that we now know Cambridge Analytica helped target:

First, heavy media consumers are more likely to believe ideologically aligned articles. Second, those with segregated social networks are significantly more likely to believe ideologically aligned articles, perhaps because they are less likely to receive disconfirmatory information from their friends...Third, "undecided" adults (those who did not make up their minds about whom to vote for until less than three months before the election) are less likely to believe ideologically aligned articles than more decisive voters.

But the flip side of this finding is that there are factors that can insulate people from persuasion by false news-and perhaps, from the larger phenomenon of targeted messaging. According to Allcott and Gentzkow, "people who spend more time consuming media, people with higher education, and older people have more accurate beliefs about news....people who report that social media were their most important sources of election news were more likely both to correctly believe true headlines and to incorrectly believe false headlines."

What We Can Do Now

That translates into some very straightforward recommendations that we should all follow, regardless of whether we believe that we are personally vulnerable to advertiser, news and political manipulation:

Commit to daily media engagement-not just through whatever shows up in your news feed, but by actively seeking out trusted media sources.

Invest in education for yourself, your family, and your larger community-not only general education, but specifically around learning to discern the difference between independent, rigorous reporting and sponsored or fake news.

Validate every social media headline by looking at-for example, by doing a Google news search.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir here: after all, if you're the kind of person who reads a thousand words into a story based on academic research, you're probably not the kind of voter or consumer who swallows whatever message pops in your Facebook feed. But that's all the more reason we need you on Facebook: so that you can drop a Snopes link or factual correction whenever you see a friend sharing dubious information.

If Facebook's filter bubble keeps you inside the universe of fellow JSTOR junkies, you can take a page from the troll army that searches Facebook for comment threads on topics like gun control or the Trump administration. Just click on one of the headlines in the tiny nightmare of Facebook's Trending sidebar, and you can get to work adding links or informed perspective to threads that are currently missing both.

We must demand that the platforms selling our data in turn invest in protecting their users from manipulation and abuse.

Of course, neither an army of fact-checking vigilantes nor a newly self-educating electorate are likely to overcome the systemic disinformation and manipulation of consumers and voters in the era of large-scale data collection and targeting. Lest we leave this all in the hands of overwhelmed consumers, let me return to one last recommendation from the Atlantic Council: "The technology sector should play a key role in developing tools for identifying, countering, and disincentivizing computational propaganda. Technology companies should make these tools ubiquitous, easy to use, and the default for platforms. They should also align business models and industry norms with societal values, and develop industry organizations for self-regulation."

We must demand that the platforms that are reaping billions by selling our eyeballs and our data in turn invest in protecting their users from manipulation and abuse. In my opinion, that requires nothing less than a wholesale reconstruction of our regulatory environment, so that American internet users enjoy the same kind of privacy protections that are now the law in Europe. And nothing will serve us better in becoming advocates for a better internet tomorrow than becoming smarter news consumers today.

JSTOR Citations

By: N. Craig Smith and Elizabeth Cooper-Martin

Journal of Marketing, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 1-20

American Marketing Association

By: Matt Chessen

Atlantic Council

By: Diana C. Mutz

Daedalus, Vol. 141, No. 4, On Public Opinion (Fall 2012), pp. 83-97

The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

By: Jeremy Cohen , Diana Mutz , Vincent Price and Albert Gunther

The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 161-173

Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research

By: Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow

The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring 2017), pp. 211-235

American Economic Association

Comments are closed.

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Why Deleting Facebook isn't the Answer to Data-Driven Targeting | JSTOR Daily

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How will my data be used against me? That's the question on many minds in the wake of recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica, its extraction of Facebook data, and the use of that Facebook data by the Trump campaign.

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The power of social media in the manipulation of public opinion and in electioneering has been highlighted in various democracies recently, the most obvious example being the US.

An idea is being expressed that legislation is needed to curb social media's power. But that involves some curtailing of the expression of opinions by the powerful and that is not going to be easy to achieve.

That it will not solve all problems is epitomised in this country by the pre-social media landscape, in which mainstream media had control of the organs of public-opinion formation.

It is a matter of history that one political grouping won all elections in the nearly quarter century between 1987 and 2011.

There was a change of government in the 1990s, but the then opposition got into government without an election and that was reversed at the subsequent election in 1997.

Democratic institutions do need to 'regulate' social media, but it would be a mistake to assume that that will solve the problem of the manipulation of power by those in a position to do so.
A Leavy
Sutton

Dublin

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Readers' blog: Powerful have always controlled opinion

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The power of social media in the manipulation of public opinion and in electioneering has been highlighted in various democracies recently, the most obvious example being the US. An idea is being expressed that legislation is needed to curb social media's power.

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The cryptocurrency phenomenon has led to numerous scams on social media platforms. Companies that are claiming "guaranteed investment" and "no risk of losing money" are taking you to be a crypto-fool. There is no such thing as a guaranteed investment. On its face, investment comes with the risk of losing money.
So, how have these scams evolved?

Empty Promises

Initially, scammers would announce giveaways and contests, promising to send certain amounts of crypto (ETH, BTC, or LTC) to the "first 50 people" to respond or provide financial information. This allows scammers to gauge the types of responses they get, and then look to the followers of these individuals. That provides a sort of database for scammers to identify influencers and other popular accounts out there.

Post Manipulation

Next, scammers would create social media accounts similar to verified accounts, belonging to popular crypto-influencers. They would then leave comments on tweets containing high engagements, promising to send certain amounts of crypto to the address(es) provided. As such, individuals would share, re-tweet, and tag others in these posts, causing the scam posts to appear at the top of the page, or very close by the original tweets.

Account Manipulation

Another measure that scammers have taken is mirroring verified accounts. By either buying out verified accounts or changing their profile pictures, account names, and bios, these scammers are luring individuals away from the actual verified accounts they already follow to these "new" accounts designed to obtain highly sensitive financial information and, eventually, control of people's digital assets.

What Are Platforms Doing To Minimize Scams?

Last week, Twitter announced that it was joining other platforms like Facebook in attempting to minimize fraud and deceptive trade practices by banning accounts that aim to steal individuals' digital assets and financial information. "We are on it," said Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, in reference to addressing cryptocurrency scams.

To that end, Twitter has greyed out accounts under review, with all tweets and pictures hidden. A message in the middle of the screen reads:

Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content. You're seeing this warning because they Tweet potentially sensitive images or language. Do you still want to view it?

The message provides users the option to click "Yes, view profile" or to avoid viewing the account in question.

This move by Twitter is one of many recent efforts to minimize abusive or harmful accounts on the platform. "We're working to identify accounts as they're engaging in abusive behavior, even if the behavior hasn't been reported to us," said Ed Ho, Twitter's VP of engineering. "Then, we're taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets."

These efforts aren't scam-proof, and Twitter recognizes that it may make mistakes when it comes to taking these preventative measures. "We aim to only act on accounts when we're confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive. Since these tools are new, we will sometimes make mistakes, but know that we are actively working to improve and iterate on them [daily]."

Facebook has already begun taking measures against misleading and deceptive trade practices by, for instance, banning ads linked to cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, and binary options. However, some ads continue to get through.

With each day come new threats and novel solutions implemented in an attempt to counter those threats. Only time will tell what new threats and defensive strategies are enacted in the future.

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Social Media Platforms Address Crypto-Manipulation and Scams

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The cryptocurrency phenomenon has led to numerous scams on social media platforms. Companies that are claiming "guaranteed investment" and "no risk of losing money" are taking you to be a crypto-fool. There is no such thing as a guaranteed investment. On its face, investment comes with the risk of losing money.

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Ignorance is the insidious powerful enemy of democracy. Education for all the people based on truth, scientific fact and culturally accepted moral norms is the enemy of ignorance.

An American society that strives to continue the journey begun by the Founding Fathers toward a more perfect union based on equality for all people is doomed to self-destruction if ignorance is tolerated or fostered. An under-educated populace soon becomes the breeding ground for the apathy that feeds the power of dictators and other insecure/fearful leaders who rely on media manipulation of events to promote their own self-interests. Such manipulation can include often-repeated lies designed to cast doubt on the authority of legitimate governmental entities.

Another key goal of media manipulation is to foster a mistrust of officials who place loyalty to the Constitution, their oath of office and the prescribed duties of their office over loyalty to the leader.

Media manipulation, however unique to their own form of government, is important to Xi Jinping in China, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and Kim Jong Un in North Korea.

Ignorance fostered by media manipulation does not happen suddenly. It creeps, seeps and slowly permeates the consciousness of a nation. The people's political and social consciousness is dying before they know sickness is in their bones.

Stop relying on social media and paid lemmings to replace the right to educate one's self. Be the power invested by the Constitution to personally determine our nation's future.
Jim Mittino * St. Louis

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Educated citizens can fend off media manipulation

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Ignorance is the insidious powerful enemy of democracy. Education for all the people based on truth, scientific fact and culturally accepted moral norms is the enemy of ignorance. An American society that strives to continue the journey begun by the Founding Fathers toward a more perfect union based on equality for all people is doomed to self-destruction if ignorance is tolerated or fostered.

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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Forget the idea of "seeing is believing." New technology is making digital media manipulation easier than ever.

The result? Phony videos that are popping up across the web.

One video making the rounds is of former-President Barack Obama delivering a speech that he never actually made. It's part of a video trend circulating the internet called Deepfake, which has made it tougher to tell what's real and what's not.

"It's very concerning because as people get better with this software we're able to not just use celebrities, they're able to use a neighbor in a video and compromise that person," FITECH Senior Vice President Duarte Pereira said.

Pereira says in recent months, the videos started appearing on Reddit. They're created by a program called Fake App, which superimposes videos of one person's face on another person's body.

"The way they do it is they identify things in your face like your eyebrows, nose as they break your face down into smaller pieces," tech expert Ram Jayaraman said.

Until recently, the artificial intelligence video technology was only used by major Hollywood productions. Social media apps like Snapchat have made the face-morphing technology all too easy to obtain.

Experts are worried it could have serious moral implications, like framing people for crimes or putting celebrities' faces on pornographic performers.

There's also concern the technology could be used to circulate fake news and smear politicians.

Reddit took steps to ban a number of Deepfake groups that had tens of thousands of members, but experts say people are still accessing the tool on the dark web.

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Alarming Advances Made In Digital Media Manipulation

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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Forget the idea of "seeing is believing." New technology is making digital media manipulation easier than ever. The result? Phony videos that are popping up across the web. One video making the rounds is of former-President Barack Obama delivering a speech that he never actually made.

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The path forward for smart cities is not without its obstacles and challenges, many of them far removed from the worlds of tech, and instead more linked to the societal, political and financial factors.

Kimberly LaGrue, chief information officer in New Orleans, recalled a community event when one resident said, "I don't have a computer. I don't use any of that stuff." LaGrue shared the experience during a panel discussion at the Smart Cities Connect Conference in Kansas City, Mo., March 27.

"I asked her another question and she went to her phone," LaGrue added.

"She didn't even understand that her phone was a tool for digital literacy. That the Internet on her phone was the same as Internet in her house," she went on, underscoring the growing need to educate residents about the many ways technology is serving the city.

Since then, New Orleans has launched initiatives like a program called Tech Goes Home, as well as a digital equity challenge to close the digital divide that often leaves those without technological knowledge behind.

Understanding and overcoming the digital divide is an issue officials in other cities explore as well, said Girish Ramachandran, Dallas' chief technology architect.

"If there's public Wi-Fi out there, do people even know how to access public Wi-Fi?" Ramachandran asked. "Do they have the devices needed to access public Wi-Fi as opposed to just deploying a solution and then saying, 'Great, now go use it'?"

San Francisco holds classes that focus on using the Internet for job searches and other information like college programs. The idea is to go beyond simply putting a tool out in the world; it hinges on fostering its use for the greater public good.

"Essentially, what we've done is we've created a place where there's plenty of computers, they're attached to the Internet, so they come do the training and go back to their home and kind of apply what they've learned," said Nina D'Amato, chief of staff for the City and County of San Francisco Technology Department.

The panelists also zeroed in on some of the peripheral issues that must be addressed as cities become smarter, more data-driven and more network dependent. In the end, they warned, residents can't be left behind in the process.

"We have to help our citizens understand why the information is important," said LaGrue. "And if technology is as much of a demon as it is an asset, if data is as much of a demon as it is an asset to them, then we've got to fix that."

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Digital Literacy Is at the Heart of a Thriving Smart City

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The path forward for smart cities is not without its obstacles and challenges, many of them far removed from the worlds of tech, and instead more linked to the societal, political and financial factors. Kimberly LaGrue, chief information officer in New Orleans, recalled a community event when one resident said, "I don't have a computer.

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The early 21st century - with its increased travel and trade, rapid urbanization, environmental degradation and climate change - could have been fashioned to help epidemics thrive and grow.

As public health emergencies have become more complex so have the responses - with local, national and international personnel involved, all bringing different backgrounds, cultures and levels of knowledge.

For WHO's experts, it became clear that a crucial tool in the war against epidemics and pandemics would be getting timely, accurate, up-to-date information to the growing cadre of responders - regardless of how remote or difficult their location.

"The major epidemics we have seen this century highlighted the need for a system that quickly transforms scientific knowledge into action on the ground," said Dr Gaya Gamhewage, Manager of WHO's Support for Response team in the Department of Infectious Hazard Management

For epidemic disease, it is particularly important to make sure that responders and volunteers know how to protect themselves.

Actionable Knowledge

"The key is actionable knowledge," adds Dr Sylvie Briand, Director of Infectious Hazard Management at WHO. "What we have is knowledge. For us the value of knowledge is when it is shared - and it is especially important that responders have enough knowledge to protect themselves and do good work. We had information on diseases like Plague, MERS and Ebola, we had a number of courses but they were on paper, not accessible from the field."

To tackle this 21st century problem, WHO turned to a 21st century solution - the creation of a suite of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

Since first emerging in the early 2000s, these courses have quickly become a popular internet-based learning tool for millions of people, who follow courses created by global experts and institutions that can be accessed anywhere, anytime, by anyone.

OpenWHO

In June 2017, WHO publicly launched its own MOOC platform - OpenWHO - offering online courses specially tailored for health emergency responders. The space is interactive, allowing experiences and expertise to be shared and kept fresh via discussions and feedback.

"We don't call it training - we call it knowledge transfer. OpenWHO allows us and our key partners to transfer life-saving knowledge to large numbers of frontline responders quickly and reliably," said Dr Briand.

The platform offers four channels of self-paced learning materials that cover key technical, operational and social elements of epidemic and pandemic response.

The Outbreak Channel cover the science of fighting pandemics and epidemics.

The Ready for Response Channel focuses on improving emergency response operations.

Get Social covers necessary soft skills such as risk communications, social mobilization and community engagement.

The GOARN channel contains information for Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network participants - preparing them for emergency field work.

So far more than 34 courses have been uploaded onto the on the Platform. More are in the pipeline - along with multiple language versions. A new channel dedicated to pandemics will be launched in the next few months.

WHO partners with NGO Translators Without Borders who can translate into more than 122 different languages and dialects, as required. The most popular courses so far are those on the Incident Management System, Pandemic and Epidemic-prone Diseases, and Communications.

The courses are free although most users must register. To date, more than 25,000 users from more than 190 countries and territories - with the most registrations coming from Nigeria, India and the USA - have enrolled in 43,000 OpenWHO courses, many for more than one.

The MOOC platform is also integrated with WHO social media outlets - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn - which helps people find it. It has been configured to work on smartphones and tablets, as well as computers.

The platform was designed for use in remote setting where internet connectivity could be weak or absent. Course materials can also be downloaded - for use offline where there are poor internet connections.

Enthusiastic

Although the platform has only been available for a few months, user responses have been enthusiastic.

"Many thanks indeed to the WHO team for informative training with real objectives," said one student on the Incident Management Systems course.

"It is good that WHO took the leadership in emergency response and developed these systems and frameworks," said another.

Up to 250,000 students can access the courses at any one time and an unlimited number can register on OpenWHO - so the plan is to develop and expand the platform's content and reach.

"We want to establish OpenWHO as a leading, trusted source of public health information, which can react quickly to new health information needs as they arise," says Dr Briand.

"Too many people have died from lack of knowledge. We want these online courses to help save lives."

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Saving lives by sharing knowledge online

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The early 21st century - with its increased travel and trade, rapid urbanization, environmental degradation and climate change - could have been fashioned to help epidemics thrive and grow. As public health emergencies have become more complex so have the responses - with local, national and international personnel involved, all bringing different backgrounds, cultures and levels of knowledge.

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For many millennials, the traditional four year university is no longer appealing. Yes, that is the route that many will take. For some, this is for no reason other than necessity. They simply don't see another choice to pursue their career choice.

However, that doesn't mean that millennials rely primarily on traditional educational institutions to obtain the knowledge they need. A recent study conducted by the Mayo Clinic took a deeper look at how millennials learn. What researchers discovered was that the elements that make millennials thrive in a learning environment were collaboration, feedback, technology and mentorship. Many of these factors may be more readily available on the Internet than in many traditional classrooms.

Of course, there are other factors to consider as well. Let's explore ways in which internet based educational options may work better for many millennials and how universities should act to meet changing educational demands.
1. Many universities are holding onto the lecture model as the standard
This isn't to say that universities aren't exploring and implementing other ways of presenting educational materials. They certainly are . In some cases, the lecture method is actually the best method for teaching certain concepts. Still, as long as so many colleges view this as the standard, millennials are going to be drawn to education opportunities that are more varied.

One of the problems is that there is little room for collaboration or feedback in the lecture hall. A student must wait until they happen to be called upon for any sort of feedback or until they receive their grades for any feedback. They certainly aren't collaborating much with other students. On the other hand, internet based educational models can allow for both. Educational social media platforms such as allow students to create online communities where they can share, communicate and collaborate. In addition to this, the marriage of AI and ed-tech makes it easier for students to receive feedback on their performance.
2. Internet educational opportunities don't need to embrace technology
Many traditional colleges and universities are making changes to embrace technology. Students are receiving tablets, for example, instead of textbooks. Courses that were once only available on campus are now offered online. While these are positive developments, it's not quite the same as educational initiatives that have been developed wholly online for digital natives. For these courses, the entire architecture and infrastructure behind them are created with internet based learning in mind.

Again, the increasing use of blockchain for educational purposes will only make online learning more appealing to millennials. According to , all that's needed for blockchain to gain more adoption and break into the mainstream is to simplify access.
3. Millennials crave fast, flexible and affordable education
For millennials that want to pick up skills without concern for earning a traditional degree or certificate, a quick internet search will reveal plenty of options. Courses can be taken at will and often for free from providers such as edX, Coursera and Khan Academy. Many of these courses are self paced, students can take as many as they want at a given time, and the price ranges between free and a few dollars.

There are also options for students who do wish to obtain a degree. For example, Aston University's online business management program is fast paced and offered wholly online. In order to remain competitive in the future, traditional colleges and universities may need to consider the changing needs of millennials.

Flexibility doesn't simply mean that students can complete courses at their own pace or learn when their schedule allows. Millennials also value the ability to design their own educational programs. They appreciate the independence they are afforded when they choose internet based educational options. For many available options, the concept of the formal prerequisite has been upended. If a student believes they have the knowledge and experience to succeed in a course they are often able to take it without proving to some authority that they are qualified to do so.
4. Using the internet as a financial equalizer
For many, getting a college degree is the most desirable option. Unfortunately, tuition costs have skyrocketed in the past few decades. This means that formal university education isn't always an option. For some, they simply don't have the financing options available. Others cannot accept the burden of financial aid debt . Some millennials are even realizing that getting a degree doesn't pass muster when they do a cost benefit analysis. Because of this, free and low cost online educational offerings hold more appeal.
Can traditional colleges catch up?
Not only can traditional colleges and universities pivot in order to accommodate changing educational needs, they absolutely must. The most challenging standard to meet will be policy based. As long as students can learn new concepts using free or low cost options that's going to be a problem for colleges and universities.

Higher education can also benefit by going back to the drawing board in course design. They can create courses that are much more appealing if use of technology is woven into the structure of these courses rather than retrofitting technology into older educational models. Finally, they can innovate by allowing students more freedom in designing their educational paths.

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Why Many Millennials Are Turning To The Internet For Education

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A recent study conducted by the Mayo Clinic found that the elements that make millennials thrive in a learning environment were collaboration, feedback, technology and mentorship, and these may be more readily available on the Internet than in many traditional classrooms.

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For the average internet user, Wikipedia operates in the background, its 44 million entries serving as a priceless resource, rarely thought of until you need to know the capital of Azerbaijan. This week, however, Wikipedia's volunteer editors and the nonprofit that makes its work possible, the Wikimedia Foundation, suddenly found themselves in the news, tasked once again with providing a ground-level truth for a platform unwilling to provide one of its own.

On stage at the South by Southwest conference on Tuesday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that her company would begin adding "information cues" to conspiracy theory videos, text-based links intended to provide users with better information about what they are watching. One of the sites YouTube plans to use is Wikipedia. "We're just going to be releasing this for the first time in a couple weeks, and our goal is to start with the list of internet conspiracies listed where there is a lot of active discussion on YouTube," Wojcicki said on stage.

The move came as a surprise-even to the Wikimedia Foundation. "In this case, neither Wikipedia nor the Wikimedia Foundation are part of a formal partnership with YouTube. We were not given advance notice of this announcement," the organization said in a statement.

YouTube, a multibillion-dollar corporation flush with advertising cash, had chosen to offload its misinformation problem in part to a volunteer, nonprofit encyclopedia without informing it first. YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the move prompted protestations from the media and some of Wikipedia's editors.

"As a longtime Wikipedia editor, I wondered whether YouTube thought deeply about how relying on Wikipedia to combat disinformation on YouTube videos is going to impact Wikipedia and the community of editors," says Amanda Levendowski, a clinical teaching fellow at the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at New York University Law School.

Wikipedia never claimed to be perfect, and isn't.

But YouTube is far from the first tech company, or even the first social platform, to use Wikipedia's content for its own goals. Its parent company, Alphabet, frequently uses Wikipedia content in Google search results. Facebook is also testing using Wikipedia to fight its own misinformation problem, though it informed the Wikimedia Foundation of its intentions first. Artificial intelligence researchers also frequently use the online encyclopedia-which still adds 20,000 new entries each month-to train algorithms or teach smart assistants. And Levendowski notes that Alphabet-owned Jigsaw used Wikipedia article discussion pages, in part, to train its open-source troll-fighting AI.

"Our content powers hundreds of semantic web services and knowledge graphs, including those maintained by Google, Apple, and Yahoo!. Our traffic data is used to track the flu virus, analyze changes in the stock market, and predict which movies will top the box office. Our structured and linked data platform, Wikidata, is used to organize datasets from the Library of Congress to the Metropolitan Museum of Art," says Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Which is to say that much of the tech industry uses Wikipedia-it's not only YouTube that has to consider the consequences of making it the arbiter of truth.

Who Writes History

It's worth acknowledging that Wikipedia is, for the most part, remarkably good at its job. The site is a free, generally reliable, vast source of information. But it does have its issues. Only 16 percent of the site's volunteer editors identify as female, according to a 2013 study. Nearly half of all articles about geographic places were written by inhabitants of just five countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, and Italy, a 2015 Oxford University study concluded. The same study found that more edits have been made from the Netherlands than all of Africa combined.

These disparities result in real consequences both for the kind of content that ends up on Wikipedia, and how it's written. While it presents itself as a source of facts, articles can have their own slants. "For certain political topics, there's a central-left bias. There's also a slight, when it comes to more political topics, counter-cultural bias. It's not across the board, and it's not for all things," says Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University and the author of Structural Differentiation in Social Media, a book that studied 10 years worth of Wikipedia editing logs.

The vast majority of edits to Wikipedia are also made by a tiny fraction of its volunteers. Seventy-seven percent of Wikipedia's content is written by one percent of its editors, according to Matei's book, which he cowrote with Brian Britt, an assistant professor of journalism at South Dakota State University.

"The diversity and representation of our editor community has been an area of critical focus for our movement over the past several years. To truly be a free knowledge resource for all, Wikipedia has to reflect the lived experience of the world-and this extends beyond gender, to language, geography, and more," says Maher. "At the Foundation, we're committed to supporting the diversification of the Wikimedia editor community, and the efforts of those working to make Wikipedia more representative."

Funding efforts to diversify Wikipedia's contributor base is challenging, though, when companies use its content, but don't also invest in its future. Or when they choose to treat it as an "endlessly renewable resource with infinite free labor," as longtime Wikipedia editor and librarian Phoebe Ayers put it. Google confirmed to New York Magazine that it does contribute financially to the Wikimedia Foundation. ¹

Scraping Wikipedia content has already had unintended effects in other parts of the web. Consider what happens when you search a number of news outlets on Google. Several daily US newspapers in major metropolitan areas, like the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, are presented as having "political alignments." The search results describe the former as conservative, and the latter as centrist. But if you search for an openly partisan outlet, like Breitbart, no political alignment shows up, because Wikipedia's editors haven't added one to its entry. Because the information lives on Google, independent from its source, it's not always apparent why a piece of information did or didn't end up in a search result.

Of course, anyone could add a political alignment label to Breitbart's Wikipedia entry if they wanted to. Wikipedia's greatest strength is that anyone can contribute to it, a feature that also draws the most criticism. Powerful people have been caught editing entries to suit their own interests, or to bend history, exonerating themselves of past offenses.

Scraping Wikipedia content has already had unintended effects in other parts of the web.

In 2015, for example, a Politico investigation uncovered that someone with access to New York City Police Department computers had edited Wikipedia pages detailing alleged police brutality. They attempted to delete Wikipedia entries entirely for several well-known victims, including Eric Garner. The NYPD Wikipedia scandal is far from the only instance in which the site has been manipulated; a Twitter bot updates daily with anonymous edits made to the site from IP addresses associated with Congress, for example, though not all the edits it chronicles have political or policy implications. Wikipedia has also struggled with how to deal with people who are paid to edit articles to suit their benefactors.

Wikipedia never claimed to be perfect, and isn't. But tech giants still use it as an unassailable force-often in an attempt to hide their own failures of moderation.

Conspiracists At the Gate

Some Wikipedia editors have expressed concern that YouTube's new feature will make their jobs even harder by sending a flood of conspiracy theorists to the site, eager to edit pages to shape their worldview. So far, though, Wikipedia does have a good track record of fighting back against people interested in propagating misinformation. A 2016 study conducted by three Stanford researchers found that most hoaxes are detected and dealt with on Wikipedia quickly. While anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the process is fairly bureaucratic, and not something you can do easily in the heat of the moment after watching a conspiracy theory video on YouTube. In fact, Wikipedia has had trouble recruiting new editors in the past because of the sometimes cumbersome safeguards it has installed to prevent poor-quality edits from making their way into entries.

If an army of flat-Earth truthers do try to infiltrate Wikipedia, what they will create is extra labor for the site's editors, who aren't compensated for their work. They may also harass the editors of articles that debunk conspiracy theories, a problem that the site dealt with during the Gamergate controversy.

Perhaps worse than vandalism is the worry that Wikipedia links on YouTube, or on any platform, will become a symbol rather than a source of more information. Users might not read the encyclopedia entries, but merely interpret them as a cue. Videos that are presented without Wikipedia pages or other additional information might be viewed automatically as more legitimate than those that are.

"When people go to interfaces they do not think, they do not want to think, they want to see conventions and encoded signals that help them make quick decisions," says Matei. "It will signal just this is fake, this is bogus."

More than anything, that's perhaps the greatest risk that comes with tech companies using Wikipedia to fight misinformation. Using the crowdsourced encyclopedia as a shield, platforms abdicate responsibility for their own problems.

Everything in Moderation
¹CORRECTION 3/17/18 2:09PM: This story originally said that Google does not contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation. That is incorrect; the company does contribute, and its Matching Gifts program is listed among the foundation's major benefactors.

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Don't Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet

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For the average internet user, Wikipedia operates in the background, its 44 million entries serving as a priceless resource, rarely thought of until you need to know the capital of Azerbaijan.

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Can we move toward an internet where your personal data isn't currency to be traded with advertisers, and where services exist for the common good? The good news is that it already exists.

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When we think of democracy, we generally think of voting: the people are polled, the people decide. But voting is zero-sum: it has winners and losers. There are other models of governance that can make claim to democratic legitimacy that produce wins for everyone.

Nadia Eghbal, who writes about "money, governance, and the internet," turns a skeptical eye on the prevalence of voting as a means of settling governance questions in the decentralized internet movement, which includes things like IPFS, blockchains, and distributed hash cacheing.

As Eghbal points out, many of the worst aspects of voting are even worse in decentralized voting: voting is subject to all kinds of manipulation including mobilizing or suppressing blocks of voters through questionable tactics. When the actual number of voters is unknown and unknowable (which is practically a design spec for the decentralization movement), then these problems are exacerbated.

There are alternatives to voting: cooperative models for constructing governance questions that treat voting as a failure, not a default (think of the "stag hunt").

These cooperative models need to be designed into the system from the start, and Eghbal has some practical design suggestions to that end:

* Default to failure: set up the system so that an inability to achieve consensus creates consequences for everyone

* Bias toward action: design the system so that "bad thing X will happen unless you do something to change it"

* Use deadlines: set a clock ticking so that a decision has to be reached in finite time

I've worked in situations like this and seen them horribly gamed by powerful blocks of incumbents -- it's basically how the worst standardization efforts work, especially in the DRM world. And indeed, Eghbal points out all the ways that these systems can fail: a lack of representativeness (who has the time and expertise to participate in the debate?); signal hijacking (who has the biggest megaphone with which to recruit people); oligarchy and cults of the individual (think of all the problems with the internet's benevolent dictatorships); and forking and fragmentation.

Despite the many ways that cooperative governance models can go wrong, they are not objectively worse than voting, and yet they aren't even on the table when we talk about the future of governance. That shouldn't be the case. There are certainly situations in which cooperative models are superior to voting and unless they're in the mix as we design the future of systems, we're going to have an impoverished decision-making future.

Under voting, it's cheap to veto (i.e. vote against something), which has led to an anti-pattern of outrage today. Not only is it cheap to disagree, but you're often rewarded for it (in the form of attention and/or reputation).

Cooperative mechanics flip this around, so it's cheap to do nothing and expensive to raise an objection. That means people reserve their objections for stuff they really care about. If you object too often, other people are likely to start discounting your opinion. You can focus on what you care about

When voting, the expectation is that everyone ought to participate. Even abstaining is a conscious decision. But in a cooperative game, you can participate as much or as little as you'd like.

It's no secret that we're drowning in information. As Albert Wenger suggests, today's challenge is not finding time to actually read everything, but rather deciding where to spend your limited attention.

It's impossible to maintain deep knowledge of every political topic of importance. Cooperative governance gives us permission to be curators, focusing on just our areas of passion and expertise.

Reputation is quickly becoming more important than money. (Or, rather: perhaps money was just a historic proxy for reputation.) Cooperative games leverage the power of reputation really well, because you need reputation to capture attention. And whomever captures enough attention, gains influence.

While this may sound bleak at first, when compared to wealth, reputation strikes me as a more democratic alternative. Black Lives Matter started as a hashtag. The Women's March started on Facebook. For all that was terrible about the U.S. presidential election, Trump broke the mold of how people become president, simply with a powerful enough megaphone.

The problem with voting [Nadia Eghbal/Medium]

( via Four Short Links)

( Image: Colm Callanan, CC-BY-ND)

Ann Kirkpatrick cast the vote that kept Guantanamo Bay open and voted against cap-and-trade, and has been a consistent opponent of EPA air-quality measures; Jason Crow says he won't take corporate PAC money, so instead he's funded by his law firm which lobbies for casinos, fossil fuel companies (he also opposed gun control after the [...]

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Governing a decentralized internet without votes

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When we think of democracy, we generally think of voting: the people are polled, the people decide. But voting is zero-sum: it has winners and losers. There are other models of governance that can make claim to democratic legitimacy that produce wins for everyone. Nadia Eghbal, who writes about "money, governance, and the internet," turns...

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One cannot address the issue of change in this series of articles without exploring the rapid advancements in the field of communication and information technology.

Since the start of the third millennium, this domain has witnessed a true revolution that has had profound and radical effects on the different social, cultural, political, economic, security, and military aspects of human life. This revolution is viewed by many as the key to the future and to mastering the instruments of power, advancement, and modernity in an ever-changing world.

The developments in the field of communication have deeply affected the structure of human society throughout history. With each significant development or invention that facilitates and improves the means of communication, humanity has progressed from one stage of civilisation to a more advanced one.

In the beginning, humans utilised symbols, pictures, and signs for communication. When they succeeded in developing these symbols and signs into a form of writing and recording by using primitive materials such as papyrus, leather, and wooden boards, it was considered a major leap forward in knowledge transfer and communication for humanity.

When the printing press was invented in the 15th century, it was heralded as the greatest form of communication the world had ever known. It triggered a vast transformation by making it easier to print, publish, and distribute not hundreds, but thousands of books or documents. This launched an enlightenment movement in culture and knowledge that paved the way for modern civilisation.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, further significant inventions in the field of communication played a crucial role in global development. This started with the invention of the telegraph in 1837, the telephone in 1876, and the phonograph in 1877, which promoted commercial, cultural, and academic interactions across human societies. In 1896, the radio - the first device to use electromagnetic waves to transmit information across the ether - was invented, which further revolutionised the process of communication. This opened the door for the telecommunications revolution that led to the invention of the television in 1924.

In the second half of the 20th century, it was satellite technology that was viewed as a miracle in the communications field. As well as having a role in developing telecommunications, satellites also were used as tools of espionage, in the identification of military targets, and in guiding of weapons of war.

In all these radical transformations, the advancements in the communications sector have contributed towards the development of humankind and world civilisation. However, the impacts of this sector have never been as profound and widespread as in the past few decades. Thanks to the dramatic developments that humankind has achieved in the areas of knowledge, information systems, and electronic advancements - especially with the emergence of the internet - there has been an unprecedented communication revolution that has changed the world. The most significant feature of this revolution in the field of communication and information technology is the sweeping transformations that are taking place. This revolution is developing much more rapidly than the communication and knowledge revolutions of the past. Many people, even the most astute observers and followers, often fail to keep abreast of the changes that are taking place.

Aspects of transformation

This can easily be demonstrated by examining the profound transformations the world has witnessed in this field since the turn of the new millennium. In the year 2000, the landline telephone and a very limited internet were the main means of communication among people. Today, less than two decades later, billions of people use their smartphones for communication. Social media and messaging applications revolutions are widespread, while broadband internet connections are extensively used by almost half of the world's population. At the end of 2017, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that about 4.3 billion people around the world were using the internet. A report by the US International Trade Commission (USITC) in August 2017 estimated that 16.3 billion devices were connected to the internet in 2015, an increase of 87 per cent from 2012. The flow of information via the internet also increased 12-fold between 2007 and 2016. Data-processing capabilities have also significantly evolved, as well as storage capacity and knowledge accessibility. Additionally, there are spectacular developments in emerging technologies, which encompass a wide range of innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IOT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, quantum computing, and more.

Of course, in this limited space we cannot elaborate on all the effects and transformations that the communication revolution has had on every aspect of human life. I have already addressed some details of these aspects in my 2013 book From Tribe to Facebook: The Transformational Role of Social Networks. However, I will touch on some of the aspects of transformation and change resulting from this communication revolution thus far. I expect that its influence will extend and evolve in the future, creating a totally different world from the one we currently know. The first aspect is of an economic nature and focuses on the global knowledge economy and investment in information technology and communications. The volume of change here is, by all accounts, stunning. According to the aforementioned USITC report, global e-commerce has vastly expanded as shopping has moved from traditional stores to the internet and smartphones. The report shows that e-commerce grew from a total volume of $19.3 trillion (Dh70.8 trillion) in 2012 to $27.7 trillion in 2016, of which $3.8 trillion was between consumers and companies and $23.9 trillion of e-trading was between the companies themselves.

This is at a time when information technology companies top the list of the world's biggest corporations in terms of market value. For example, Apple was worth an estimated $900 billion at the end of 2017, according to a report by Bloomberg in November 2017. While an article in the British newspaper The Guardian from January 3, 2018, reported that the value of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, was worth $729 billion; Microsoft was worth $660 billion; Amazon was worth $563 billion; Facebook was worth $515 billion; and the Chinese firm Alibaba had a market value of $441 billion. The communication and information technology revolution is the focal point of the Fourth Industrial revolution (4IR), towards which the world is hastily heading. This is intrinsically based on the idea of inventing smart systems and machines that can be controlled via mobile high-speed broadband telecommunication networks.

Second is the sociopolitical aspect. This is associated with how the communication revolution has eroded the conventional ideas of national sovereignty that have existed since the concept of the modern nation state was established following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This revolution has broken all domestic and international boundaries and barriers, influenced the values of national identity of citizens of different societies, and created the "Global Citizen," whose orientations, ideas, and principles are no longer shaped by his local environment and culture, rather by the external ideas and values being constantly broadcast on social media and the internet. This communication revolution has affected the patterns of social relationships between people, as well as their morals, behaviours, and interactions. It also poses new challenges that governments need to adapt to and cope with. The idea of e-government evolved to provide e-services to citizens. Some governments have restructured their local governance systems to establish a direct interaction between citizens and local authorities.

Third is the security-military aspect. The communication and information technology revolution has provided a dangerous platform for terrorists and extremist groups to expand and disseminate their dark ideas across societies. Furthermore, it has provided new means that can be utilised by competing and conflicting powers to inflict damage upon their competitors. These include cyberwarfare, which is becoming increasingly dangerous, and the attempts to penetrate competing countries from within, threatening their security and stability by inciting social unrest or creating sleeper cells, or even using modern communications for espionage and collecting detailed information about rivals.

In the past two decades, communication and information technology offered abundant and important opportunities to promote cooperation and cultural interaction between countries and peoples of different cultures. It helped create sustainable economic development based on the knowledge economy. In turn, it also created serious challenges for countries and governments and produced global threats, which the world can only counter through enhanced cooperation. This revolution, however, is only in its early stages and its ultimate effects are not yet known. Vast investments are being directed toward this vital sector, focusing on the creative and innovative elements to develop new methods, mechanisms, and applications to consolidate the existing communication revolution.

Control over lives

The communication revolution will also open up new opportunities and present new challenges that may well be more serious than the current ones. These could include the erosion and possible loss of governments' capabilities to control the means of communication and social media within their national boundaries. Today, governments control internet services and can disconnect or deny access based on their national security interests. In the future, however, governments may lose this control to pioneering IT companies that could provide internet services to the citizens of any country, even without the consent of these governments. Also, in the future these services could become fundamental human rights, which, should governments violate them, could entail blame and punishment. The expansion in modern information and communication technologies, especially the IOT, means these technologies will have a deeper and more effective control over our lives and mark the end of the "era of privacy of humankind." With the growing dependence on smart machines and the decrease in reliance on the contribution of humans, global unemployment rates stand to rise. This may cause social problems, not to mention challenges in revising the existing legal framework to deal with the new advances and the age of smart machines and robotics, as well as the ethical aspects of all these developments.

I believe that the most important challenge of the future is being able to adapt to the ever-accelerating changes that the world is witnessing in the field of communication and information technology. It is a challenge that faces the developed world. For example, Nokia, which once controlled the mobile phone global market and was the first to manufacture smartphones, failed to maintain its position and was overtaken by the likes of Apple and Samsung. The reason was simple - Nokia was too slow and could not keep pace with the accelerating changes in this field.

It is reassuring that the UAE has understood the importance of investing in this vital sector within the context of its strategic future orientations and achieving sustainable development in the post-oil era. Our wise leaders have launched several ambitious initiatives and projects that aim to prepare society to compete in this field. These include the e-government and smart government initiatives, the plan to explore outer space by sending the Hope probe to Mars, and the launch of the UAE Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the formation of an associated council to pursue it. This strategy will act as a basis for investments in the future sectors based on AI, robotics, cloud computing, 3D printing, and the IOT. This clearly shows that the leadership, which God has bestowed upon the UAE, is aware of and well-informed about the essence of the changes affecting the world today, while also possessing the will, determination, and ability to tackle these challenges.
Dr Jamal Sanad Al Suwaidi is a UAE Author and Director-General of the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research.

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Jamal Sanad Al Suwaidi, 
Special to Gulf News

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The information and communication revolution: An engine of global change

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One cannot address the issue of change in this series of articles without exploring the rapid advancements in the field of communication and information technology. Since the start of the third millennium, this domain has witnessed a true revolution that has had profound and radical effects on the different social, cultural, political, economic, security, and military aspects of human life.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned down an invitation to give evidence to a House of Commons committee investigating allegations of misuse of the data of the social media giant's users.

But the chairman of the influential Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Damian Collins, repeated his call for Mr Zuckerberg to face a public grilling, saying it would be "appropriate" for him to answer MPs' questions in person or by video link.

The committee issued an invitation to the Facebook billionaire to attend a hearing of the fake news inquiry on March 20, after whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed how UK-based data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) harvested details of 50 million users on the social networking site.

My response to @facebook's letter to @CommonsCMS the letter can be viewed here: https://t.co/ykiz1yMGcu pic.twitter.com/gCzCQVkqHQ

- Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) March 27, 2018

The details were allegedly used to micro-target campaign messages in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election.

In a letter to Mr Collins, Facebook's head of public policy Rebecca Stimson said that - despite a request for Mr Zuckerberg to attend in person - the company would be putting forward chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer or chief product officer Chris Cox to answer MPs' questions.

Both are among Facebook's longest-serving senior representatives and are "well-placed to answer the committee's questions on these complex subjects" straight after the end of Parliament's Easter recess on April 16.

Christopher Wylie gives evidence to the inquiry into fake news (PA)

Mr Collins said the committee would be "happy" to issue an invitation to Mr Cox, but made clear that he was not withdrawing the call for Mr Zuckerberg to give evidence.

"We believe, given the serious nature of the allegations that have been made around the access and use of Facebook user data, that it is appropriate that Mark Zuckerberg should give evidence to the committee," said Mr Collins.

"We would be very happy to invite Mr Cox to give evidence. However we would still like to hear from Mr Zuckerberg as well.

"We will seek to clarify from Facebook whether he is available to give evidence or not, because that wasn't clear from our correspondence.

"If he is available to give evidence then we would be happy to do that either in person or by video link, if that would be more convenient for him."

Mr Collins's comments came at the start of a committee hearing in which Mr Wylie was being questioned on his revelations about CA, where he was formerly director of research.

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Facebook chief Zuckerberg turns down request to speak to fake news inquiry

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned down an invitation to give evidence to a House of Commons committee investigating allegations of misuse of the data of the social media giant's users.

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Brexit could free up Britain to impose world-leading regulations on technology companies, the culture secretary has said. Matt Hancock argued that when Britain left the EU it would no longer be bound by regulations such as the e-commerce directive, allowing it to write new "forward-looking" legislation for social media platforms.

He told the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee: "Outside the EU, we could attempt, as this country is quite good at in lots of different areas, to write really forward-looking legislation that supports the innovation and the freedom that these social media platforms bring but also ensures they mitigate better against the harms.

"Currently the e-commerce directive in the European Union says that they are a mere conduit. We are going to leave the EU, so this may be an opportunity to write a set of laws that are absolutely right for the modern times, that allow us get this balance right at the same time. At the moment, without changing the e-commerce directive, you can't do that."

Hancock suggested one area in which Britain might lead the way was by establishing a new set of laws placing social media companies halfway between traditional platforms and publishers. "The current law is that they are mere conduits," he said. "That law was put in place to stop the people who were responsible for the wiring being responsible for what went over the wiring.

"It was designed with Openreach [a telecoms infrastructure company] in mind, and then there was a legal case when it was decided that it applied to the platforms was well. At the moment, the debate takes place between these two - are they one extreme or are they another? - and there's very good arguments to say that they are neither one extreme nor the other."

He suggested that competition law was another area where post-Brexit Britain could diverge from the EU. "At the moment European competition law is ... based on a world of widgets," he said. "There's another opportunity to have a really big look at how we run competition policy in the UK in the light of the changing technology and the fact that many of the innovations of our time have zero marginal cost."

The DCMS committee is investigating the impact of fake news on British politics, and members of the committee have repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the limited cooperation offered by technology executives.

Hancock said the government "should also not rule out legislative options to insist on the transparency of platforms in this area". He added: "That isn't somewhere we have yet concluded is necessary, and I hope that it isn't, because they can come to the table voluntarily much quicker than it'll take to legislate, but of course we're prepared to do that."

One reason the minister may not be eager to legislate against people running social media platforms is that he is one. "I have an app for my constituents," he noted. "I can't be liable for what they publish, otherwise I wouldn't be able to allow them to publish it, because I can only be liable for what I publish."
Topics

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UK could rethink social media laws after Brexit, says minister

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Brexit could free up Britain to impose world-leading regulations on technology companies, the culture secretary has said.

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Think back to the last time you ate a real blow out meal, the kind that causes you to unbutton your pants and double check your antacid supply. Remember the sensation of discomfort, bloat, and regret?

That's how a lot of folks are feeling about their digital diets these days. After gorging on the mental equivalent of junk food -- nasty political rants, time-wasting quizzes, compulsive browsing -- they're looking up and telling themselves, "Something has got to change."

Along with Facebook's recent privacy scandals, this feeling is one of the big drivers of the #deletefacebook movement. But just as we vow to improve our diets (or our drinking habits) after a bout of gluttony and then quickly backslide, going cold turkey on social media is most likely a recipe for failure.

After not too long, some clickbait headline or pang of boredom will lure you back to your old ways. Instead, you need a way to clear your head, clarify which aspects of your digital life are actually working for you, and build willpower by reconnecting with other activities to fill the void created when you abandon unhealthy habits.

In short, you need a better way to reset your digital life. Computer science professor and author Cal Newport has a suggestion: Try a 30-day digital declutter.

One month to a healthier digital life

"As part of my research for a book I'm writing on digital minimalism, I invited my mailing list subscribers to participate in an experiment I called the digital declutter," he reported on his blog recently. "I expected around 40 - 50 people would agree to participate. ... My guess was wrong. More than 1,600 people signed up."

So what did Newport ask these folks to do? Rather make some radical long-term change to their online lives, he instead asked them to quit all social media for just one month, observing how their behavior and emotions changed. "The participants would then rebuild their digital lives starting from a blank slate -- only allowing back in technologies for which they could provide a compelling motivation," he explains.

How did it go? In the post Newport reports on what he's learning from participant feedback and also shares some of their stories, like these (in Newport's words):

An IT professional named Andy noted that he typically reads 3 - 5 books a year. Free from the time sink of social media, he's on track to finish 50 books in 2018. [He's not the first to note that cutting back on social is a great way to find more time to read.]

Angie is a yoga instructor, but she also has BFA and used to be a professional artist. "Not spending time on social media had me thinking," she told me, "what do I want to get good at? Making social media posts, or getting back into painting?" She choose painting. During her declutter, she booked three new art shows and had her work accepted at a juried exhibition.

A retired stockbroker named Bob began to spend more time with his wife, going for walks, and "really listening." He expanded this habit of trying to "listen more and talk less" to his friends and family more generally. [Science backs up Bob's observation that constantly checking screens can be insidious for relationships.]

A PhD candidate named Alma described the experience of stepping away from distracting technologies as "liberating." Her mind began "working all the time," but on things that were important to her, and not just news about "celebrities and their diets and workouts."

When a publishing executive named Leonie gave up Facebook, she had an epiphany: "I do want to connect socially," she told me, "but for a bigger purpose, and with a specific group of people, and to share a valuable message." So she started her own blog on a topic she finds important. "It's early days yet, but I'm enjoying this redirection my time and creative energy into making something that's uniquely me, instead of getting caught up in the 'compete and compare' culture of social media."

No less informed, no less social

Reading through these responses, Newport detected a theme. Kicking the social media habit clarified that people were using these services for very real reasons -- connecting with others and consuming media. It's just that social media meet these needs in suboptimal ways.

Folks are legitimately hungry for information and human contact, but social media fills them up with junk food. When they took a temporary break from social media, participants were forced to find more nourishing ways to meet these needs (like books, blogs, and talking to the actual human beings around them).

"The participants in my digital declutter experiment developed analog alternatives to social media, in which they recreated many of the benefits promised by these digital tools using more intentional real world activities," Newport writes.

That didn't just better nourish their brains and relationships; it also strengthened their resolve to maintain a healthier digital diet when they did eventually sign back into their accounts. It's hard to have FOMO when you're painting, devouring a great book, or having a real heart to heart with your spouse. So killing that fear of missing out will help you click more mindfully once your declutter is over.

Or as Newport concludes: "When it comes to tools like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram: don't let the fear of missing out dictate how you live your life. The most productive and fulfilled people I know often got where they are by doubling down on the activities that return them huge benefits, while happily ignoring everything else."
Are you up for giving a digital declutter a try?

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1,600 People Quit Social Media for a Month-Long 'Digital Declutter.' Amazing Things Happened

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Think back to the last time you ate a real blow out meal, the kind that causes you to unbutton your pants and double check your antacid supply. Remember the sensation of discomfort, bloat, and regret? That's how a lot of folks are feeling about their digital diets these days.

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SINGAPORE - The real threat to democracy is not deliberate online falsehood, but selective news consumption, an European lawyer and IT expert said on Wednesday (March 28).

"The overreaching problem is that the news I get is not the news you get and so on," Mr Dan Shefet noted in his written submission to the Select Committee on deliberate online falsehoods.

Algorithms used by technology companies such as Google and Facebook track users' online activities and preferences to sort them into groups for targeted advertising, he noted. These algorithms also determine what articles and sources show up on a person's news feed, which in turn creates bubbles and echo chambers.

"That is very dangerous in a democracy. Whether it's fake or not is not the point. We don't have the same information," he warned the committee. "This amounts to psychological manipulation."

Mr Shefet, who is also a consultant to Unesco, said this problem should be addressed in the run-up to major political events such as an election.

"It's a question of suspending the echo chambers for five weeks before an election so every one has the same news," he said.

Mr Shefet noted in his submission that some may say this is like making it compulsory for all news stands "to carry the same newspapers all over the country prior to elections", but did not give more details on how this could be implemented.

He also stressed that it was important for governments to regulate tech companies and the online space, perhaps through appointing an Internet ombudsman which can offer guidance to Internet platform providers and search engine operators on what is unacceptable content.

Tech companies, when asked to better police the content on their platforms, often argue that they are infrastructure providers and not content producers, and are not in the position to judge what should be taken down, Mr Shefet noted.

"So what we need here is an institution that will give guidance to the social media companies and search engines and so on. And that can be done very quickly if the guidance is not a legally binding decision. That judicial oversight could be almost real time."

Mr Shefet also raised another concern - behavioural psychology research which, in the wrong hands, could be used to manipulate people on a large scale.

He cited ongoing research being conducted by Stanford University on the 60 "persuasion points" that each person is vulnerable to.

"If I had the data, I could persuade you to do anything I want you to do. It's dangerous to have this kind of science, this kind of research, if it falls in the wrong hands, as we saw with Cambridge Analytica," he said.

Mr Shefet was referring to how the British data-mining firm was reported to have used Facebook to gather the private information of tens of millions of Americans, to help United States President Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election.
Public hearings to fight online falsehoods: Read the submissions here and watch more videos.

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Real threat is not online falsehood but selective news consumption, says European lawyer

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SINGAPORE - The real threat to democracy is not deliberate online falsehood, but selective news consumption, an European lawyer and IT expert said on Wednesday (March 28). "The overreaching problem is that the news I get is not the news you get and so on," Mr Dan Shefet noted in his written submission to the Select Committee on deliberate online falsehoods.

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The media fervor that followed special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of a Russian internet organization for intentionally sowing discord in the US political system has missed one crucial implication: We still know far too little about the potential impact of social media on individuals and society.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Catherine Brooks (@catfbrooks) is an associate professor of information at the University of Arizona, where she is also the associate director of the School of Information and founding director of the Center for Digital Society and Data Studies. She is a Public Voices fellow with the Op Ed Project.

Ironically, this problem could be easily addressed. If Facebook truly embraces the vision, expressed in January by co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to make products that are "good for people's well being," the company needs to provide academic researchers far broader access to its data.

Zuckerberg has voiced his concern about recent findings that social media causes social harm. He has announced that Facebook aims to tweak its search algorithm again, this time so users would experience the most "meaningful interactions" with friends and family, instead of seeing the "most meaningful content"-that is, news (and sometimes fake news).

Facebook, however, continues to resist what may be the best way to learn more about meaningful interactions, digital propaganda, and aspects of social media that could be good for people: sharing its vast amount of anonymized data with a broad set of academic researchers.

Currently, the company shares data with a select few, which limits society's ability to analyze and understand online behaviors related to elections, mass demonstrations, political attitudes, cyberbullying, identity theft, and much more. As it stands, scholars must depend on sometimes-awkward workarounds (user surveys and algorithm audits, for example) to study Facebook's societal impact.

Social scientists want to know why stories go viral, who holds political influence, what shapes political and social attitudes, and whether social media can change those attitudes. We want to understand echo chambers and fake news, and why users join groups like ISIS or domestic white supremacy organizations online. Access to the company's enormous data sets for research purposes would offer unprecedented opportunities to understand more about online human interaction and behavior.

Such broadened access for scholars would vastly expand public knowledge and understanding about our own behavior (e.g., the online mechanisms for political polarization, impediments to civil discourse, mass cyberbullying activities that target vulnerable youth, and propaganda types that sometimes lead to fake information going viral) in this increasingly digital society.

To be fair, Facebook does share data with a select few scholars. For instance, Facebook is providing data to Stanford economist Raj Chetty, a Silicon Valley insider and "a favorite among tech elites." Though Chetty's research on inequality is valuable, those of us working on public campuses across the United States and around the globe have scholarly questions just as Chetty does. Confining research to a very select few, and within the Silicon Valley circle, severely restricts the kinds of questions and analyses such data could inform.

It's understandable that Facebook would hesitate to share individuals' data. Privacy and security are serious and growing concerns for users and tech companies alike. Privacy advocates are right to remain focused on protecting user data across platforms like Facebook. But data can be anonymized to protect distinct users-those identities are not necessary for the study of trends and behaviors.

Some social media companies are already finding creative, safe ways to share data. LinkedIn, for example, launched the Economic Graph Research program in 2014. This ongoing program invites scholars to submit proposals for using LinkedIn data to generate new insights. Although programs like these may also be a concern for privacy experts, the data shared are stripped of user identities before handed to researchers and can illuminate hiring trends, skills gaps, gender differences in organizational advancement, and the impacts of professional networks for employees.

Society is changing rapidly, online and off. Facebook has the power to help us understand those changes and make better choices for the common good. Stockholders, policymakers, scholars, and Facebook users alike should lean on the company and ask for broader access to what is likely the largest social media data collection in the world.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.

More Facebook

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It's Time for Facebook to Share More Data with Researchers

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The media fervor that followed special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of a Russian internet organization for intentionally sowing discord in the US political system has missed one crucial implication: We still know far too little about the potential impact of social media on individuals and society.

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The company Cambridge Analytica is at the heart of the latest frenzy over privacy, fake news, and the perils of Facebook. Mainstream liberal media has been quick to frame this as a story about how new technologies and social networks are shaking up the democratic political system. But they are missing the point; this is a story about social inequality and political corruption in liberal democracies.

According to investigative reports from the New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, and Channel 4 News, the London-based company Cambridge Analytica is alleged to have hired ex-spies and sex workers, infiltrated the accounts of 50million Facebook users, and spread fake news using social media, meticulously covering up its paper trail. These methods were then supposedly used in election campaigns worldwide, including Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. While going to great lengths to hide their digital breadcrumbs, Cambridge Analytica made headlines due to a very human factor, straight out of a pre-internet mystery novel: their employees boasted about the company's shady methods to undercover investigative journalists posing as potential clients from Sri Lanka.

British and American media have focused on how the personal data of 50million Facebook users fell into the hands of Cambridge Analytica spin-doctors. The hashtag #deleteFacebook is trending on Twitter and becoming its own newsbreak, with celebrities chiming in. Major news outlets have provided how-to guides on deactivating your Facebook account, and are posing questions like "Is this the end for the world's most powerful social network?"

@Newsweek twitter account

However, this is not the question we should be asking. It's distracting us from more unsettling questions about polarisation in British and American society.

The #deleteFacebook movement is based on two major critiques of social media and internet companies. First, social media companies and third parties use our personal data without our explicit informed consent. Second, social media companies and third parties enable the spread of fake news for political purposes. The latter critique stems from the assumption that if people had only known the "truth", they would have acted or voted differently. This idea is extremely problematic.

Many members of British and American "polite society" (the educated classes that take pride in critical thinking) have been eager from the very start to blame Trump's victory and the Brexit vote on fake news made possible by social media. The Cambridge Analytica controversy seems to confirm such fears. But, as I argue in my piece for Q&A platform TheQuestion, things are not so simple in societies that face rising levels of inequality. We should be critically examining media consumption, audience reception, and class divisions - as well as dynamics of race, gender, age, and religion.

What do we actually know about the outcomes of Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook accounts? How do companies like Facebook affect people's political behaviour? How do we know that a Facebook user who saw a "Crooked Hillary" video in their newsfeed voted for Trump because of the video, and not because they have been unemployed for over a year, cannot pay their mortgage, and don't trust the political establishment in Washington? Is it so difficult to imagine that someone voted for Trump not because they believed the "fakes" underpinning his campaign, but because they simply don't care about Clinton's elite "truth" when she cites accurate statistics during debates? We also cannot definitively say that if people had received "true" information ahead of the Brexit referendum, they would have voted to remain in the EU thanks to this knowledge. Maybe Cambridge Analytica has data that could shed light on how audiences changed their behaviours in response to various messages, but independent researchers have not analysed this data yet.

Like many sociologists of the media, I am dismayed at the naïve and nostalgic public debates surrounding new technologies, "fake news", and "post-truth". At last week's conference and teach-out "The Post-Truth Phenomenon", convened at the University of Cambridge by Ella McPherson, Devika Ranjan, and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, academics came together to move past uncritical blaming of new technologies. Eva Giraud suggested we must consider how values are pushing people to engage with the world in a certain way, not their lack of knowledge. John Naughton, drawing on his "Conspiracy and Democracy" research project, suggested that instead of focusing on new technologies, we should be scrutinising the business models of companies like Facebook that depend on user engagement with their services and offer free platforms in return for personal information. Naughton also called for reflecting on longer-term disaffection with liberal democracy as it is currently practiced. Alfred Moore noted that one of the components of such disaffection is loss of trust in experts, and as a result authority is relocating to new institutions we have not yet fully understood.

In my view, focusing on "fakes" and on the moral and ethical standards of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is distracting us from two major parts of this unfolding story: first, systemic social divides, and second, corruption among political elites.

The dimension of social divides has been articulated by John Naughton: claiming that distribution of "true" information or spread of media literacy will solve the problems faced by liberal democracies negates the experiences of people who have been hit by deindustrialisation and globalisation. Perhaps, instead of concentrating on fake news, we should be analysing the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, why populism is on the rise, and how class interests shape our standards for what truth and authority entail.

I also believe that corruption is a factor that merits consideration in every social and political situation. When we think of the political orders of Western liberal democracies, corruption often ends up beyond our view, usually reserved for countries like Russia. Yet corruption among political elites was the part of the Channel 4 News investigation that stood out to me most: Cambridge Analytica was apparently successful in using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians, spreading information through proxy organisations, and violating US election rules by coordinating with the super-PAC funded by Mercer family donors. Cambridge Analytica does not exist in a vacuum, their clients are parties and politicians who are involved in bribery and complex systems of patronage. As voters, we must hold them accountable, but our obsession with new technologies is distracting us from this task. Journalists, scholars, activists, and civil society could do more to locate agency within the state and to call out politicians who cross the line.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, for all their questionable practices, are not the problem. Members of "polite society" can #deleteFacebook in an attempt to push back against surveillance capitalism, and this may indeed be a noble endeavour. But it can have political effects only in the event that people take their eyes off their screens and turn towards the social problems faced by their fellow citizens, and towards the corruption of their political elites - including those elites "polite society" has claimed as their own.
Earlier versions of this post appeared on TheQuestion:

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Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are not the problem. The problem is social inequality

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The company Cambridge Analytica is at the heart of the latest frenzy over privacy, fake news, and the perils of Facebook. Mainstream liberal media has been quick to frame this as a story about how new technologies and social networks are shaking up the democratic political system.

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Most homes in the United States have Internet service, but they don't in the poor parts of Cleveland and nearby suburbs. A survey in 2012 showed that 58 percent of the area's households with incomes under $20,000 had neither home broadband nor mobile Internet access, often because of the cost. Another 10 percent had a mobile phone but no home broadband. Until recently, one such household was a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment in a public housing project called Outhwaite Homes, where a circumspect 13-year-old girl named Ma'Niyah Larry lives with her mother, Marcella.

Ma'Niyah has a special-education plan for math; to help her, she's been assigned problems to do online through Khan Academy. But her mother says she cannot afford broadband from Time Warner Cable, which would begin at around $50 a month, even for an entry-level offering, plus modem and taxes (and the price would rise significantly after the 12-month teaser rate expired). The family has a smartphone, but it's harder for Ma'Niyah to use the small screen, and Marcella watches her data caps closely; just a few hours of Khan Academy videos would blow past monthly limits. Fast Internet access is available in a library a few blocks away, but "it's so bad down here that it's not really safe to walk outside," Marcella Larry says. Ma'Niyah's bedroom, its wall decorated with a feathery dream-catcher, faces a grassy courtyard where gang-related gunfire rang out on two nights last summer, causing Ma'Niyah to flee to the relative safety of the living room.

There is a patchwork of attempts to deal with this problem. The region's public housing agency, the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, recently gave Ma'Niyah a tablet and a wireless hotspot in a trial program to help close the "homework gap" that's opened up between kids who have Internet-connected computers at home and those who don't. And Marcella Larry qualifies for a discount program AT&T offers to families that receive food subsidies: DSL service-far slower than what the government defines as broadband-over phone lines for $5 to $10 a month. But it's hardly a long-term solution. AT&T agreed to offer the package for four years as part of its effort to win regulatory approval for its acquisition of DirectTV.

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Marcella and Ma'Niyah are among the millions of people on the wrong side of America's persistent digital divide. A survey by Pew Research shows that fully one-third of American adults do not subscribe to any Internet access faster than dial-up at their home at a time when many basic tasks-finding job listings, doing homework, obtaining social services, and even performing many jobs-require being online. Even many people who are willing to pay for service can't get it. Thirty-four million Americans have no access at all to broadband as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission defines it: a download speed of at least 25 megabits per second and an upload speed of three megabits per second. These speeds are what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls "table stakes for 21st-century communications."

People without broadband are not necessarily entirely offline: like Marcella Larry, some of them rely on smartphones. But because of small screens and data caps, phones are not an adequate substitute for home broadband. Its absence in some communities is a growing problem at a time when the jobs of the future will be increasingly digital: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 500,000 information technology jobs will be created in the next few years. Already, one in 20 American adults is deriving some income from online "gig" employment (not including ride- or home-sharing services), according to joint studies by Microsoft Research and the Pew Research Center. Such opportunities are only expected to grow-for people who have broadband access.

In Cleveland, which along with Detroit ranks among the worst-connected cities in the nation, help is on the way for some residents. Housing projects like the one where Marcella and Ma'Niyah Larry live are about to benefit from an ambitious project to provide the fastest service in the city using a combination of fiber-optic networks and a new breed of wireless connection. But no comprehensive solution is in evidence for these cities-or the nation as a whole. Despite having invented the Internet's protocols, the United States lags far behind much of the industrialized world in available broadband speeds and affordability of fast services-a problem that is particularly acute in inner cities and rural areas. In past eras, great national efforts led to universal electricity and telephone service. Now the nation could use an ambitious plan to improve service, drive down costs, and expand access to children like Ma'Niyah and everyone else who deserves it.
Opening doors
Of course, computers and broadband by themselves don't magically lead to college degrees and better jobs. After all, much of what people do with Internet access once they get it is hardly productive. But some of them may not be getting the training they need to make effective use of software and online services. And there are many correlations between broadband access and income levels or success in finding employment. As the White House Council of Economic Advisers says, "The digital divide is likely both a cause and a consequence of other demographic disparities."

When people do get broadband and computer training, their lives can change in remarkable ways. Take Monica Moore. She's a single mother who lived in a decaying neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland and spent more than 20 years working as a file clerk at the Cleveland Clinic. Then three years ago came ominous news. "At work, they said everything was going to electronic medical records and they were going to outsource my job," Moore, now 47, recalls. "Oh my gosh, my job."

Moore had few computer skills and rarely used the Internet. The high cost of service from Time Warner Cable kept her offline. But faced with the prospect of losing her job, she steeled herself and entered a storefront training center called the Ashbury Community Center. She started learning software like Office and Excel, and wound up taking online classes through the University of Phoenix. She spent evening after evening doing that work until, in early 2016, she collected a bachelor's degree in finance. She was one of more than 6,000 people who have received computer training over the past five years thanks to the Ashbury Center and its partners in a nonprofit collaborative called Connect Your Community.

Today, she's still at the Cleveland Clinic-only she's got a new job that pays $20,000 more than her old one, editing and uploading digital reports in the hospital's bustling cardiac catheterization lab. "I was stuck 20 years in the same job due to the fact I didn't have the means, the technology," Moore says. "This opened so many doors for me, and I'm just so thankful." While finishing her degree, she recognized the value of getting Internet access at home. She decided it was worth $154 a month for a cable deal that includes high-speed access in her new home in the suburb of South Euclid.
Fast and cheap
To solve the access problem for more low-income people, Cleveland needs to focus on public or subsidized housing, where 50,000 of the city's 375,000 inhabitants live. I took a trip to the 14th-story roof of a public housing project named Cedar Estates with Lev Gonick, CEO of a local nonprofit called DigitalC. We stepped out into the drizzle and beheld a panoramic view of America's industrial rise and decline. To the north was Terminal Tower, a symbol of the region's onetime economic might: the 52-story Art Deco tower was once the second-tallest building in America. To the south, smoke rose from two steel mills that represent the vestiges of a local industry that today employs fewer than 2,000 people, down from Cleveland's steelmaking peak of 47,000. Also in sight: vacant factories and blocks of near-worthless frame houses.

Gonick pointed to St. Vincent's Charity Hospital, one kilometer away. A high-speed fiber-optic network passes through St. Vincent's; built using a 2009 federal stimulus grant, it connects institutions including at least 800 schools, medical facilities, and government buildings in greater Cleveland. Now the plan is to extend the network to residents in the housing projects. Because it would cost $350,000 to run fiber from St. Vincent's to Cedar Estates and several nearby buildings, DigitalC will instead close that gap with a wireless technology costing one-tenth as much to install: a millimeter-wave transmission system from a company called Siklu. The new service will be able to deliver one-gigabit-per-second connections to the building, and a bank of servers in Cedar Estates' basement telephone room will use the existing copper telephone network to provide broadband service to all 163 apartments.

The goal: to provide the fastest and cheapest service in the city, completely removing the cost barrier that poor residents now face. Gonick believes the whole project is so cheap to build that when you throw in an FCC subsidy (called "lifeline") of $9.25 per month, all tenants in the housing project will easily be able to afford broadband.

While delivering fast, cheap service is an end in itself, DigitalC and partners also plan to give all tenants in the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority refurbished computers and training similar to what's offered at Ashbury. The tenants will be directed to online workforce training schools such as Career Online High School, too. At the same time, the government of Cuyahoga County is working to put more services online, including workforce training, benefits enrollment, and potentially telemedicine appointments, says Scot Rourke, chief transformation officer for the county. "We want to do more than manage poverty," he says. "If we have broadband, we can do more kinds of education and training. We've got to get people into jobs that will give them the wages to get out of poverty."

Paths to such jobs exist for those who seek them. One of the new businesses within Terminal Tower is WeCanCodeIt, a 12-week software engineering boot camp for people with little experience in technology. The program aims to equip them for jobs like building websites. One student is Melissa Hughes, 40, who left her job as an HIV-testing counselor in Philadelphia and is now unemployed in Cleveland. "In my previous field there was not stability," she says. "Adding coding skills will give me more opportunity."

New efforts to introduce kids to coding are taking root as well. At a recent "hip-hop coding" seminar organized by several academic institutions in a downtown office space, teachers and librarians photographed themselves doing break-dance moves and then used Scratch, the popular programming language and online community developed at MIT, to design multimedia animations of their antics. Maria Trivisonno, a librarian in the Cleveland suburb of Warrensville Heights, explained the audience she had in mind: the kids who pour into the library after school, looking for things to do. "We want to teach kids how to create things online, not only how to find information," she said between dance moves. "If you can start kids young thinking about how to code, it will help them as they get older."
Don't be scared
While Gonick's project might provide a model for cheap broadband in public housing and for educational efforts that might help people put it to good use, there's a bigger problem to crack: how can we get more and cheaper digital infrastructure everywhere else in the country? The key is to stimulate competition. For example, after Google began offering broadband on fiber-optic lines in the Kansas City area in 2012, existing providers increased the speed of their services by 86 percent over what it had been a year prior-the largest increase in the country at the time, according to Akamai Technologies.

But Cleveland has no such luck. It has only two companies providing service-Time Warner Cable and AT&T-and the latter doesn't compete very strongly. AT&T doesn't offer most of the city anything close to what the FCC considers broadband, and some streets can still only get dial-up service from the company.

The situation is perhaps worse in rural areas. Drive an hour east of Cleveland and you reach the community of Andover, flanking the Pennsylvania border. Much of the region has only slow DSL from CenturyLink. "They claim it's 'high speed,' but downloading things literally takes minutes," says Cindy Schwenk, a retiree who works part time at the Andover Public Library. When she's there, she can use Wi-Fi to download things on her smartphone in just seconds because the building, unlike residences in the area, has a fast connection from a state library consortium. People sometimes sit in their cars outside the building after hours to get online.

The Andover area relies economically on part-time residents who vacation at nearby Pymatuning Lake. But other areas without such draws may get left behind in an increasingly digital economy.

How can we jump-start competition in these places? One model is emerging: let local governments find partners to build out the basic fiber-optic infrastructure, or at least the empty conduit that can carry fiber underground, and then let service providers compete for customers over such networks (or pull fiber through the conduit, as the case may be). That's what a few cities are doing, including the aerospace mecca of Huntsville, Alabama. In this case, what's going on in Huntsville isn't rocket science. The city is building the basic fiber infrastructure, known as "dark fiber"; Google will "light" the fiber and provide the service. In Ammon, Idaho, the city built a fiber network and let private service providers duke it out. Now customers can use a Web interface to switch providers in a few seconds. No need for the company-specific cable or optical networking boxes that are common in homes across the country.

But in most places, efforts to install new networks often crash into decidedly low-tech obstacles. For example, utility poles. These are almost always owned by an electric company or telephone company, and the latter has an interest in making it slow and costly for competitors to add new fiber to the poles. The FCC has streamlined the rules for how companies attach to poles, but under federal law the rules benefit only ISPs, telephone companies, and cable companies. If the entity trying to install fiber happens to be, say, a county redevelopment agency in a rural area, FCC regulations don't apply, and pole owners are freer to make the process lengthy and difficult, even if the agency has been told by the state or local government that it may use the poles. Cutting red tape to help install fiber and then adopting flexible service models to facilitate competition could "help get away from today's rigid models of information services," says Christopher Mitchell, director of the community broadband networks initiative at the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that, among other things, studies broadband. That might finally help end the digital divide across the United States.

Does everyone deserve access to affordable high-speed Internet, just like water, sewers, electricity, and telephone service? In Ma'Niyah Larry's apartment and at the Ashbury Community Center, where Monica Moore rebooted her career, you can see that the argument could be made. "There is never a shortage of people who want to show up here and learn," Bill Callahan, director of the Connect Your Community collaborative, remarked as we looked around the community center.

One of those people was Claudette Hughley, a 55-year-old unemployed physical-therapist assistant and mother of three adult children. She has spent her life offline and needs to find work. She's now learned how to use e-mail, how to create and edit Word documents, and how to scroll through online job listings. These are all steps toward fully crossing the digital divide.

"I'm just getting more comfortable with doing things like this," she said. "I want to broaden my mind-and not get scared."

Credit

Illustration by Tim Lahan; data from Council of Economic Advisers, Citing Census Figures and Survey in 2014; map by Connect Your Community 2.0 Using FCC Data; data from Pew Research, 2015; data from Council of Economic Advisers

David Talbot Senior Writer

I'm ... development there, and Germany to explore how they'll try to ramp up renewable power while closing down nuclear plants. My 2008 feature on the Obama campaign's social-networking operation was selected for MIT Technology Review's senior writer, interested in a wide range of topics including climate change, energy, and information and communication technologies. Recent projects have included traveling to China to write about GMO crop More The Best Technology Writing 2009.

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Why the digital divide still lingers, and why it matters

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Most homes in the United States have Internet service, but they don't in the poor parts of Cleveland and nearby suburbs. A survey in 2012 showed that 58 percent of the area's households with incomes under $20,000 had neither home broadband nor mobile Internet access, often because of the cost.

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Whether we like it or not, we live in a very unequal and stratified world. We live in societies in which inequality is ignored in education, science, and in the social media. As Internet technologies are rapidly evolving and new digital divides on the Internet emerge, we must move beyond, at some point, a singular concern over Internet access and technological infrastructure issues. We must tackle socio-cultural differences, we must focus on Internet skills, literacies and social media usage.
Recently I finished a study on social inequalities from an Internet perspective (to be published next year) where I examined moving beyond digital inequalities in the context of the technological infrastructure and Internet access. Primarily, those inequalities in the networked world are: the lack of digital and media literacies; critical thinking and communication skills in order to navigate and evaluate data online; an information and knowledge gap; and collaboration and participatory inequalities.

We are already experiencing the way that the old, pre-digital divides are now labeled as new types of divides in the social Web context, such as the connectivity inequalities - high-speed wireless for those who can afford it and second-class wireless for poor and rural Americans have been recently mentioned as a " new digital divide".

Previous experiences in the scientific, academic, governmental and commercial communities in the last decade and different practices of participatory and collaboration inequality made me curious about this shift. I started to explore in depth and talk about the communication possibilities for collaboration, participation and networking in each segment of our connected lives.

We have a situation where connectivity and access are not a major problem, but the challenges are different. For example, in science and academic communities there are some countries in Europe where the majority of online resources that could be accessed are not being used at a satisfactory level due to many factors: lack of awareness and promotion, digital illiteracy, lack of motivation, information gate keepers, human and economic factors.

I started to explore the possibilities for social media as a tool for collaboration in order to bridge digital inequalities and foster participation, as a subtopic for my doctoral dissertation. The paradigm of the digital divide is a very complex one. It implies many factors and perspectives, highlighting especially issues and data that I didn't find in the official international European reports and the body of knowledge in Europe in regard to inequalities in higher education and science. Those issues have been present, and still are, during the last decade or so, and it doesn't have to do so much with hardware and internet access as much as with the way those are used.

One recent example involved protests in Moscow where people organized meetings via Facebook and other social networking sites, deploying social media in the effort at bridging the divide between the parliament and the middle class.

Beside the divide in Internet use and in the context of technological infrastructure, there are other types of digital inequalities that move beyond internet access such as information literacy. Information literacy involves, for example, online search, digital, media and networked literacy or technical and cognitive, critical literacy skills in order to navigate online.

As we live in an Information Society determined by a "filter Bubble", with the vast majority of Internet and Web services moving toward the next generation of the Semantic web, access to knowledge and its deployment in everyday work and education is crucial for producing the results and fostering the competence of scientists, scholars and knowledge workers. Access to information is the key to an individual's position in society, though access is not everything; it is only the starting point in many countries and societies as the power structures of society and academia remain.

On the other side, on the issue of inequality, Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, considers as fundamentally important the fact that education plays a significant role in either strengthening or breaking down inequalities. Giddens assesses the role of education as he identifies a new divide emerging between the life chances of those who have the opportunity to experience education and those who do not. He thinks "it's important not to think of the education system as if it works in a vacuum - factors like changes in employment and the economy. We have to work to tackle the root causes of inequalities if we are going to establish a fairer society".

Social inequalities are of course a big issue in information society, influencing media literacy, engagement in political, social, education life, and using the web in participation and collaboration in an online public sphere. They create marginalized groups who do not have access to the Internet and therefore at some point will not be able to engage in social, economic and political life.

But even if new technologies enhance social equality by democratizing consumption they can also grow a gap caused not by technological infrastructure, but by human not-working, not-collaborative practices.

My preliminary results indicate that collaboration possibilities using the Internet and social media services present one of the communication practices for overcoming inequalities in e-skills, twenty-first century literacies and communication, and foster better collaboration and participation.

The notion of being social on the Web is constantly evolving since we are connected not only via computers but also via mobile phones or handheld devices. The web is getting more powerful and social: new messaging services emerge each month; streamed media is becoming real even for the non-technical consumer; Google reshapes its services like a child rearranging building blocks; new ideas in federated rather than centralized systems are being explored, and more. The frequent change in layouts, privacy settings and interaction tools indicate that online dynamics require new classes of knowledge and skills to adopt such major changes on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other places in order to navigate and socialize online.

What is important to emphasize is that these digital divides, that go far beyond the pure infrastructure issues, need to become a key focus of engagement for profit and nonprofit organizations as they continue their missions to develop programs for social and digital inclusion.

By creating, developing and fostering knowledge societies in order to decrease the existing divides, governments world wide must create more efficient strategies and programs to overcome such inequalities and not just provide techno-infrastructure.

I would like to hear from you what types of digital divide and inequalities have you noticed or experienced lately? Send your thoughts bellow as comments, @ me on Twitter @DanicaR, or email me (danica at danicar dot org).

Images: 'No Technology' by Sammy0716 on Flickr; 'Don't worry' by Anonymous9000 on Flickr.

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Digital Divide and Social Media: Connectivity Doesn't End the Digital Divide, Skills Do

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Whether we like it or not, we live in a very unequal and stratified world. We live in societies in which inequality is ignored in education, science, and in the social media. As Internet technologies are rapidly evolving and new digital divides on the Internet emerge, we must move beyond, at some point, a singular concern over Internet access and technological infrastructure issues.

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Britain is rapidly digitising, increasing opportunities across a wide range of areas in our everyday lives, from interacting, to being informed and to undertaking transactions more rapidly and at lower cost. Yet, both academic and policy research show that the benefits achieved from digital engagement are not distributed equally. Dr. Ellen Helsper, an expert on digital inequality and Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, presented the findings of a study commissioned by the Prince's Trust that looked into the socio-digital skills of young people and the relationship these have to their general well-being. The accompanying report, "Slipping through the Net", is launched in Parliament today.
The study confirms that whilst access to the Internet in some form is near-universal, the quality of such access, digital skills levels, the availability and expertise of support networks, and, most importantly, outcomes of digital engagement differ radically for disadvantaged young people. This report compared young people in general with those who are Not in Education Employment or Training (NEETs). It shows that NEETs encounter barriers to engagement to a greater extent than their peers, for example, in technical as well as 'soft' skills, such as netiquette, online self-representation and risk avoidance. Qualitative findings vividly illustrate the quantitative survey work done by providing narratives around dehumanising online experiences, disengagement through frustration and rejection (see the full report for details).

The report highlights the importance of diversity of personal support networks and motivations to engage with the digital environments. For example, the support that NEETs use is primarily made up of their friends and family, while their peers make use of more specialized services, such as technical support forums, experts and colleagues or teachers. When it comes to attitudes and a desire to engage in digital activities, half of NEETs reported that no one online could be trusted. Many talked about a lack of reaction to online queries, especially when it came to job applications. This lack of response was experienced more painfully by NEET youth as it amplified the common experiences of rejection in everyday life. Yet, even in the face of multiple negative experiences, NEET youth remain optimistic about the potential contributes of the Internet to the society in general and to them in particular.

The overarching narrative of the policy recommendations is as follows: digital inequalities are complex and multidimensional, thus they require complex multi-stakeholder solutions. Thus, socio-digital inequalities cannot be tackled without a collaborative effort from the government, education, NGOs and business sectors. Initiatives with young people should create an environment that supports them in gaining a wide variety of digital capabilities ranging from technical proficiencies to resilience building and soft skills. To make future efforts more successful, additional investment in 1) training youth-facing support service providers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related issues and 2) more thoughtful design and evaluation of ICT interventions and training is needed.

Dr. Helsper summarized the core message of the report: " Surviving in this digital world is about more than technical infrastructure and skills. A range of capabilities is needed for a wide range of activities related to general well-being. Therefore, a multi-stakeholder approach involving various government departments, as well as the commercial and third sectors is the only way forward to avoid disadvantaged youth falling further behind. "

In the last decade the debates around digital inequalities have become increasingly complex, as both scholars and policymakers recognize that a shift in thinking about digital inequalities is necessary. Thus, the conversation moved away from a simplistic approach to inequality-as-access to a more complex narrative of digital inequality as a compound and multidimensional issue. Dr. Helsper's report advances this line of thinking by taking a look at everyday digital engagement and exclusion amongst a generation that has been described as digital natives. It takes a novel approach by focussing on the tangible outcomes of digital engagement, as well as more traditional aspects such as ICT access, skills, use and motivation to engage.

According to data collected by the Office for the National Statistics in 2016 there are around 865,000 young people country-wide who can be classified as NEET. These young people are among the most vulnerable clusters of the country. Frequently, NEET youth suffers from compound socio-economic, as well as digital disadvantages. Experiences of homelessness, rejection, lack of connection to and care from educational and employment institutions go hand-in-hand with the lack of opportunities and abilities to engage fruitfully with the digital realm.
This post gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Digital Inequality: Disadvantaged Young People Experience Higher Barriers to Digital Engagement

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Britain is rapidly digitising, increasing opportunities across a wide range of areas in our everyday lives, from interacting, to being informed and to undertaking transactions more rapidly and at lower cost. Yet, both academic and policy research show that the benefits achieved from digital engagement are not distributed equally.

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The World Economic Forum has postulated that polarization of societies and increasing income divides pose a great threat to social well being. The digital divide seems to be giving impetus to this inequality, especially in high- and middle-income countries. This is mainly because well-paying blue-collar jobs that once provided income generation to the masses are being replaced by technology. A skewed income distribution is particularly seen in the Silicon Valley, which may be an indication that technological development spurs economic and social inequality.

Statistics show that income disparities abound in technology-centered California. On one hand are the tech multi-billionaires; on the other are the working class folk. About 31% of these normal income jobs pay $16/hour or less . Another interesting finding is that the US median income is about the same as it was in 1995. This income disparity began with the advent of PCs into the home in the 1980s, according to an analysis by The Second Machine Age. However, today, the pace of advancement of technology is so rapid that the impact is multiplied several-fold.

With the emergence of new technologies such as cloud, social and artificial intelligence (AI), this divide promises to deepen further. Already, technological echelons are rife with discussions about how AI-led machines and robots will replace human workers, creating employment crises. This phenomena is not new; the automation wave has replaced many job opportunities in the past decade. One may argue that innovation has created more jobs than it has snatched away. For example, technologists state that the new wave of startups has created a new wave of employment generation. A case in point is Uber which has decentralized earning opportunities. However, a closer look at Uber wage policies highlights the recent case against Uber where it was charged $20 million for inflating wages unrealistically to lure drivers. This points to a new reality - one in which technological innovation has created a dominance of monopolistic markets. The leading technology players of the world are congregating opportunity rather than decentralizing it. Industry pundits feel this is detrimental to the economic good.

Such unequal treatment of humanity extends to the world of biotechnology as well. Going ahead, one can expect a new socialistic class divide to emerge, where the elite would have access to advanced bio-alterations such as gene-editing and longevity manipulations. This will serve as the zenith of inequality, setting the stage for a physically and mentally superior elitist class, with no hope for the others to compete. Such is the impact of technology without responsibility.

Technology will unleash its effect, but blaming technology for inequality is not the solution. It is the responsibility of those who use technology to use it responsibly. One must focus on the benefits brought on by tech advancement - increased productivity, better reach, and financial inclusion and so on - and harness these for the greater good. For example, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have pledged to donate 99% of their fortunes to charity in order to equalize wealth distribution. If everyone looks at technology through the lens of economic and social well being, significant social advancement can be attained.

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Is Technology Deepening the Digital Divide? - Read IT Quik - Medium

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The World Economic Forum has postulated that polarization of societies and increasing income divides pose a great threat to social well being. The digital divide seems to be giving impetus to this inequality, especially in high- and middle-income countries. This is mainly because well-paying blue-collar jobs that once provided income generation to the masses are being replaced by technology.

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As civic technology explodes across the world, engulfing citizens with new platforms and better designed services, we here in Uganda, continue to scratch our heads about how we can reach our targets groups: the consistently marginalized and under-resourced groups who stand to benefit the most. With our recent forays into civic technology, we're left asking "how do we ensure that using technology will not perpetuate the existent inequalities in society due to the current digital divide?". What good is open data or SMS feedback systems when people can't read or access the internet?

Access to information continues to be a challenge, not only in rural areas but also urban areas, further exacerbated by migration trends. This is puzzling given the rising rates of mobile penetration. According to the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), a total of 123,889 new mobile subscribers were registered by mid 2016, bringing the total mobile phone subscriptions to 22,034,837 or somewhere between 50-55% penetration rate. In addition to this climb in mobile penetration, the UCC also reported that the number of internet subscribers and internet users grew respectively by 30.2% and 19.6% resulting in a 42.5% internet penetration as of June 2016. However, connectivity remains a challenge due to the high internet tariffs and poor coverage in the rural areas.

What truly complicates matter is low literacy rates, coupled with a very high diversity in languages spoken throughout the country. Statistics show that only 73% of Ugandans can read and write. According to the Demographic and Health Survey 2011, only 64% of women could read at least part of a sentence. Given these conditions, we need a new way to reach out to the under-represented populations scattered across the country.
Is it time we do away with text?

As the "next billion" come online, companies have been rushing to develop technologies that work for this new demographic. Low-resource, low-literacy populations are embracing cheaper technology and falling internet tariffs in up and coming countries such as India, Indonesia and Brazil.

A recent publication in the Wall Street Journal titled " The End of Typing: The Next Billion Mobile Users Will Rely on Video and Voice " got us thinking about what this means for civic technology. The article discusses apps such as SHAREit and MX player, popular in emerging markets that focus on offline storage of content and high performance on low-speed connections. While 10 years ago, people came online to send/receive emails, they now do so to watch videos and join social media.

It's been difficult to avoid the debates around "artificial intelligence" (AI), but as more technology gets churned out everyday, we can now interact more conversationally with our devices. With the introduction of Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA), our mobile phones can now help us navigate the internet, plan our days and perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Think Siri by Apple, Bixby by Samsung or Google's voice assistant. These IPA use natural language to create a more human experience.

WhatsApp Videos Calls and Audios, Facebook Live, Twitter's Periscope and YouTube have given people a way to share and express themselves without having to type out a myriad of words. We use emojis daily to express our innermost emotions. We can press buttons to rate services at airports and shops. Are we truly entering a post-text future? After all, language has existed far longer than writing and oral tradition has dominated Ugandan culture until quite recently.
What's next for Uganda?
Civic technology in East Africa is at an exciting cross roads to start with this future in mind. Still nascent in this region, we have the opportunity to develop platforms that take all the realities of the digital divide into account to create something truly inclusive. Civic technology can help break down traditional barriers and detrimental divides created by disparities in income, education and networks.

There is great potential and some experimenting in using technologies such as Automated/Interactive Voice Response (IVR), speech recognition, community radios, video and audio messaging, and artificial intelligence to build platforms and services that cater to the next billion and work towards closing the digital divide.

For example, Farm Radio International in Uganda collaborates with partner radio stations and using an IVR system, provides farmers with voice content on demand, collects audience feedback, and conducts listener surveys. In Somaliland, Ila Dhageyso utilized an IVR system to connect citizens with government officials using a discussion forum accessible online and through mobile phones.

Another interesting use case is low-cost community radios. RootIO, an open-source toolkit allows users to broadcast using just a smartphone and a transmitter. Using all materials that can be sourced locally, as mall transmitter is built into a bucket with a fan, a charge-controller and a smartphone, which is then connected to an antenna and a solar panel. All content produced is hosted in the cloud. Listeners wanting to participate in the radio show's discussions would call in, have their calls dropped and then have the computer call them back. This way, callers don't pay to listen to the programming. RootIO is adding more stations here in Uganda!

Recently, the UN Pulse Lab in Kampala has been working with the Government of Uganda and other development partners to get a pulse on public opinion through a toolkit that makes public radio broadcasts machine-readable through the use of speech recognition technology and translation tools that transform radio content into text. Through a better understanding of public opinion, the program hopes to bridge the gaps between policy and implementation of development programmes in the country. The ambition is to develop a fully automated system whereby data flow from the radio broadcast to the dashboard takes only 1 day.

As you can see, we don't have many excuses left for us to keep developing solely SMS or web-based platforms that we know are not inclusive. Let's keep leapfrogging. Let's build what works locally, for a global future.

Each time individuals take civic action with digital tools - texting donations, sharing videos, mapping information on open source platforms for others to use, snapping and sharing photos of protests or movements - we invent digital civil society- Lucy Bernholz
Written by Neema Iyer and Pius Enywaru

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Kill Text to Kill the Digital Divide: A Journey out of Inequality for Uganda

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As civic technology explodes across the world, engulfing citizens with new platforms and better designed services, we here in Uganda, continue to scratch our heads about how we can reach our targets groups: the consistently marginalized and under-resourced groups who stand to benefit the most.

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In Toronto, Canada it seems like everyone has access to the internet; by using their cell phone, going on their home computer, or commuting to a nearby library. We go online and see the vast people who share their content on Youtube, their pictures on Facebook or breaking news on Twitter. However, have we ever thought of those who don't have access to the internet? How do they get the latest updates of the Grammy Awards, apply for jobs online or even check the weather forecast for the week? The truth is that they don't.

The digital divide describes the segregation of people due to the unequal access, usage and impact of information and communication technologies such as the internet. This segregation is highly to due economic and social inequality that enables some people to have greater access to the internet over others. With the amount of free Wi-fi around Toronto or free access to a library, who can be missing from the web?
The truth is that many people are missing from the web
Economic and social inequality is just the umbrella on top of the other numerous factors that affect one's ability to access the internet. These factors can include developing nations, rural area, older generations, low-income status or mental/physical disabilities. For instance, in the rural areas of Cambodia where 80% of the population reside, there are few Cambodians with internet access, while majority of the rural area do not have access to electricity. This kind of geographical, poor nation development and poverty barrier are examples of inequalities that contribute to the digital divide.

The digital divide does not always impact people who are in poverty and located thousands of miles across the ocean, but rather, can impact to those in Toronto or even in your household. People who are blind have limited accessibility when using the internet, such as not being unable to fully utilize the visual interface, as how the internet was intended to be used. Instead, voice recognition and text-to-speech programs are used to facilitate the user interface, however, this is still considered unequal access to the internet and serves as a digital divide.

The digital divide also affects older generations such as our parents or great relatives, since the internet has only been commercially recognized and used for the first time in the late 1980s. Unlike millennials, older generations didn't grow up during the digital transition revolution in the 2000s where there was a huge shift in the usage of the internet, computer and cell phone development. As a result, people who grew up before this revolution were less likely to use computers as much as the younger generations.

Bridging the Gap
Fortunately, many initiatives have started to overcome this digital divide; such as The Affordable Access Coalition proposal to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The proposal petitions the CRTC to subsidize internet access for low-income and rural Canadians, in order to increase accessibility for families and individuals living below Statistics Canada's low-income measure. As many people know, Canada has one of the most costly internet, wireless and home phone service in the world; making it a very difficult for low-income families to afford internet service. As President Obama said "Today, high-speed broadband is not a luxury, it's a necessity." It has even come to the attention of Obama that the internet has evolved from a commodity into a necessity, making this proposal very important in bridging the gap in Canada's digital divide.

There are also local solutions in Toronto to bridge the gap such as kids@computers which is a scholarship program that provides lessons on using a computer and at the end of the program, a computer is given to the families for free. Since 2001, the program has given over 20 000 computers to low-income families, giving access to families and the confidence needed to succeed in today's world. Personally, my first computer was from kids@computers and I think it is a wonderful program for immigrant families or families who never experienced the internet.
It's a Win/Win Situation!
Who benefits from people gaining internet access from different areas? Everyone! We can all be more connected to different parts of the world and people from all culture, background and socioeconomic status. Whether that connection is to families in Africa or someone across the street, we can all learn more from each other if we bridge the digital gap and make the internet more accessible, affordable and powerful for individuals to use.

With Youtube travel vlogs (video blogging) on the rise, having a glimpse of people's everyday lives in areas that never had internet connection is a good way show their lifestyle but also illustrate the attention they may need, whether that is for poverty, accessibility or human right advocacy. It could also help new internet users apply for jobs online, become prosperous and decrease unemployment in an area; helping both the individual and the general area.
Bring it all Together
If we educate others on the digital divide and get people thinking about bridging this gap, we could really bring up the attention of internet accessibility and affordability in Canada and demonstrate the need for The Affordable Access Coalition. The video below is a great summary of the digital divide and an excellent discussion about the need for bridging the gap.

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The Digital Divide: How the digital world divides the real world

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In Toronto, Canada it seems like everyone has access to the internet; by using their cell phone, going on their home computer, or commuting to a nearby library. We go online and see the vast people who share their content on Youtube, their pictures on Facebook or breaking news on Twitter.

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Internet access is a modern necessity, not a luxury. The Internet isn't like cable television. We don't need cable television to efficiently exist in modern world society. Cable television is merely a luxury. However, Internet access is a necessity as it is required to efficiently exist in the modern world. The Internet provides us a means of communication between friends, family, work colleagues, and school colleagues. The Internet provides us with a means of acquiring knowledge from all of the sciences, philosophies, and other academia branches, as well as non-academia branches such as sport statistics, or musical artist bibliographies. The Internet also provides us with a means of allocating and transferring currency for the exchange of goods and services. The Internet is a crucial part to being able to exist efficiently in the modern world, however not everyone has the means to access the Internet.

The term digital divide refers to the gap in demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communication technology, which includes television, phone lines, and most importantly the Internet. Of these 3 types of technology, the Internet is the most important because it is required to exist efficiently in the modern world. According to an article published in the World Economic Forum, as of 2016, 4 billion people have restricted access to the Internet.

According to statistics from the World Economic Forum, the approximately 4 billion non-Internet users include : (1) third world country civilians that cannot access Internet because they either don't have access to electricity or they live outside of 3G coverage , (2) people who are below the international poverty line in wealth and cannot afford broadband Internet, (3) illiterate adults that cannot maneuver the web due to language barriers, and (4) elderly people and disabled people who are either physically or mentally unable to utilize a computer or grasp the concept of Internet browsing.

How can we bridge the gap? One method of bridging the gap that I have in mind is for Internet providers to lower the cost of broadband Internet. This way people who are below the international poverty line in wealth can afford to pay for these services and can have access to the Internet. To ensure that the Internet providers are still making a profit, they can allow discounted services for households who have a low family income. OSAP (Ontario Student Assistant Program) has a similar program in place where students with families having a lower income of 50 000 Canadian dollars a year don't need to pay back the loan OSAP provides for post-secondary tuition. Internet providers can also broaden their range of 3G coverage so more people in third world countries can have access to the Internet. Programs can be set in place by the government to assist illiterate adults, the elderly, and disabled people in maneuvering the Internet.

Many initiatives are taking place to overcome this digital divide. One initiative in particular is the Close the Gap initiative.

Close the Gap is an international non-profit organization that aims to bridge the gap that is the digital divide by providing second-handed computers donated by companies around the world to educational, medical, and social projects in third world countries. This initiative will reduce the percentage of people in third world countries who have restricted Internet access. This initiative is providing benefits for both the people in these developing countries, as well as the economy. The people in these developing countries will now have the available resources to gain information and will also gain means for effective communication. This will increase employment opportunities in these developing countries, and will also help the economy grow.

If you are someone that has access to the Internet, be grateful, for there are approximately 4 billion people in the world who aren't as blessed as you are.

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The Economic and Social Inequality that is the Digital Divide

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Internet access is a modern necessity, not a luxury. The Internet isn't like cable television. We don't need cable television to efficiently exist in modern world society. Cable television is merely a luxury. However, Internet access is a necessity as it is required to efficiently exist in the modern world.

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In his seminal book Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 2003), first published in 1962, Everett Rogers admits that "the structure of a social system can facilitate or impede the diffusion of innovations in the system". This is especially true today, as new technologies, new thought paradigms and new models of communication are continuously disrupting and recasting our lives, whilst putting huge pressure on the underlying social structures. The penetration speed of innovation is thus a function of the amount of inertia such structures are inherently endowed with, even though it was the collapse of solid societies, as Bauman would call them, that first demanded for a global re-editing of traditional models.

Wikipedia defines the digital revolution as "the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics which began anywhere from the late 1950s to the late 1970s with the adoption and proliferation of digital computers and digital record keeping that continues to the present day". As had happened centuries ago with industrial revolution, although on a far larger scale, the changes we are experiencing on a daily basis can be (at least partly) explained by the complex interplay among new technologies (digital logic circuits and their derivatives such as the computer, digital cellular phone, and the Internet), new knowledge (information theory, algorithms and artificial intelligence, statistics, engineering), and new socio-economic phenomena (the globalization, first and foremost). Yet, as Chris Freeman and Francisco Louçã warn in As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), "the very notion of innovation is a difficult one [...]: change, instability, mutation, and bifurcation are difficult concepts to measure and to assess, in contrast with permanence, continuity, linearity, and structure".

The adoption of digital technologies is, however, crucial in ensuring a country's competitiveness on a global settings; which is why the European Union put a special emphasis on its own development program, encompassing a broad range of key areas. Within the general framework of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Digital agenda for Europe was launched in May 2010, with the aim of " boosting Europe's economy by delivering sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market ".

Countries within the EU borders have experienced, to this date, very diverse magnitudes of success in implementing the European guidelines. It goes without saying that Western countries were rather better off, in comparison with countries in the former Communist areas, where access to new technologies and know-how is sometimes observed to enforce a certain degree of inequality, not only "in the context of technological infrastructure" but also with regard to literacies (information, media, digital, and network), online social networks, knowledge gaps, and collaborative/non-collaborative practices" (Muschert, Glenn W, and Massimo Ragnedda. The Digital Divide: The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2015).

Poland has developed, of course, its own flavour of the EU digital agenda: Polska Cyfrowa, or Digital Poland, is a document prepared by the Ministry of Administration and Digitization (Ministerstwo Administracji i Cyfryzacji) and by the Ministry of Regional Development (Ministerstwo Rozwoju Regionalnego), and subsequently adopted by the Rada on January 8, 2014. The agenda comes with its own comprehensive web portal, polskacyfrowa.gov.pl (which is merely a fork, an offspring, of the EU funding program web portal), and an extensive PDF document available both in Polish and in English.

The overarching goal of Polska Cyfrowa is to use digital potential to improve the quality of life of the Polish society. The program budget is, reportedly, over EUR 2.2 billions. For those who prefer to drill deeper into technical and numerical details, a much more comprehensive Description of priority axes is available (Szczegółowy opis osi priorytetowych Programu Operacyjnego Polska Cyfrowa).

Of great interest, amongst the program key performance indicators, are those touching the public sector itself. Indeed, the document suggests that the idea of the open government "is connected with increasing the transparency and accountability of the activities of the state, sharing the data and resources owned by the state and engaging citizens in the governing process". At the moment, admittedly, no estimations regarding public sector information, or PSI, are available for Poland; however, "numerous significant weaknesses in terms of PSI supply are widely recognized". The amount and quality of "open data", that is, of data made freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, "as well as of the ways of making them available", are unfortunately "relatively low".

Yet, availability of open data is recognized as crucial in contemporary policy-making, and, by and large, to ensure that a wholesome democratic process can take place. Indeed, it is exactly in this soft spot that the debate about adoption of information technologies can border very closely far deeper questions about fundamental citizenship freedoms, and even more so within the advanced political setting which Stefano Rodotà used to call hyperdemocracy ( iperdemocrazia). Rodotà, a renowned jurist as well as a former Vice President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, writes in his essay Tecnopolitica. La democrazia e le nuove tecnologie della comunicazione (Roma: Laterza, 2004) that "electronic democracy [...] can well be projected beyond the pure referendum decision: indeed, it must be, if we want to go beyond that game of the yes and the no [...]"; and to go beyond, access to open data is essential, because "the possibility of remote access to public and private databases [...] is not only a technical fact: it represents a form of redistribution of power that weakens the filtering and intermediation functions typical of bureaucracies" (English transl. by the author).

But data, however pivotal, is inoperative without software; and yet, hardly any mention of software ( oprogramowania, in Polish) is made in the foundational document of Polska Cyfrowa, notwithstanding a great deal of encouragement on the part of the EU institutions, which strive to set a good example: the European Commission, e. g., has a special strategy put in place that ensures " a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects and providing more of the software developed within the Commission as open source ".

In order to understand what open source means in this context, we must go back to the birth of the free software movement. Rooted in the hacker cultures of the Seventies, the free software movement aimed (and still does) at providing users with fundamental freedoms, such as "the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software" (What is free software?). The movement was started in 1983 by the US computer scientist Richard M. Stallman, when he launched a project called GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU is not Unix) to create a computer operating system composed entirely of free software (DiBona, Chris, and Sam Ockman. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, Inc, 2008). Later on, with the birth of the Linux operating system (or, more appropriately, the Linux kernel), the free software was to become ubiquitous.

But using it is not only a matter of convenience. Today "to use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy" (What is free software?). Moreover, the adoption of free software (sometimes called open source software, with a slightly different emphasis) by the public sector may help to increase both transparency and sustainability (share & reuse models) whilst fostering developer communities as well as encouraging widespread commitment.

Unfortunately, not many examples of adoption of free software platforms do exist eastward of Germany (the site itsfoss.com, which keeps tracks of best practices through the world, seems to ignore Poland); yet we were able to leaf through a memorandum which goes by the title Open Source Software Adoption in the Polish City of Gdańsk. The authors thereof recognize that "the use of open source software brings along with it an independence from one single supplier and provides the possibility to choose the rhythm of software investment independent of, instead of dictated by, software vendors".

In passing, we must consider that, from a legal standpoint, both the production and the use of free (open source) software pose several challenges, mainly connected with copyright laws. And it will not be without interest to recall that, to this day, Poland law "provides no definition of a computer program or computer software. Computer programs are eligible for protection as literary works", as Tomasz Rychlicki notes in The International Free and Open Source Software Law Book.

Many other areas would be worthwhile of a detailed account: digital competencies, media education, cybersecurity and privacy, to name just a few. But, lest we should run out of space (and our readers out of patience), we will refrain from going into too many details. What appears unquestionable is that the country is now facing a big challenge. As Monika Rosa, a Member of Polish Parliament of the Modern Party ( Nowoczesna), writes in her paper A Digital Agenda for Poland, "at present, Poland is standing at the crossroads. We can open a new chapter in our history, a chapter of modernization, fast development and improving the quality of life of the Polish citizens".

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Closing the Gap. Digital divide and digital cultures in Poland: an introduction

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In his seminal book Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 2003), first published in 1962, Everett Rogers admits that "the structure of a social system can facilitate or impede the diffusion of innovations in the system".

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It is no secret that women have unequal access to economic opportunities, but here's what's new: as digital technologies dramatically reshape our economies, they can either make the problem worse or help fix it.

The sexist culture of Silicon Valley and its stream of apologies, scandals and step downs highlights the scale of the challenge. Think about it: most job growth will continue to come from STEM fields, yet only 12% of engineering students are women. Much of our day-to-day is dictated by digital gadgets, yet few women are involved in developing them. Those who are involved don't have it easy on a day-to-day basis, as the latest stories of systematic harassment make clear. In less developed countries, fewer women than men own mobile phones or have basic internet access.

So how can technology be part of the solution? Here are some opportunities to think about:
Access to finance and financial services
Forty-two percent of women and girls worldwide - 1.1 billion in total - are unbanked. Women are more likely than men to lack credit history and the mobility to go to the bank. That is why financial technology (or fintech) can play a large equalizing role, not only in terms of access but also in terms of how financial products and services are designed. For example, fintech products that are more adapted to women's risk preferences can help close the wealth and investment gap between genders.
Mobility and new income streams
In contexts where women's movements are severely limited because of cultural or security concerns, tech can play a role in either facilitating or directly providing income-generating opportunities. For example, where harassment remains one of the main deterrents for engaging in the workforce, location-reporting tools can give women more confidence to go to work. Working remotely thanks to online micro-jobs platforms can provide a whole new set of opportunities, but tech companies need to put in the extra effort so that the gig economy provides dignified standards of living that are equally attractive to men and women.
Have you read? Tech literacy
Digital and STEM skills are the hottest in town, and job openings in computer, technology and engineering-related fields will continue to grow. Encouraging girls' STEM (or STEAMD - Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math development) education from an early age and teaching digital literacy to women and girls are the first steps toward closing future gaps. Creating the systems and cultures that help women and girls remain and thrive in those fields are also necessary.
Correcting for bias
Algorithms that feed on available data perpetuate gender stereotypes and biases. Engineers have taken notice and some are working on weeding out prejudice from artificial intelligence. AI is also being used to surface bias in hiring and promoting. Just one example is automated screeners highlighting "male" adjectives in job descriptions that discourage women from applying for leadership positions.
Creative economy
As people are pushed out of industries by automation, they will seek alternative forms of employment. Original artistic creation, hand-craftsmanship, innovative design and other types of creative work will be vital to sustaining economies. Technology can serve as an enabler of these opportunities by offering access to markets, lowering the costs of launching new ventures and allowing flexibility of working hours. All these factors make the creative field an attractive one for women.

The gender gap is closely linked to the digital divide. If we double the pace at which women become frequent users of digital technologies, the workplace could reach gender equality by 2040 in developed nations and 2060 in developing nations  - much earlier than current projections.
Are you working on any of the above? Apply to MIT Solve's Women and Technology Challenge by August 1.

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To fix the gender gap, fix the digital divide - World Economic Forum - Medium

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It is no secret that women have unequal access to economic opportunities, but here's what's new: as digital technologies dramatically reshape our economies, they can either make the problem worse or help fix it. The sexist culture of Silicon Valley and its stream of apologies, scandals and step downs highlights the scale of the challenge.

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By Paula Klein
In the 1990s when many Americans - and certainly, people around the world - lacked access to the newly emerging internet and related technologies, the term digital divide was coined to describe the gap between those who could connect and those who couldn't.

In 2017, the gap is as wide as ever.

Although it's 30 years later and mobile and cellular technologies have exploded, disparities persist. Sparked by new definitions of digital access -  broadband versus cellular, urban versus rural -as well as industrial and sociological differences, the term, and the gap, is top of mind. In fact, MIT Technology Reviewrecently pointed out that the U.S. has "a persistent, embarrassing digital divide " that needs to be addressed at the highest levels. Moreover, the article emphasized that, "mobile broadband access isn't the same as at-home connectivity," even though some in the FCC and Trump administration are making that case.

Many Americans take digitization for granted, yet Pew Research also concluded that "the digital divide persists, even as lower-income Americans make gains in tech adoption."

Providing mobile-only services is insufficient, Pew argues, because limited access stymies educational as well as economic opportunities, and widens the divide.

Clearly, while digital technology is creating unprecedented wealth for some, it remains concentrated among relatively few people, compared to the broader economic gains driven by previous technological advancements. Part of the problem still lies with basic access to digital technology and the opportunities it affords.
Myriad Solutions
What's being done? There are many approaches, of course, and leaders from Maine to North Carolina, Budapest, to Indonesia and beyond, are seeking hopeful solutions that meet their local and demographic needs. Tech corporations such as SAP and Google are taking steps, too.

At MIT, t he IDE Inclusive Innovation Challenge was specifically formed to identify, reward, and promote technology-based solutions that drive greater economic prosperity worldwide. In August, the IIC named 16 finalists in four categories. One key aim is to connect more people with internet and technology access, regardless of age, location, education, or ability.

In the category of technology access, for instance, the Digital Citizen Fund has built 11 internet training centers and two media centers for women and girls in Afghanistan to gain basic digital literacy so they can better compete in the global economy.

The organization says that only 5 percent of Afghanistan's population has access to the internet - and few of those are women or children.

The Fund is expanding to Mexico and hopes to expand to other markets in the future.

Similarly, online education is growing, yet less than 1 percent of the populations of Africa and India have the broadband to access it - cost and speed are the biggest barriers to adoption. Dot Learn is changing that imbalance. Using an MIT-developed technology that compresses video, the company is making online education in Africa as inexpensive as text messaging.

Some of the IDE inclusive innovators are addressing specific niche markets where access is available, but limited. One finalist, the African Renewable Energy Distributor Ltd., has taken a two-pronged approach: promoting green energy as well as digital access. It has developed solar-powered, portable kiosks where people can charge their mobile phones, access Wi-Fi, or access an intranet while offline. Using a micro franchise business model, the Rwanda-based company hopes to empower women and people with disabilities who can run the kiosks. It may seem basic, but it's a life-line for many rural residents.

Eliminating Barriers
Often, putting technology to use in optimal ways, in addition to providing access, can make the difference between success and failure. In the U.S., for example, 14 percent of the total number of students admitted to college each spring, never actually attend school that year - and of those who do attend, 48 percent don't graduate six years later.

Boston-based AdmitHub wants to eliminate at least one set of barriers: It has created a virtual assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, to help students navigate the financial, academic, and social situations that accompany going to college. The system primarily uses text messaging, which means communicating with students on their terms and easing complicated transitions that can deter many potential graduates.

Other IIC finalists are addressing financial inclusion, income growth, and better ways to match skilled workers with good jobs in the quest to narrow the digital divide. On October 12, the IIC will announce and celebrate this year's winners at a gala event at HUBweek. Each Grand Prize winner will receive $150,000 to expand their work. The remaining 12 winners each receive $35,000.

No single program will eliminate the digital divide for everyone, but these efforts shows how passion, hard work, awareness, and creative ideas can go a long way to level the digital playing field. And after 30 years, even small steps represent achievements.

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The 2017 Digital Divide - MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Medium

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By Paula Klein In the 1990s when many Americans - and certainly, people around the world - lacked access to the newly emerging internet and related technologies, the term digital divide was coined to describe the gap between those who could connect and those who couldn't. In 2017, the gap is as wide as ever.

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ONE factor behind the rise of income inequality in America over the past four decades is that the labour market has increasingly favoured the well-educated. Real wages for college graduates have risen by over a third since 1963, whereas wages for those without high-school diplomas have dropped. As more of the economy becomes automated, doomsayers worry that the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow. History shows, however, that this need not be so.

The recent rise in earnings for skilled workers is a rare historical phenomenon. Compiling records from churches, monasteries, colleges, guilds and governments, Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has put together a comprehensive dataset of English wages that stretches back to the 13th century. Mr Clark notes that in the past the skilled-wage premium, defined as the difference in wages between craftsmen, such as carpenters and masons, and unskilled labourers has been fairly stable, save for two sharp declines (see chart).
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The first drop came in the 14th century, and had nothing to do with technological change. Life expectancy in medieval England was short and interest rates were high, meaning that taking on the seven-year apprenticeship needed to become a craftsman came with a heavy opportunity cost. But interest rates started falling in this period, from around 10% in 1290 to 7.5% in 1340. When the Black Death struck England in 1348, wiping out a third of the population, interest rates fell further, to 5%, and apprenticeships became much more attractive. The increased supply of skilled labour relative to unskilled workers drove down the wage premium. Data from Jan Luiten van Zanden of Utrecht University show similar patterns in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

The second big decline in the skilled-wage premium came after the Industrial Revolution. Inventions like the power loom displaced artisans, and increased the relative demand for unskilled labour. Craftsmen whose skills took years to hone suddenly found themselves being replaced by machines operated by workers with just a few months' training. (The Luddites reacted by smashing the machines.) One study has found that the share of unskilled workers rose from 20% of the labour force in England in 1700 to 39% in 1850. The ratio of craftsmen's wages to labourers' started to fall in the early 1800s, and did not recover until 1960.

Using a different inequality measure leads to slightly different results. Peter Lindert, also at the University of California, Davis, says that as middle-skilled jobs in England disappeared, the Gini coefficient of household earnings rose, peaking in 1800. The share of earnings captured by the top 1% reached a high in around 1870. But the two measures then went on to fall, not bottoming out until the mid-20th century.

What distinguishes the advances of the computer age from those of the Industrial Revolution is that they have favoured skilled workers. So far, university degrees have been a reliable proxy for skill but this may change as artificial intelligence starts taking jobs away from white-collar workers. Projections from America's Bureau of Labour Statistics show that four of the five fastest-growing occupations in the country involve personal care; none of those jobs requires a bachelor's degree.

In any case, to assume that current economic trends will persist is to assume an inefficient labour market. Ken Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, argues that as the wage premium for a particular group of workers rises, firms will have a greater incentive to replace them.

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What history says about inequality and technology

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ONE factor behind the rise of income inequality in America over the past four decades is that the labour market has increasingly favoured the well-educated. Real wages for college graduates have risen by over a third since 1963, whereas wages for those without high-school diplomas have dropped.

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THAT there are more telephones, computers and internet connections in rich countries than there are in poor ones is obvious. There are also more cars, televisions and air-conditioners. But the difference in the availability of information and communication technologies (s) is the focus of particular concern among policymakers, academics and non-governmental organisations. Such technology, it is generally agreed, boosts productivity, though how quickly and by how much is the subject of much debate. The far wider availability of ICTs in rich countries, goes the argument, will therefore enable the rich to get richer, while the poor are left behind. In short, not only is there a worrying "digital divide" between rich and poor, the divide is widening-with ominous consequences.

These beliefs are widely held. But a new paper* by two economists at the World Bank, Carsten Fink and Charles Kenny, questions the logic of this argument and highlights the woolly thinking that pervades the digital-divide discussion. The authors conclude that the divide's size and importance have been overstated, and that current trends suggest that it is actually shrinking, not growing-which means policies designed to "bridge the digital divide" may need rethinking.

For a start, Messrs Fink and Kenny observe, the term "digital divide" came to prominence "more for its alliterative potential than for its inherent terminological exactitude". It is used in at least four distinct ways, and two in particular: to describe the gap in access to ICTs between rich and poor countries, and the resulting gap in usage. The digital divide is almost always described in terms of the difference in the number of telephones, internet users or computers per head in rich and poor countries. For example, there are more telephones than people in most developed countries, compared with around three telephones per 100 people in the developing world.

While the gap as defined using these per-head measures looks enormous, the growth rates tell a different story. Over the past 25 years, telephone penetration has been increasing faster in low and middle-income countries than in high-income countries, which has not been surprising given the market saturation in rich countries. But the same is also true of internet usage, which grew by around 50% per year in high-income countries in the late 1990s, compared with 100% per year in low and middle-income countries. The rich are ahead, but the poor are catching up fast. So much for the "widening digital divide" decried by such organisations as the United Nations Development Programme. The most striking feature of the per-head divide in access to ICTS, conclude Messrs Fink and Kenny, "is not how large it is, but how rapidly it is closing."

Wired in Wuhan

But such per-head figures may not even be the right way to measure the divide. You would expect poor countries to have fewer telephones and computers per head, simply because they are poorer. And phones and computers are routinely shared between many users in developing countries. Mobile phones are often rented out by the call, and cybercafés provide internet access to people who could otherwise not afford it. One alternative measure, suggest the paper's authors, is per-income availability of ICTs. The number of phones and internet users per dollar of GDP provides a measure of the relative importance attached to ICTs. On this measure, the digital divide becomes a "digital leapfrog", as low- and middle-income countries jump ahead of rich ones. This finding is even more striking, say the authors, given that income inequality between the developing and developed world seems to have widened slightly. "Even though developing countries have fallen behind economically over the past decades, they managed to catch up digitally," they note.

Does that mean there is nothing to worry about? Not necessarily. One worry is that ICTs might have less impact on productivity in poor countries than in rich countries because of lower adoption levels. It is possible, for example, that a certain threshold level of adoption is required before the productivity benefits of ICTs kick in. But even if this is true, the high growth rates suggest that there are perceived benefits to adopting ICTs in any case, even if productivity benefits have yet to materialise, so that the threshold will eventually be reached.

Another worry is that the adoption of ICTs within poor countries may be hugely unequal, and limited to a relatively affluent minority, so that the digital divide within countries may grow even as the digital divide between countries shrinks. Moreover, rich countries with high penetration of ICTs may be more likely to do business online with other such countries, at the expense of poor countries. Well, perhaps, but it seems far more likely that access to ICTs will, overall, enlarge poor countries' trading opportunities. And as the authors suggest, growing access to ICTs will improve their plight.

All this has important ramifications for policymakers. There is no doubt that the adoption of ICTs plays a big role in development. But it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on "bridging the digital divide" by trying to narrow the per-head divide in access. For one thing, the divide is narrowing on its own. More important, when it comes to determining the best use of international aid, money given to narrowing the divide might be better spent elsewhere. In many developing countries, people face far more important challenges than the lack of internet access, namely lack of access to water, food, medical treatment and education. For them, the digital divide is a symptom, rather than the cause, of wider inequality.

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THAT there are more telephones, computers and internet connections in rich countries than there are in poor ones is obvious. There are also more cars, televisions and air-conditioners. But the difference in the availability of information and communication technologies (s) is the focus of particular concern among policymakers, academics and non-governmental organisations.

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E-GOVERNMENT is not just e-business on a larger scale. One of the most fundamental differences is that whereas businesses can, by and large, choose their customers, government cannot. The debate over the so-called "digital divide" is like the ghost at the e-government feast. For e-government to succeed fully, the dream of Internet access for all has to become a reality.

Governments are well aware that large and expensive e-projects will command little support if only a privileged minority benefits. As David Agnew of the Toronto-based Governance in the Digital Economy Project, which is supported by eight big IT firms and 20 national and local governments, argues: "If putting government online is just a way of reinforcing access for people who probably already have more opportunity to access government and decision-makers, then it hasn't really been much of an advance after all."

When Arizona's Democrats held their state presidential primary online in March, it nearly did not happen-not because of security and authentication problems (although there were plenty of those), but because a pressure group called the Voting Integrity Project tried to have it banned. It almost persuaded a court that the vote would disenfranchise the state's minorities, so should be ruled illegal.

Raise the spectre of the digital divide with the technology vendors and e-government champions within the public sector, and their brows furrow with concern-but not for long. They are, after all, professional technology optimists. But they also genuinely believe that many of the barriers to near-universal Internet access are falling, at least in economically advanced countries (though it is worth remembering that half the world has never even made a telephone call). Survey after survey has found that the main barriers to access are the fear that it is too expensive, that computers are too complicated and that somehow the whole thing is not really relevant or useful. Those optimists argue that, one by one, each of those perfectly legitimate anxieties is being overcome.

What's the problem?

Too expensive? Internet-ready PCs can be bought for little more than $300-less than the price of most televisions, a device that has found its way into 99% of all American homes. Some Internet service providers (ISPs) are even giving PCs away in return for two or three years' subscription, and other firms offer free PCs to users who agree to be bombarded by advertisements while online. True, access fees and telephone call charges remain high in some countries, but unmetered local calls are spreading from America to Europe, and free ISPs are evolving a range of different business models.

Too complicated and unreliable? That will soon be fixed by the proliferation of non-PC devices which provide access to the web. Among them will be simple terminals that do nothing more than run a browser and take all their applications from the web. These will be found in places such as schools, community centres, libraries and anywhere else that needs a robust machine and has an "always on" connection. An even simpler version is the kind of web kiosk with a touch-screen that is springing up in cities such as Singapore and Toronto.

Many people will be able to do as much business as they need over the Internet with inexpensive smart mobile phones, some of which will soon take the form of a wrist-watch that can be activated by speech rather than via a fiddly keypad. Many new mobile phones are already being loaded with WAP software and microbrowsers. Another way of getting online is by interactive digital television. Early services, such as BSkyB's Open in Britain, are still clunky, but the technology will improve, and the set-top box decoders will often come free.

The more extreme technology optimists, such as Adam Thierer of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, say that the rapidly falling price of both computing power and bandwidth will in fact create a "digital deluge", so any policies aimed at giving access to the "information-poor" are quite unnecessary and may be counter-productive. It is a comforting view, but probably quite wrong.

The latest release of the US Department of Commerce's survey "Falling Through the Net" paints a disturbing picture in which the digital divide between rich and poor, white and non-white, well-educated and under-schooled seems, if anything, to have widened significantly during the five years in which this information has been collected. Among the examples of the digital divide today, the survey found that:

*People with a college degree are eight times more likely to have a PC at home and 16 times more likely to have Internet access at home than those with an elementary school education.

*A high-income household in an urban area is 20 times more likely to have Internet access than a rural, low-income household.

*A child in a low-income white family is three times more likely to have Internet access than a child in a comparable black family, and four times more likely than if he were Hispanic.

*A wealthy household of Asian descent is 34 times more likely to have Internet access than a poor black household.

*A child in a two-parent white household is twice as likely to have Internet access as a child in a single-parent household. If the child is black, he is four times more likely to have Internet access than his single-parent counterpart.

*Disabled people are nearly three times less likely to have home access to the Internet than people without disabilities.

In other words, although Internet penetration has risen across all demographic groups, the digital divide remains only too real. It has also become a poignant proxy for almost every other kind of disadvantage and inequality in society.

Chalk and cheese

It would be hard to find a better real-life symbol for the digital divide than the gulf between Silicon Valley's leafy Palo Alto, home to dot.com millionaires, where the average house sells for nearly $700,000, and East Palo Alto, the desperate little town on the other side of Highway 101 that not long ago claimed America's highest murder rate. Palo Alto's website has 251 sections and is a paragon of e-government. Among many other things, it allows users to send forms to the planning department and search the city's library catalogue. During storms, it even provides live video footage of flood-prone San Francisquito Creek. East Palo Alto's site, by contrast, has only three pages, containing little more than outdated population figures and the address of City Hall.

The digital divide is not so much a question of access but of education. As Esther Dyson, an Internet pundit, puts it: "You can put computers in community centres, but only the literate people are likely to go use them." Simpler, cheaper ways of getting on to the web will help, as will content that seems relevant to those who shun the Internet today-after all, the mobile phone has conquered all social classes, thanks to its sheer usefulness and simplicity. But even with enlightened policies such as America's "e-rate", which gives cut-price web access to schools and libraries, and the growing number of private-public partnerships to spread both technology and training in its use, there is a danger that the "digital deluge" may reach only those parts where the grass is already green. The same people who have wired PCs today will collect all the fancy new web gadgets that are coming in, and the rest will continue to go without.

So what does this mean for e-government architects? First, as IBM's Todd Ramsey points out, they have to accept that some people, especially the elderly, will never want to deal with government-or indeed anyone else-online. That means some off-line channels will almost certainly have to be kept open for years after everything has moved on to the web. Second, they must find ways to allow even those diehards to benefit from the e-government transformation by improving the quality of the off-line channels and targeting them better. Not all the savings from electronic service delivery will be bankable.

Third, they need to think up incentives for those on the wrong side of the digital divide to take the leap. Government may be able to act as a catalyst in a way that the private sector cannot. What persuades most people to try the Internet is the promise that they will find something relevant to them. If the most convenient way of getting welfare benefits is online, a lot of people who had never thought of using the web will have a go.

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E-GOVERNMENT is not just e-business on a larger scale. One of the most fundamental differences is that whereas businesses can, by and large, choose their customers, government cannot. The debate over the so-called "digital divide" is like the ghost at the e-government feast.

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THE gleaming Indian headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, an American computing giant, are testament to India's technology-led boom. The glass-panelled tower, located on a busy Bangalore thoroughfare, swarms with a new breed of well-heeled urban professionals. But inside the building, in a warren of cubicles on the second floor, a rather different customer is being targeted. Engineers and programmers at HP Labs, the company's research arm, are working on low-cost devices for the three-quarters of Indians who still live in the countryside. In one room, a cheap e-mail device that allows messages to be sent in local languages is on display; in another sits a tablet-shaped PC that lets users fill out government forms in Indian scripts.

These technologies are part of HP's ambitious plans to sell to the 4 billion poorest people at the bottom of the global economic pyramid. In addition to work being done at the HP Labs, the company has also invested resources in its "e-inclusion" initiative, a project designed to set up "Digital Villages" and "i-communities" around the world-the former are philanthropic projects, the latter strategic market investments. Several centres-in India, South Africa, Ghana and Brazil-have already been established.

All of this activity could easily be mistaken for yet another philanthropic effort to bridge the "digital divide" between rich and poor. But that is only part of the story. Anand Tawker, the head of HP's e-inclusion efforts in Asia, speaks of a "blended strategy" that creates social benefits at the same time as boosting HP's brand and sales. "In the process of creating social value, there is also a profitable return to HP," he says. "Doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive."

HP is somewhat ahead of the curve, but it is not alone. Companies around the world are now busy developing low-cost devices and innovative business models to reach the world's poor. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is pushing cheap wireless-data systems as the best way to extend connectivity to rural areas. Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile operator, has set up "phone shops" where rural entrepreneurs can buy and resell airtime. And the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai recently unveiled a stripped-down cash-dispenser that it plans to take to the masses in partnership with private-sector banks.

Of course, the idea that the poor constitute an untapped market is hardly new. Hindustan Lever, a subsidiary of Unilever, pioneered the idea years ago, marketing its shampoos and detergents in single-use sachets rather than larger (and more expensive) bottles. But the increasing ubiquity-and falling cost-of digital networks has heightened interest in these markets for at least two reasons. First, such networks increase information transparency, allowing, for instance, farmers or fishermen to sell their produce to the highest bidder, rather than just to the nearest market. This in turn creates new markets and expands existing ones. Second, dispersed electronic databases can aggregate demand, opening up low-margin markets that depend on high volumes for their viability.

In a celebrated article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2002, C. K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan and Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, pointed out that the collective buying power of the poor in Rio de Janeiro is $1.2 billion. Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-Chennai, who has been instrumental in bringing several technologies to rural markets, points out that there are 600,000 villages in India alone. "Give me profit margins of just one rupee, and I'll be happy," he says.

While such numbers are indeed striking, and heartening to would-be rural entrepreneurs, the challenge lies in the implementation. Mike Best of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has worked in rural markets in Africa and Asia, points out that many developing countries (he cites Ghana as an example) lack the requisite connectivity. In addition, aggregated demand in, say, Madagascar, with a population of 17m, is unlikely to yield the same economies of scale as in India. And with its multitude of languages and cultures, even India poses difficulties.

Some of the difficulties may have technical solutions. To deal with the problem of multiple languages, HP is devising character-recognition systems capable of recognising a variety of scripts. The engineers at IIT-Chennai are implementing a fingerprint-recognition system in their cash dispensersthat would save the (often illiterate) villagers from having to remember a personal identification number.

But perhaps the best reason to be optimistic is that the companies in question are driven by a powerful motivator that is lacking in donor-led rural programmes: profit. Mr Tawker, for example, happily characterises HP's efforts as a long-term strategic response to saturation and slower growth in the company's traditional markets. Now, the technologists just have to devise the technological equivalent of shampoo sachets.

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THE gleaming Indian headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, an American computing giant, are testament to India's technology-led boom. The glass-panelled tower, located on a busy Bangalore thoroughfare, swarms with a new breed of well-heeled urban professionals. But inside the building, in a warren of cubicles on the second floor, a rather different customer is being targeted.

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IT WAS an idea born in those far-off days of the internet bubble: the worry that as people in the rich world embraced new computing and communications technologies, people in the poor world would be left stranded on the wrong side of a "digital divide". Five years after the technology bubble burst, many ideas from the time-that "eyeballs" matter more than profits or that internet traffic was doubling every 100 days-have been sensibly shelved. But the idea of the digital divide persists. On March 14th, after years of debate, the United Nations will launch a "Digital Solidarity Fund" to finance projects that address "the uneven distribution and use of new information and communication technologies" and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the information society". Yet the debate over the digital divide is founded on a myth-that plugging poor countries into the internet will help them to become rich rapidly.

The lure of magic

This is highly unlikely, because the digital divide is not a problem in itself, but a symptom of deeper, more important divides: of income, development and literacy. Fewer people in poor countries than in rich ones own computers and have access to the internet simply because they are too poor, are illiterate, or have other more pressing concerns, such as food, health care and security. So even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and cause a computer to appear in every household on earth, it would not achieve very much: a computer is not useful if you have no food or electricity and cannot read.

Yet such wand-waving-through the construction of specific local infrastructure projects such as rural telecentres-is just the sort of thing for which the UN's new fund is intended. How the fund will be financed and managed will be discussed at a meeting in September. One popular proposal is that technology firms operating in poor countries be encouraged to donate 1% of their profits to the fund, in return for which they will be able to display a "Digital Solidarity" logo. (Anyone worried about corrupt officials creaming off money will be heartened to hear that a system of inspections has been proposed.)

This sort of thing is the wrong way to go about addressing the inequality in access to digital technologies: it is treating the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes. The benefits of building rural computing centres, for example, are unclear (see the article in our Technology Quarterly in this issue). Rather than trying to close the divide for the sake of it, the more sensible goal is to determine how best to use technology to promote bottom-up development. And the answer to that question turns out to be remarkably clear: by promoting the spread not of PCs and the internet, but of mobile phones.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points (see article).

And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.

Phones are widely shared and rented out by the call, for example by the "telephone ladies" found in Bangladeshi villages. Farmers and fishermen use mobile phones to call several markets and work out where they can get the best price for their produce. Small businesses use them to shop around for supplies. Mobile phones are used to make cashless payments in Zambia and several other African countries. Even though the number of phones per 100 people in poor countries is much lower than in the developed world, they can have a dramatic impact: reducing transaction costs, broadening trade networks and reducing the need to travel, which is of particular value for people looking for work. Little wonder that people in poor countries spend a larger proportion of their income on telecommunications than those in rich ones.

The digital divide that really matters, then, is between those with access to a mobile network and those without. The good news is that the gap is closing fast. The UN has set a goal of 50% access by 2015, but a new report from the World Bank notes that 77% of the world's population already lives within range of a mobile network.

And yet more can be done to promote the diffusion of mobile phones. Instead of messing around with telecentres and infrastructure projects of dubious merit, the best thing governments in the developing world can do is to liberalise their telecoms markets, doing away with lumbering state monopolies and encouraging competition. History shows that the earlier competition is introduced, the faster mobile phones start to spread. Consider the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, for example. Both have average annual incomes of a mere $100 per person, but the number of phones per 100 people is two in the former (where there are six mobile networks), and 0.13 in the latter (where there is only one).

Let a thousand networks bloom

According to the World Bank, the private sector invested $230 billion in telecommunications infrastructure in the developing world between 1993 and 2003-and countries with well-regulated competitive markets have seen the greatest investment. Several firms, such as Orascom Telecom (see article) and Vodacom, specialise in providing mobile access in developing countries. Handset-makers, meanwhile, are racing to develop cheap handsets for new markets in the developing world. Rather than trying to close the digital divide through top-down IT infrastructure projects, governments in the developing world should open their telecoms markets. Then firms and customers, on their own and even in the poorest countries, will close the divide themselves.

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IT WAS an idea born in those far-off days of the internet bubble: the worry that as people in the rich world embraced new computing and communications technologies, people in the poor world would be left stranded on the wrong side of a "digital divide".

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In a context of institutional opacity and low-quality reporting, Latin American fact-checkers are growing in number and importance, writes Ariel Riera (LSE).

In 2003 Brooks Jackson launched FactCheck.org, giving the name to a fact-checking style of reporting. This genre of journalism, understood briefly as testing factual claims in order to make public discourse accountable and more accurate, has been growing continuously. According to the 2018 Duke Reporters' Lab annual fact-checking census, there are 149 active fact-checkers worldwide.

Latin American organisations account for 17 of the fact-checkers identified by Duke Reporters' Lab, and they share some attributes that reflect some of the peculiarities of the Latin American media landscape.

Smaller and more independent

Only five out of the 17 fact-checkers in the report are part of a traditional well-established media outlet or group (this sum includes EBC, Brazil's publicly funded news service, which utilises the tag 'hoax' to cover misinformation online). This contrasts with the situation in the US, "where most fact-checkers (41 of 47, or 87 per cent) are directly affiliated with newspapers, television networks and other established news outlets."

Dulce Ramos, Program Manager for the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), explains:

Most of the Latin American fact-checkers were born or consolidated in the independent media environment and were incubated in small newsrooms. That has pros and cons. On the one hand, fact-checkers have great flexibility to experiment, but on the other hand, their possibilities of growth are limited due to limited budgets.

Ramos also notes that Latin American organisations have managed to overcome difficulties: "They have obtained funding from international donors, have joined the great technological platforms (Facebook, for example) in the search for solutions that pair technology and fact-checking as a way to reach a wider audience".

Additionally, while in the English-speaking world "fact-checkers and investigative reporters are friendly but distinct", as pointed out by the IFCN Director Alexios Mantzarlis, in Latin America many organisations carry out both types of journalism.

Five of the active fact-checking projects in the region are part of independent websites that also publish journalistic investigations or political reports:

Other similar cases, like Ojo Biónico [Bionic Eye] from Perú or Chequéalo PR [Check it PR] from Puerto Rico, are currently inactive.

Combating a lack of information

In some countries in the region there are problems with availability or reliability of data. However, Ramos highlights this as a lesson, since "the lack of data hasn't stopped the fact-checkers there. When something cannot be verified, they say it and they fight for the necessary data to be opened up. They turn obstacles into levers". In addition to traditional categories like "True" or "False", many Latin American fact-checkers include "Unsustainable" as a category to mark the absence of public information to verify a claim.

Many fact-checking initiatives started as a new way to cover elections, in some cases persisting after voting concluded. In Brazil, the website Truco launched a satirical video during the 2014 elections to complain about the lack of responses from the main Brazilian candidates' press officers. The video published online (see below) featured the song "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" in the background, which includes the lyrics: "every time I ask you, 'what, when, how, and when', you always answer, 'perhaps, perhaps, perhaps'".

Girl power

According to the 2011 Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media women were underrepresented in the highest positions: within the Americas (including the US and Canada), they represented 21.5% at the governance level and 30.4% at the top-management level.

In contrast, half of the active fact-checking projects in Latin America have a woman in charge: Agência Lupa [Magnifying Glass Agency], Aos Fatos [To the Facts], Chequeado [Checked], Colombia Check, Detector de Mentiras, El Polígrafo [The Polygraph] and Truco. Female participation is even greater when focusing only on those organisations that have signed up to the IFCN's code of principles: five of these six are directed by women.

However, this could also be part of a broader trend in digital startups. A 2016 analysis of 100 digital media outlets in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico found that 38% of the founders were women, with women in management positions at 57 of these initiatives. A report from SembraMedia concludes that "this finding suggests that women are taking advantage of the low barriers to entry in digital-media startups to go around the glass ceilings of traditional media and build their own publishing companies".

Involving the audience

Even if fact-checking implies a certain kind of authoritativeness - at least to establish whether or not a claim is correct - Latin American initiatives have been trying to incorporate their readers in part of their process. The most common practice is to ask people to suggest what statements could be checked. Detector de Mentiras, meanwhile, has gone one step further, receiving suggestions for which WhatsApp-based viral hoaxes to check and then asking readers to commit to forwarding fact-check conclusions to their friends.

Chequeado has started to incorporate people in live fact-checking coverage, both by prompting users to send data through social media and by allowing citizens to collaborate in the checking process. Other sites like El Sabueso have followed suit.

Chequeado also undertook experimental studies with its audience on identifying checkable statements in political discourse. There were 3,557 participants, and the study concluded that "participating in a short training session significantly increased participants' performance". The resulting paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Communication Research Report.

Challenges

Cristina Tardáguila, director of Agência Lupa, worries that "there are few fact-checkers to face the huge amount of low-quality information". As such, projects like Chequeado and Agencia Lupa have launched initiatives to improve media literacy: "We have trained more than three thousand people. It would be great if many of them effectively check their mayors, councillors and so on. There is a need for ultra-local fact-checking, focused on what happens in a town or a county".

For Laura Zommer, executive director at Chequeado, there are two main issues for the future:

On the one hand, it is necessary to figure out how to reach broader audiences, beyond those already convinced about the importance of data, and break the filter bubbles. On the other hand, we need to generate public demand for data and prevent fact-checking from generating incentives for less usage of data by leaders.

Notes:
* The views expressed here are of the authors and do not reflect the position of the Centre or of the LSE
* This article is a slightly edited repost of the original version published by the LSE Media Policy Project blog
* Please read our Comments Policy before commenting

Ariel Riera - LSE Department of Media and Communications
Ariel Riera is a graduate student in LSE's Department of Media and Communications, as well as a 2017-18 Chevening Scholar. He worked as a journalist at Chequeado from 2012 to 2017.

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Independence, gender equality, and citizen participation help Latin America's fact-checkers hold the powerful to account | LSE Latin America and Caribbean

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In a context of institutional opacity and low-quality reporting, Latin American fact-checkers are growing in number and importance , writes Ariel Riera (LSE). In 2003 Brooks Jackson launched FactCheck.org, giving the name to a fact-checking style of reporting. This genre of journalism, understood briefly as testing factual claims in order to make public discourse accountable and more accurate, has been growing continuously.

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In the foreword to Labour's new policy paper, Jeremy Corbyn characterises the party's vision for development as "a progressive, outward-looking, global view, driven by social justice and human rights". So far, so expected.

For those who remember the Blair-Brown era of Make Poverty History, the most exciting shift isthe plan to tackle rising inequalities alongside the more familiar focus on reducing poverty, treating inequality and poverty as two sides of the same coin.

Speaking at the launch, Kate Osamor, shadow secretary of state for international development, described inequality as, "the challenge of our lifetime".

Five priorities are set out: a fairer global economy; a global movement for public services; a feminist approach to development; building peace and preventing conflict; and action for climate justice and ecology.

Dismissing the current Conservative government's approach as stemming from charity rather than social justice, the paper emphasises what is universal - what people want and need in the UK, people need and want everywhere - and argues for an international development policy that seeks to transform the status quo.

The radical ambition of Corbyn's team is clear in the intention to "redistribute power to the people" and the title: "A World For The Many Not The Few". But will it be embraced by the centre?

Underpinning the paper is the belief that poverty is not natural, but human-made as a result of the existing economic system.

It proposes democratising key international economic governance institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, to ensure countries in the global south have a greater voice in the decisions affecting them - a tough ask, especially with Brexit and Donald Trump in the mix, but long overdue.

Again, the call to end the tax evasion that deprives southern countries of resources crucial for development is not new, but the political will to tackle UK-controlled tax havens seems stronger than in Cameron's golden thread.

In a fairer international trade system with well-regulated business, it says, low-income countries will be able to "build their tax base and ease their debt burdens"to develop themselves.

The rebalancing theme is evident in the call for an international commission to explore the possibility of a global wealth tax, as suggested by economist Thomas Piketty and a review of patents so that poorer countries can access the drugs and technologies they need.

Greens will like the emphasis on a more ecological economy, living within planetary boundaries, and the interest in finding alternatives to GDP as a measure for economic progress. They will note the divestment from fossil fuels in favour of decentralised, publicly owned renewable energy.

The report backs freely accessible, high quality public services such as health, education and social services, flagging years of failed policy in these areas.

Following the lead set by Sweden and Canada, the report calls for a feminist approach to development. It argues that achieving gender equality requires taking on ingrained patriarchy, not just tackling issues like child marriage or female genital mutilation in isolation. The gender pay gap gets a topical mention as embedding inequality in every country in the world. Much will depend on the promise to triple funding to grassroots organisations.

The importance given to local ownership and civil society action is encouraging.

Noting the threat to development from a recent rise in conflicts, terror attacks and forced displacement, it reintroduces Robin Cook's " ethical foreign policy ", as the answer to "viable, long-term solutions to crisis and conflict".

As the vision is broader than the focus on aid that so preoccupies much public debate on development, the biggest implementation challenge will be the cooperation it would entail across government ministries.

The ambition is likely to be well received by many frustrated at the current rather battered state of development policy, further fatigued by the recent safeguarding scandals, even if many a promise can be made in opposition.

Some would want to see more on research and digital futures. Many will welcome the greater inclusion of southern voices and especially the twin goals of tackling rising inequalities alongside poverty reduction. But truly transforming the world order requires root and branch reform - tough to imagine with some current world leaders still in place.

Fans of growth-first, trickle-down economics won't be surprised to be disappointed.
Topics

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department for international development (dfid)

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Jeremy Corbyn puts new focus on inequality but the old challenges loom

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In the foreword to Labour's new policy paper, Jeremy Corbyn characterises the party's vision for development as "a progressive, outward-looking, global view, driven by social justice and human rights". So far, so expected.

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unctad.org | Digital economy data gap risks widening inequalities, UNCTAD says

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unctad.org | Digital economy data gap risks widening inequalities, UNCTAD says

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Digital inequalities policies must tailor their interventions to the problems, needs, and outcomes of specific vulnerable groups if they are to move beyond good intentions and achieve real socioeconomic change, writes Ellen Helsper (LSE Department of Media and Communications).

Latin America is digitising at a steady pace, with improved broadband infrastructure, a proliferation of e-services, and over half of its citizens online in 2017. Yet, it continues to fall behind Europe, North America, and Australasia on indicators such as the International Telecommunications Union's ICT Development Index and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's PISA measures for digital literacy.

Part of the problem is a failure to link digital agendas and digital-inclusion interventions to specific socio-economic and socio-cultural outcomes, as it is this that would allow citizens to hold governments to account for tackling digital and traditional inequalities alike.

Much as in Europe, Latin American policies assume socio-economic and socio-cultural benefits from improved access and skills training, but beyond increased use of the internet or ICTs, they fail to specify targets for specific disadvantaged groups.

The region would benefit from stronger evidence-based policymaking, as well as evaluation based on definitions and theoretical models that trace links between digital and social inequalities, yet only Uruguay's digital agenda explicitly focuses on generating the kinds of statistics that would allow for this.

Definitions of digital inequalities make a difference to policy

In societies that are rapidly digitising, inequalities in engagement with ICTs matter because degrees of digital inclusion impact on economic, social, cultural, and personal well-being.

How this inclusion is defined is important because it influences how policies and interventions are designed, which types get priority, and which get funded, determining in turn who gets the benefits and who gets left out.

As I have recently argued, policies and interventions can only be effective in generating greater equality if they incorporate four key elements for all citizens:

High quality access to infrastructure, devices, and software

The ability to access, engage with, and produce content

Availability of content tailored to the needs of all citizens

Opportunities to translate digital engagement into beneficial outcomes

Europe is considered a global leader in this area, with infrastructure, access, and skill interventions. But my analysis of European policy shows that these focus narrowly on technical, information-navigation, and advanced skills such as coding.

Since all aspects of public and private life are being digitised, issues with communication or networking (e.g. netiquette, safe interactions), and lower level content-creation skills (e.g. creating and sharing images and documents) must also be stimulated to allow citizens to translate use of ICTs into beneficial outcomes.

The most important takeaway from this framework is that in order to reduce socio-digital inequalities, initiatives need to start from an understanding of the (non-digital) outcomes they aim to achieve and then be held accountable for their progress towards associated targets.

This means embedding digital inclusion in a number of different policy and regulation areas that deal with social challenges, as well as understanding which types of access, skills, and use (i.e. content) are most likely to help different groups to improve their situation.

The state of digital inclusion in Latin America

In Latin America, digital inclusion has been on the political agenda since 2000 when the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean initiated a regional dialogue on the Information and Knowledge Society in order to construct coordinated Digital Agendas.

The commonly held assumption is that Latin American policies lag behind European policies, focusing only on infrastructure or access provision, as with the much-hyped, much-maligned "one laptop per child" programmes. But if we analyse these policies using the definition above, it becomes clear that this is not an entirely accurate depiction.

The table above shows the characteristics of digital inequalities policies in five Latin American countries: Uruguay and Chile were selected because they were considered regional leaders in this area; Brazil and Mexico because they are large, highly unequal countries; and Argentina because it will be the chairing the OECD and has recently implemented changes in its policy.

Figure 2 shows that most policies include targets for better access and skills as important indicators of success, but only Uruguay includes specific and broad objectives on awareness of the benefits and risks of ICT use.

However, few specify the particular problems of particular groups that will be alleviated by access to and skilled use of ICTs. Skills are discussed in a generic, technical sense as drivers of employment with little clarity on how this will occur (especially in Chile).

Some policies (Mexico, and to some extent Chile and Uruguay) identify groups and their specific challenges, and most identify problems with digital inclusion in terms of access and skills, but Uruguay's approach for the vulnerable elderly is the only case of linkage to group-specific targets.

Brazil suggests that civil society organisations in direct contact with digitally marginalised groups should play an important role, but specifics are absent.

No policy indicates that success will be measured by an increase in socioeconomic or sociocultural wellbeing. And of course these are just policies, which cannot guarantee implementation or real, cross-sector stakeholder involvement.

The vital link between policies and socioeconomic outcomes

This disconnect between digital and socioeconomic ambitions matters, because governments need to be held accountable for outcomes: not how many people have done skills training or used the internet, but how many individuals of specific vulnerable groups have achieved certain tangible beneficial outcomes as a result of this access and engagement.

Policies and interventions that are not explicitly designed with this in mind risk amplifying existing inequalities: those who are already advantaged are most likely to exploit new access and training opportunities.

The truth is that Latin America's digital agendas are not much better than their slightly more elaborate European counterparts: a lot of grand words and good intentions, but also a lack of accountability in terms of what really matters. Namely, decreasing socioeconomic and digital inequalities.

Notes:
* The views expressed here are of the authors and do not reflect the position of the Centre or of the LSE
* UNCS Disclaimer: The designations employed and the presentation of material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Dotted line represents approximately the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir agreed upon by India and Pakistan. The final status of Jammu and Kashmir has not yet been agreed upon by the parties. Final boundary between the Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan has not yet been determined. Final status of the Abyei area is not yet determined. A dispute exists between the Governments of Argentina and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland concerning sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas).
* Figure 2 methodology: The scores were constructed by summing scores on separate items, with a max of 4 points if the policy mentioned the element and was specific in relation to the target to be achieved, 0 points when this was not mentioned at all, 1 point when it wasn't explicitly mentioned but implied, and 3 points when it was explicitly mentioned but no specific targets were given or only a very narrow range of social issues/beneficiaries was mentioned. Categories were: access (increasing speed, integrating platforms for services; cost reduction; access to internet in general; ubiquitous access in CTCs, libraries, schools; accessibility; archiving cultural heritage), skills (general mention; formal education in schools/centres; formal certification [on-the-job] training; stimulating informal learning); awareness campaigns (internet benefits; social risks; data risks); content/platforms for target groups (SME; payment systems; children; disabled; elderly; unemployed/poor; women/girls; rural areas).
* Please read our Comments Policy before commenting

Ellen Helsper - LSE Department of Media and Communications
Dr Ellen Helsper is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her current research interests include new media audiences; digital inclusion; mediated interpersonal communication; and quantitative and qualitative methodological developments in media research.

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Digital inequalities policies in Latin America are mostly words and little accountability, just like in Europe | LSE Latin America and Caribbean

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Digital inequalities policies must tailor their interventions to the problems, needs, and outcomes of specific vulnerable groups if they are to move beyond good intentions and achieve real socioeconomic change, writes Ellen Helsper (LSE Department of Media and Communications).

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Many people insist we are now a society which operates on information overload, too much information and too little time.

Some might argue that writers, bloggers, and social media fanatics add to the problem of overload. Many of the top social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn rely heavily on carefully constructed sharing methodologies as well as specific algorithms for feeding information to friends, followers, or connections. Much of this might be an attempt to minimize redundancy and maximize interest, and some of it is to please shareholders through advertising, post boosts, and other pay-for-display promotions.

Do you feel overloaded?
Information Overload
Today knowing the answer to nearly any question is perhaps just a cell phone away. While there are many aspects related to how each individual person might manage their own information a few of the most common points of consideration include what we read, what we watch or listen to, and how we store what we want to remember. Some might suggest that there isn't as much need for memory. Today you only need to know how to search for it and retrieve it quickly. Perhaps the development team for the IBM Watson would agree.
The Right Information
Many of us want to be sure we find the right information. We jump on "the internet" and choose a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and away we go. Suddenly we have millions of possible results based on our simple search words. How do we know what information to use or believe? Since I'm assuming you are not researching for an academic paper, or a master or doctoral thesis, you might be able to utilize just a few simple tips to help you narrow your search.

1. State your problem. You must know and understand exactly what problem you are seeking additional information about.

2. State your goal. Finding a picture and some information about a strange bug you saw on the sidewalk is different from building research data for a marketing strategy. Have a clear goal.

3. Watch for push. So many people are pushing information at you, often trying to entice you for more. Balance all of the push information with pull information. Pull information is what you find and pull towards you. Push is someone else shoving it your way.

4. Get specific. This one is simple, the more you refine your search parameters the less information you'll retrieve. Filter what you want to see, read, watch, listen to, and otherwise take in.

5. Verify sources. Academically this is absolutely critical, but again if you aren't writing an academic paper or a book based on research you can relax your standards somewhat, regardless look for knowledgeable and trusted resources.

6. Limit choices. Today, without a doubt you find more than what you can digest. Balance is the key to obtaining more information but not becoming overwhelmed by too much.

We can add many other things to this list such as not believing everything that you read or conspiracy theories that insist others are attempting to alter your state of mind. The list is certainly long, some of it might be true, some of it might be made up, but the key is not to get overwhelmed.

One last thing to consider for improving the use of your time and for minimizing information overload, if you are sharing information with others use links and share buttons, instead of recreating or cutting and pasting information, and in your office consider the effect of courtesy copy or blind courtesy copy on email communication. It seems that nearly everyone wants information, but not to be overloaded.

- DEG
Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSP), and coach that specializes in helping businesses and individuals accelerate their leadership, their team, and their success. He is the author of the newly released book, Forgotten Respect Navigating A Multigenerational Workforce. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.

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Are You Suffering From Information Overload? - Dennis Gilbert - Medium

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Many people insist we are now a society which operates on information overload, too much information and too little time. Some might argue that writers, bloggers, and social media fanatics add to the problem of overload.

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This article has the tone of story after participating in the Security Leader RIO 2017 as a speaker and debater.

The event, already traditional in the Brazilian calendar, seems to have arrived in good time. The Windsor Copacabana was literally crowded on the morning of April 27 when the monitors scattered through space already revealed the themes of lectures and debates. In the agenda of the day a varied menu that counted on investigation of cybercrime; breach of secrecy and privacy; safety in the workspace; cloud protection; threats and predictive methods; digital transformation; Industry 4.0; cognitive computing; risk appetite; Internet of Things; exercises of futurology and the long awaited National Information Security Policy. Definitely a day surrounded by interesting subjects and people with the purpose of thinking collectively about the dilemmas and gaps that permeate the routine of the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and the other executives' nightmares.

It turns out that at some point, after seeing the vision of different people representing different roles such as supplier, consumer or simply thinker, and still varying in breadth of vision from the most strategic top to the most operational base, I noticed evidence of a mismatch about what the roles, responsibilities, and real complexity imposed by current information security risk management really are.

Immediately I remembered the book based on an old Indian fable and written by Ed Young, a Chinese born in 1931, named SEVEN BLANK MICE. The fable describes the routine of seven blind mice deciding to go out, one by one, to check out what was the strange thing they found near the pond, each returning with a different response. The red mouse thought it was a pillar. The orange mouse exclaimed to be a fan. The blue mouse claimed to be a snake. The next three mice also came back, each with a different idea. Until the last mouse upon returning and realizing that his perception did not resemble anything that the others had felt as well, he decided to coordinate the mess and collectively to hear each idea together to conclude that it was an elephant.

It was in this way that I realized the subject of information security being addressed throughout the day, lecture after lecture, debate after debate. Technical, tactical and strategic visions mixed by shooting in appliances, tunnelling, protocols, performance indexes, steganography, malware, zero day vulnerabilities, botnets, honeypot, deep web, BYOD, user behavior, rules for contracting cloud services, fear of the cloud, cloud types, cloud future - by the way, let's stop talking about cloud as if it were an E.T. Cloud service is a no-return path, just set your security requirements and hire the one that caters to you - plus intelligence artificial, cognitive computing and GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation). All legitimate views and purposes, it is true, but without seeming to be linked to a holistic, comprehensive view and attacking the imminent problem: the LIQUID INFORMATION of a liquid society, paraphrasing the concept established by Zygmunt Bauman.

For the author, we live in a time marked by the flexibility that causes a certain fragility as our relationships about things or people. This liquid society is compared to water because this natural element has the potential to change its shape according to its container.

We need to assume the liquefaction of information.

If we stop to reflect on the concept for a moment establishing a connection analogous to the knowledge society and the power of information, we will see great similarity. Let's see... The planet is totally interconnected and by fast paths. At the ends of these tracks are formerly only electronic devices or simply information technology equipment, but already coexist in exponential growth with physical-electro-mechanical devices or simply equipment of operation technology. IoT or Internet of Things is shipping connectivity and processing power into just about anything after it has overcome the barriers of miniaturization, power capacity, and the limits of communication. Still at the ends of the same pathways, we have people. People who live socially, but who have their habits changed in relation to devices and information in a general way. Devices that handle, store, transport, and dispose of information will be everywhere. We will be able to interact with things, talk to them, ask them for information, dress them and even ingest them. We will live virtualization to the extreme. We will no longer know where the information will be, what it will be doing with it, how, where, when, or who, if we simply continue to adopt the same perimeter-based security mechanisms that have lasted for decades!

We need to assume the liquefaction of information. Understand that there is no more boundary, time and space. We need to think about providing information about mechanisms of self-protection and self-management. Embark intelligence in the information itself so that, following rules defined by its owners regarding handling, storage, transportation and disposal, they themselves can decide where to go, how to go, with whom to go, when to go, or even when to remain confidential, entire and available.

Imagine the possibility that information, in the form of a data file, refuses to be handled, stored, transported or discarded just because the security policy established by its owner prohibits it?

Forget the concept that information acquires security by transferring trust in interlocutors, people, machines or systems. This border also no longer exists. The world needs interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, the ability to operate in real time, modularity and service orientation. If we study the evolution of security concepts in the last 20 years, we will see exactly this movement of decentralization, from CPD to end-point, as with banking services. Security has come out of the super coffers, migrated to the bank branches, then to the value transports, to the ATMs and finally to the user's mobile device. But one last step is still missing. Security must reach the last layer, the "centre of the onion": the information itself.

Security by Information

Soon scenes from the next chapters.

Att,
Marcos Semola is IT Executive, Governance, Risk and Compliance Specialist, CISM, MBA Professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, writer, speaker, VP Member of the ISACA Board of Directors, Vice-President of CyberSecurity at SmartCity Business Institute, Director of Founder Institute Rio, StartUp Mentor and Angel Investor. www.linkedin.com/in/semola | www.marcossemola.com

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SbyI: security and society of liquid information - Marcos Semola - Medium

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This article has the tone of story after participating in the Security Leader RIO 2017 as a speaker and debater. The event, already traditional in the Brazilian calendar, seems to have arrived in good time. The Windsor Copacabana was literally crowded on the morning of April 27 when the monitors scattered through space already revealed the themes of lectures and debates.

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We are a group of researchers who study the regulation of networked society. Our research focuses on how the internet is transforming the way that we communicate, and what this means for our laws and social norms. We are now more connected to each other than ever before, but our laws are not yet adapted for the digital age. Our research examines how law and policy can react to our changing society in order to promote human flourishing and innovation.

Protecting human rights online: the governance of platforms

Online platforms distribute, host, and index online content. They play a crucial role in our digital economy and culture, providing key infrastructure for people and companies to communicate and access information online. These intermediaries are increasingly being asked to enforce law and social norms, to monitor user behaviour, remove content, and censor speech.

Our research examines both the liability and the social responsibility of intermediaries as an increasingly important and powerful regulatory force in the online environment. We interrogate the balance between the pressure to enforce laws and the need for adequate safeguards for due process, freedom of speech, and innovation.

Digital copyright markets

We study information policy: how people create, share, access, and use cultural works and knowledge goods.

Access to information is crucial to enable people to learn, communicate, play, and flourish. Our research examines how our law and policy can create environments that encourage creativity and access to knowledge. We seek to harness the amazing opportunities the internet provides to improve access to information in a way that promotes equality and fairness.

A flourishing information society: knowledge and cultural commons

We research knowledge and cultural commons: cooperative approaches to creating cultural works - books, films, music, art, software, etc - that are free and open to all. These commons-based systems promise lower barriers to creating and distributing creative works and greater access to knowledge and culture. We investigate the conditions for cooperation to work and the implications for law and policy.

Regulating the sharing economy

The sharing economy is rapidly expanding with an explosion of sites that facilitate peer-to-peer sharing for goods and services. Often, these systems compete directly with existing, highly regulated markets. We study how the sharing economy works, what role regulation plays, and how policy can encourage innovation, competition, and protect consumers.

Image credits

CD, Globe, Shopping Cart by Creative Stall from the Noun Project ( CC BY 3.0)
Light Bulb by John T. Garcia from the Noun Project ( CC BY 3.0)
Header photo by Caroline Methot on Unsplash

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Building a flourishing information society - Digital Social Contract

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We are a group of researchers who study the regulation of networked society. Our research focuses on how the internet is transforming the way that we communicate, and what this means for our laws and social norms. We are now more connected to each other than ever before, but our laws are not yet adapted for the digital age.

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As users continue to delete their Facebook accounts in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a number are discovering that the social network holds far more data about them than they expected, including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages.

The #deletefacebook movement took off after the revelations that Facebook had shared with a Cambridge psychologist the personal information of 50 million users, without their explicit consent, which later ended up in the hands of the election consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook makes it hard for users to delete their accounts, instead pushing them towards "deactivation", which leaves all personal data on the company's servers. When users ask to permanently delete their accounts, the company suggests: "You may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook." It is this data dump that reveals the extent of Facebook's data harvesting - surprising even for a company known to gather huge quantities of personal information.

One user, Dylan McKay, reported that for the period October 2016 to July 2017 his logs contained "the metadata of every cellular call I've ever made, including time and duration" and "metadata about every text message I've ever received or sent".

Many other users reported unease at the data they had discovered being logged, including the contacts in their address books, their calendars, and their friends' birthdays.

Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson)
Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy.

Ben Wigham (@bmdwigham)
I had a similar issue with mine on Android. Don't have FB installed but I do use Messenger and Instagram. Interestingly they only tracked when I rang my parents and girlfriend. Have never used Messenger in regards to my parents. Weird.

Emma Kennedy (@EmmaKennedy)
I've just looked at the data files I requested from Facebook and they had every single phone number in my contacts. They had every single social event I went to, a list of all my friends (and their birthdays) and a list of every text I've sent.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson explained why contacts were uploaded. "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts," it said

"Contact uploading is optional. People are expressly asked if they want to give permission to upload their contacts from their phone - it's explained right there in the apps when you get started. People can delete previously uploaded information at any time and can find all the information available to them in their account and activity log from our Download Your Information tool."

Facebook asks users for permission to upload this sort of personal data for a number of reasons: address books, for instance, are uploaded with the understanding that it will help users find friends on the social network and help the app's algorithms work out how to prioritise different content. Messenger for Android asks for permissions to read call and SMS logs for a similar purpose.

The company notes that users can stop continuously uploading contacts and delete all their previously uploaded contacts by turning off the continuous uploading setting in the Messenger app.

Permanently deleting a Facebook account will also result in contacts no longer being uploaded and all previously uploaded contacts being deleted.

What are the Cambridge Analytica files?
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Facebook logs SMS texts and calls, users find as they delete accounts

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As users continue to delete their Facebook accounts in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a number are discovering that the social network holds far more data about them than they expected, including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages.

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In the first decade of the 20th century, Standard Oil was as mighty as the tech giants of Silicon Valley are today. The company had grown from a single refinery in Cleveland in 1863 to produce 87% of all US refined oil output. In 1911, the supreme court decided that Standard Oil was in breach of anti-trust legislation passed by Congress and ordered that the company be broken up.

Even before the data mining revelations that have engulfed Facebook, there was pressure in the US for similar action to be taken against the social media networking site and two other globally dominant companies - Google and Amazon - that have come from nowhere in the past two decades.

The argument goes like this. Data is as vital to the modern digital economy as oil was a century ago. The tech giants have the same sort of monopoly power that Standard Oil once had (Google and Facebook accounted for two-thirds of online advertising spending in the US last year and Amazon was responsible for 75% of online book sales). Mark Zuckerberg might wear chinos rather than the top hat sported by Rockefeller but a robber baron is a robber baron. It is time for anti-trust legislation to be used to break up Facebook, Google and Amazon.

The charge sheet is a long one: the tech giants are exploiting their monopoly power to stifle competition; they are spreading fake news; their fantastically-rich owners portray themselves as right-on yet go to a great deal of trouble to minimise their corporate tax bills; they are ripping the heart out of communities through the closure of bricks and mortar retailers. To the list can now be added (in Facebook's case) the harvesting of the personal data of 50 million Americans and its use for political purposes.

No question, Big Tech is more vulnerable to a backlash from Washington than it has ever been. Companies have outgrown management systems that were not designed for systemically important businesses and have used their market power to gobble up rivals. It is this charge - that the disruptive startup companies of yesteryear are today's anti-capitalists - that creates the biggest risk of anti-trust action.

Standard Oil broken up

Standard Oil's monopoly is broken up by the US supreme court. The trust which had been set up by John D Rockefeller in 1882, had gained control of nearly 90% of US oil production.

Oil industry gets close to government during war

The US joins the first world war and supplies allied forces with oil. President Woodrow Wilson appoints multiple oil executives to war-effort committees and nationalises the railways.

API created

Brought together by the war, oil executives form a trade body, the American Petroleum Institute (API) in 1919. Ten years later, another trade association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) is formed to represent smaller companies.

Second world war starts

During the second world war, the US government worked closely with the oil industry, putting a federal investigation into its monopolistic practices on hold. A peacetime version of a wartime committee becomes the National Petroleum Council, an advisory committee that exists today.

Global warming warning

API hosts renowned nuclear physicist Edward Teller at a conference at Columbia University, where he warns of impending global warming.

President Johnson warns of global warning

Lyndon B Johnson is the first US president to publicly acknowledge climate change, calling it a serious global threat during a speech.

CO2 warning

Scientists at the Stanford Research Institute deliver reports to API, warning of global warming induced by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

EPA created

President Nixon signs an executive order creating the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

CO2 research by Exxon starts

Exxon starts an internal climate research programme on carbon dioxide.

Ozone standards weakened

The EPA relaxes the standard for ozone, which contributes to smog. The move angers environmentalists and industry alike. API sues the agency.

Nasa scientist gives evidence

Nasa scientist James E Hansen testifies before Congress that the planet is warming because of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

Kyoto Protocol signed

The Kyoto protocol treaty is signed. Countries pledge to reduce greenhouse gases and recognise the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and is likely caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Paris accord signed

Some 195 countries back the Paris climate agreement, pledging efforts to reduce emissions and curb global warming.

Trump announces US exit from Paris

President Trump announces the US exit from the Paris climate agreement, citing industry-hired economists that call the accord a bad deal for US businesses. Supporting the move is Scott Pruitt, a climate-change sceptic, who Trump appointed to head the EPA.

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Those who have Facebook, Google and Amazon in their sights can draw on Adam Smith for support. In the bible of modern capitalism, the Wealth of Nations, Smith said: "To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it." Excessive market power, in other words, is bad because it thwarts progress. Old established businesses can see off potential rivals even though the new entrants might have new and better ways of doing things.

This concept - that Facebook et al are anti-capitalist explains why the pressure for anti-trust action against them is coming from both left and right - from Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, as well as from the leading Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

After all, it's said, much of the innovation that blossomed in Silicon Valley was the result of the break-up of the telephone company AT&T in 1982. AT&T saw off challengers by deciding what equipment could be used on its national network: Google does the same by using algorithms to decide what comes up on an internet search. Without government action, there was no real prospect of AT&T's stranglehold being broken and the same applies today given the market dominance of the big tech giants.

The reality is that breaking up Facebook, Google and Amazon would not be as simple as their critics think. America's anti-trust legislation is tightly defined and there is no provision for action simply because a company is deemed to be too big. What counts is whether size is being exploited to damage consumer interests.

That's going to be tricky to prove. Consumers get Google and Facebook for free, while Amazon offers books - and an array of other goods - at a discount. Nor can it be said the companies are failing to invest in new products: all three companies devote an impressive share of their turnover to R&D.

Actually, of course, consumers are not getting Google and Facebook for free. They don't have to part with hard cash but they have to accept that their online activities will be constantly monitored so that advertisers - commercial or political - can tailor ads personally for them. People are now waking up to the terms of this Faustian bargain, which is why there will be calls for a change in US competition policy to make anti-trust action easier to prosecute.

This would require an ideological shift. Americans think the reason they have a Facebook, a Google and an Amazon and the Europeans don't is that they have a more relaxed attitude towards companies growing big and powerful. The US sees winner-takes-all markets as the law of the capitalist jungle; the EU sees them as an intrinsic threat to consumers.

A twin track approach - tougher regulation of Big Tech with the threat of anti-trust action if it doesn't comply - looks likelier than an immediate recourse to break up. There are echoes here of the financial crash of a decade ago. Back then, there were calls for a new Glass Steagall act to break up the banks into retail and investment arms, as was the case from the 1930s to the 1990s. It didn't happen. The banks expressed regret and then used their considerable lobbying power to head off or water down the threat of radical reform. Politicians talked a lot tougher than they eventually acted. They should be careful not to make the same mistake again.

Topics

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Is it time to break up the tech giants such as Facebook? | Larry Elliott

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In the first decade of the 20th century, Standard Oil was as mighty as the tech giants of Silicon Valley are today. The company had grown from a single refinery in Cleveland in 1863 to produce 87% of all US refined oil output.

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Facebook's reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially without their consent, and that when Facebook found out about this, it did pathetically little. We only know this thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower. This is yet another scandal in a troubled period for the company, with a growing sense that it is all profit, no responsibility. But the current malaise goes wider than Facebook. On the internet more widely, the advertising-supported model has demanded its payout, and as a result our experience of the web is getting worse. Like rats scrambling to get back on a sinking ship, senior former-Facebookers are lining up to express regrets. It all feels too little, too late.

The problem of large corporations posing a threat to democracy is an old one. Monopolies that vest control of markets in a single person create "a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government", declared US senator John Sherman in 1890, when he introduced his eponymous act, which became the cornerstone of American competition law. Facebook looks increasingly like digital royalty, and not in a good way. It controls vast amounts of our data and curates what we read with a mysterious and mercurial flair. As the Cambridge Analytica files show, the platform appears to prioritise advertisers over users, and doesn't do enough to control how the data it collects is handled by third parties. Of course, Facebook is not the only offender: Amazon and Google have enough fingers in enough pies to make digital oligarchies a problem we can no longer ignore. But what is to be done? How could we make a platform such as Facebook less autocratic?

We need transparent and participatory approaches to rule making

In the first place, it is critical that we understand this as a systemic problem with the business model. With that in mind, we could follow Sherman's example and break up the market using anti-trust laws. But there are also ways to create alternatives from the bottom up. Governments and regulators could foster the conditions in which alternative networks with more democratic foundations could flourish.

One way to do this is to increase transparency and public participation around rule-making for digital platforms. For an example of what this means, we can look to Wikipedia. It has its problems, but it is a remarkable example of how to make decisions as a community, rather than a company. The method by which articles on Wikipedia are produced is governed by a set of rules that have been determined collectively, over time. There are arguments, there is consensus, and there is everything in between - all of which is documented for anyone to see.

Compare this with Facebook's decree that its news feed would prioritise personal stories over media content, without any apparent indication that it considered the impact on journalism. Or its equally clunky attempt to survey users about who should decide whether child-grooming content should be permitted on the platform.

The Facebook executive team is clearly unaccustomed to managing democratic processes and genuine community collaboration. But it is possible to imagine a social network where users have a say in how, for example, our daily news feed is curated, and where each choice we make isn't used by some tech giant as an opportunity to monetise our data. We need to start collaborating on the design of rules, create a culture of transparency among platforms and have discussions about what constitutes the public good. It is often said that the spaces for discussion created by social media companies are the 21st-century equivalent of the town square or public meeting. We cannot continue to leave the decisions about how to organise these to the private sector.

If we want to create alternative services and give them a chance to grow, we will need ambitious programmes of public investment. Platforms organised around the public good will need to be resourced to build a user base, and it is time we stopped pretending that venture capitalists are any kind of proper substitute for public money and oversight. There are precedents for this. Minitel in France, for example, is often scoffed at in Silicon Valley, but actually worked pretty well. Minitel was a publicly supported informatics system before the modern internet, and boomed thanks to government investment. Anyone with a French telephone line could get a Minitel monitor for free and make use of the hybrid public-private network between the late 1970s and 1990s. It looked a bit like a government information service and a bit like Craigslist, where people could access information, buy things and hang out in chatrooms without anyone using these as data farms for black-ops marketing.

We have many good reasons to be wary of governments controlling the internet. But investment in infrastructure does not have to be synonymous with state spying. Interestingly, Minitel was built in such a way that users retained a form of anonymity. There was a central money-collecting service (a bit like how the Apple store today sells books, music and streaming services). But service providers were never given an itemised bill, so they did not know who their users were.

Minitel was still centralised, however: all communications had to go through one node. So while we can learn from its example, we also need to allow people to communicate and collaborate without replicating this weakness. What this means is a return to the days before the big tech companies and spooks oversaw the concentration of web activity through central nodes. The internet began as a decentralised network, but market consolidation has effectively changed this, even if its technical underpinnings have remained unchanged. This is what pioneers including Sir Tim Berners-Lee mean when they talk about the need for a "re-decentralisation" of the web.

Modern technological capabilities mean that this objective is within our grasp. Projects such as Berners-Lee's Solid offer a glimpse of what might be possible, by allowing people to control and port their data to different services. The blockchain also has the potential - well beyond cryptocurrencies - to help people deal with each other without having to rely on a centralised platform or ledger. We have the technical capacity to chat, cooperate and trade directly with each other, without relying on private platforms that measure value in ad revenue.

"The internet's inherent value and power come from the fact that it is globally interoperable and decentralised," writes the internet freedom advocate Rebecca MacKinnon. Everybody can add value to the network, without having to get permission. The basic technical protocols that allow this kind of collaboration are still in place, but the profit motive and market centralisation have undermined their effectiveness.

We need transparent and participatory approaches to rule making, public investment in digital infrastructure that does not facilitate state snooping, and decentralised forms of data management. Without these kinds of changes, we are unable fully to make use of the enormous resources generated by a network of billions of people. We also, as the news about Facebook has made frighteningly clear, risk undermining the democratic processes that hold wealth and privilege accountable.

* Lizzie O'Shea is an Australian human rights lawyer, broadcaster and writer living in London
Topics

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Time to cut ties with the digital oligarchs and rewire the web | Lizzie O'Shea

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Facebook's reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially without their consent, and that when Facebook found out about this, it did pathetically little. We only know this thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower.

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The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has remained silent over the more than 48 hours since the Observer revealed the harvesting of 50 million users' personal data, even as his company is buffeted by mounting calls for investigation and regulation, falling stock prices and a social media campaign to #DeleteFacebook.

Facebook's shares slid 6.77% on Monday following the news, knocking $36bn off the company's valuation as investors worried about the consequences of the revelations. Zuckerberg owns 16% of the company and personally saw his fortune fall $5.5bn to $69bn, according to Forbes' live tracker of the world's wealthiest people.

The embattled social media company announced on Monday that it will engage a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analyticato determine whether or not the firm still has copies of the data in question.

The Observer reported this weekend that a company called Global Science Research (GSR) harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and sold the data to Cambridge Analytica. The New York Times reported on Saturday that Cambridge Analytica still possesses "most or all" of the harvested data. Cambridge Analytica has denied knowing that the data was obtained improperly.

"If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made," Facebook said in a statement.

The engagement of the digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg is unlikely to assuage officials in the US or UK, where lawmakers have issued calls for Zuckerberg to testify about the data breach. Representatives of Stroz Friedberg were at Cambridge Analytica's office in London on Monday evening when the UK Information Commissioner's Office asked them to leave so the authorities could pursue its own investigation, Facebook said hours after the first announcement.

On Monday, the US senator Ron Wyden sent Zuckerberg a detailed list of questions related to the breach, with a demand for answers by 13 April. Two members of the Senate judiciary committee, Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican John Kennedy, called for hearings with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google.

"It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page," said the Conservative MP Damian Collins, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee.

Referencing the government's request for Facebook's auditors to leave Cambridge Analytica's offices, Collins tweeted: "These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities."

The three social media companies testified in Washington last fall, following the revelation that their platforms had been used by foreign agents seeking to illegally influence the US presidential election. All three companies sent their general counsels, a move that was criticized at the time. It is unlikely that Zuckerberg will be able to avoid congressional questioning a second time.

Experts have long criticized Facebook's privacy practices, but their warnings have done little to dissuade users - now numbering more than 2 billion around the world - from signing up for the platform.

Whether the scandal will result in actual change in user trust of the company remains to be seen, but the hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter on Monday as users shared their intention to log off the social network for good. Others tweeted #WheresZuck, in reference to the executive's silence.

Also on Monday, the New York Times reported that Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, would be leaving the company following disagreements with other executives over the handling of the investigation into the Russian influence operation.

Stamos obliquely referenced the report on Twitter, though he did not issue a full denial, writing: "Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security."

The Times reported that Stamos' responsibilities were reassigned in December and that almost all of the 120 people on his team were transferred to other departments, but that he had agreed to remain at the company through August.

"Alex Stamos continues to be the chief security officer (CSO) at Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "He has held this position for nearly three years and leads our security efforts especially around emerging security risks. He is a valued member of the team and we are grateful for all he does each and every day."

Stamos is one of a small handful of Facebook executives who addressed the data harvesting scandal on Twitter over the weekend while Zuckerberg and Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said nothing.
Topics

Mark Zuckerberg

The Cambridge Analytica Files

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Where's Zuck? Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds

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The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has remained silent over the more than 48 hours since the Observer revealed the harvesting of 50 million users' personal data, even as his company is buffeted by mounting calls for investigation and regulation, falling stock prices and a social media campaign to #DeleteFacebook.

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Alan Gould was hitting a wall. It was the late 1990s, and the political advertising operative had an idea about using a relatively newfangled tool - banner ads on web sites - to promote political candidates. "It was pretty clear to me at the time that the ability to target and tailor messaging was perfect for political campaigns," Gould recalled recently. "I did a whole presentation on the internet and the power to connect, track, do fundraising, target."

But when Gould finished his pitches, he would be met with blank stares. "I was a very lonely pied piper," he says.

Finally, in 1998, Gould found a political candidate who was so far behind in the polls, and so strapped for cash, that he was willing to take a risk and spend $100,000 on banner ads on the New York Times homepage. Peter Vallone, then a New York City council member challenging George Pataki for the governorship, gave Gould the green light for an ad buy that has since entered the history books as the first significant use of online advertising in a political campaign.

The ads themselves are lost to internet history - Gould believes he may have copies somewhere on floppy discs. But it's not hard to draw a line from that moment to Robert Mueller's 16 February indictment of the Internet Research Agency, which alleges that Russian agents carried out a conspiracy to interfere with a US presidential election, in large part by purchasing targeted Facebook ads designed to "encourage US minority groups not to vote".Or to the news recently revealed in the Observer that 50m Facebook profiles were obtained and misused by data mining company Cambridge Analytica to target voters during the 2016 presidential election.

The Vallone ads contained rudimentary versions of many of the attributes that make digital advertising such a powerful - and terrifying - force today: the ability to target specific audiences with tailored messages, then track their reaction.

"Come November 2000, I expect the question will no longer be whether web-based political advertising works," wrote Cyrus Krohn, then the manager of political advertising for the Microsoft Network, in a prescient 1999 column for Slate, "but whether it works too well."

Nearly 20 years later, the world has caught up to Krohn's concerns, with some critics making the not entirely hyperbolic argument that micro-targeted "dark advertising" on Facebook is a fundamental threat to democracy itself. Is it too late for democracy to fix itself?

Game-changing

In February, Donald Trump named Brad Parscale as his 2020 re-election campaign manager. The decision lends credence to what Parscale has been saying for the past year: that his Facebook advertising operation won Trump the election.

Parscale had been a little-known digital marketing executive working out of Texas when he was tapped to build Trump's campaign website in 2015. Until then, digital advertising was barely a rounding error in campaign budgets. In 2008, the year Barack Obama became the first social media candidate, candidates spent just $22.25m on online political ads, according to an analysis by Borrell Associates. That number grew significantly in 2012, but the real explosion came in 2016, when campaigns pumped $1.4bn into digital ads.

US presidential campaigns are often remembered - and understood - by their advertisements. Lyndon B Johnson's " Daisy" ad powerfully (and controversially) set the stakes of an election in a nuclear world. George HW Bush's " Willie Horton " attack ad still epitomizes the racist dog-whistle politics of the tough-on-crime era. The message, as much as the messenger, is a key part of the debate over who is best equipped to lead the country.

But no such public debate took place around Trump's apparently game-changing digital political advertisements before election day.

This is partly due to a loophole in the prevailing campaign finance law, which was written in 2002 and did not include internet ads in the class of regulated "electioneering communications". But perhaps even more important is the very nature of online advertising, which is self-serve (just sign up with a credit card and go) and highly iterative.

Parscale claims he typically ran 50,000 to 60,000 variations of Facebook ads each day during the Trump campaign, all targeting different segments of the electorate. Understanding the meaning of a single one of those ads would require knowing what the ad actually said, who the campaign targeted to see that ad, and how that audience responded. Multiply that by 100 and you have a headache; by 50,000 and you'll start to doubt your grasp on reality. Then remember that this is 50,000 a day over the course of a campaign that lasted more than a year.

"The reason I said it might work too well," Krohn said in a recent interview with the Guardian, "is that mass marketing went away and micro-targeting - nano-targeting - came to fruition."

Any candidate using Facebook can put a campaign message promising one thing in front of one group of voters while simultaneously running an ad with a completely opposite message in front of a different group of voters. The ads themselves are not posted anywhere for the general public to see (this is what's known as "dark advertising"), and chances are, no one will ever be the wiser.

That undermines the very idea of a "marketplace of ideas", says Ann Ravel, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who has long advocated stricter regulations on digital campaigning. "The way to have a robust democracy is for people to hear all these ideas and make decisions and discuss," Ravel said. "With microtargeting, that is not happening."

Parscale and his staff told reporters with Bloomberg that they used Facebook ads to target Hillary Clinton supporters with messages designed to make them sit the election out, including her own forays into dog-whistle politics from the 1990s, which the Trump campaign hoped would discourage black voters from turning out to the polls.

That degree of political manipulation might be unsavory, but it's also relatively old-fashioned. One digital campaign staffer (not affiliated with the Trump campaign) compared it to Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, only "technologically savvy".

But new reporting by the Observer has revealed that the data analytics team that worked for Trump, Cambridge Analytica, went far beyond Nixonian dirty tricks. The firm obtained Facebook data harvested under the auspices of an academic study, the Observer has revealed, and then used that data to target millions of US voters based on their psychological weaknesses.

"We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles," whistleblower Christopher Wylie told the Observer about the data theft, "and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons."

European elections

Political advertising in the US is the wild west compared with other western democracies, which tend to have shorter election campaigns with strict regulations on the amount and type of spending permitted. Such rules may enhance the impact of digital advertising, which is much cheaper than television and largely unregulated.

The UK has seen a rapid shift to digital campaigning following the Conservative party's embrace of Facebook in the 2015 general election. The Tories outspent Labour by a factor of 10 on Facebook advertisements, a decision that many political observers saw as decisive. In a country that bans political ads on television, Facebook enabled the Conservatives to reach 80.65% of users in targeted constituencies with its promoted posts and video ads, according to marketing materials created by Facebook. (At some point in the past year, the company began hiding previously produced "Success Stories" about its ability to sway election results.)

The Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum went on to spend almost its entire budget on Facebook advertising, an investment that resulted in about 1bn targeted digital ads being served to voters over the course of a 10-week campaign.

Though it is impossible to parse the exact impact of Facebook advertisements amid all the other factors that shape an electoral result (including organic Facebook content), the platform is increasingly cited as a factor in the growing electoral might of far-right groups in Europe.

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Supporters of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party demonstrate outside the Chancellery in Berlin last week. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (

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'It might work too well': the dark art of political advertising online

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Alan Gould was hitting a wall. It was the late 1990s, and the political advertising operative had an idea about using a relatively newfangled tool - banner ads on web sites - to promote political candidates. "It was pretty clear to me at the time that the ability to target and tailor messaging was perfect for political campaigns," Gould recalled recently.

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False news is more novel than true news, and that may be why we share the false much faster and more widely. Prominent responses to false news include surprise, fear and disgust. True news tends to be met with sadness, joy, anticipation and trust. Humans are more likely than automated processes to be responsible for the spread of fake news.

These insights emerge from a large and impressive study published on 9 March in the journal Science. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, interested in how and why true and false news stories spread differently, used 126,000 stories that had been tweeted by 3 million people a total of 4.5m times. The data spanned 2006, when Twitter began, to 2017.

The study is unsettling reading, especially in light of what has so far emerged from US intelligence agencies, congressional inquiries and the special prosecutor Robert Mueller about use of social media to distort the 2016 presidential election. I hope the research helps to persuade more people that fake news powered by social media is a serious threat to all democracies' health. A growing bundle of studies shows that this is a qualitatively and quantitatively new problem, not just a digital manifestation of the yellow press of old. Apart from effects on elections and referendums, fake news in social media can assist hate speech to turn into communal violence more quickly. And some government responses are troubling on free-speech grounds, such as Sri Lanka's week-long ban on social media, or "digital curfew".

More openness by the social media giants and greater collaboration with suitably qualified partners is essential

The MIT researchers studied what they called "rumour cascades". A cascade starts with a Twitter user making an assertion about a topic - with words, images or links - and continues in an unbroken chain of retweets. The researchers analysed cascades about news stories that six fact-checking organisations agreed were true or agreed were false. The study found that "falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than truth in all categories of information". False political news reached more people faster and went deeper into their networks than any other category of false information.

The study compared the emotional content of replies to true and false rumours by using about 32,000 Twitter hashtags and a lexicon of about 140,000 English words that associate with eight basic emotions: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy and disgust. Were automated processes, or "bots", the main culprits in spreading falsity? No - the researchers found, it's humans.

Calling for more effort to identify the factors in human judgment that spread true and false news, including interviews with users, surveys, lab experiments and neuroimaging, the paper points to some obvious reasons to look deeper. "False news can drive misallocation of resources during terror attacks and natural disasters, the misalignment of business investments, and misinformed elections."

Two features of this study, besides its published results, are heartening. Artificial intelligence was successfully deployed to good effect, for example, a bot-detection algorithm. And Twitter provided access to its data, some funding, and shared its expertise. The researchers have conditionally offered to share their dataset.

More openness by the social media giants and greater collaboration by them with suitably qualified partners in tackling the problem of fake news is essential. Traditional journalism organisations are potential partners too. They find, check and disseminate news, are well placed to assess veracity, attract masses of comment online and discussion on social media platforms, and have a clear incentive to maintain trust in their own contributions to democratic life.

A Guardian podcast released on 16 March includes more detail about the MIT study, including an interview with one of its authors.

Paul Chadwick is the Guardian's readers' editor

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Why fake news on social media travels faster than the truth | Paul Chadwick

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Good journalism is needed more than ever to counter rumours undermining democracy, writes Guardian readers' editor Paul Chadwick

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I found Moya Sarner's article on digital addiction and her story of Lady Geek's reverse ferret from digital guru to prophet of doom absorbing, timely, and somehow familiar (Is it time to fight the digital dictators?, 15 March). She also quotes Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University as having invented the term "technological addiction" in 1995. In 1971 I started a degree in maths, electronics and physics at Chelsea College, University of London which involved a certain amount of programming on the college's Elliott 803 mainframe.

I remember clearly our lecturer warning us very sternly about the dangers of getting over-involved in programming, quoting the case of an earlier student who had spent so many nights in the computer room, addicted to getting his programs just-so, that he neglected all his other studies and eventually failed to make progress in anything. Remember that this was back in the days when our programs were written in Fortran on decks of hand-punched 80-column cards.

Throughout my career as an IT consultant (and teacher of system developers and designers) I have been very wary of the addictive qualities associated with the immediate feedback and dopamine stimulation of all digital devices. As a result, I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account, my smartphone is mostly just used as a phone, and my tablet is mainly used to read the Guardian (and if that's an addiction, I'm happy with that).
Dave Smith
Dunning, Perthshire

* Ivana Bartoletti's case ( Women must act now, or male-designed robots will take over our lives, 14 March) would be much stronger if she provided some concrete indications of bias in actual search engine algorithms, and proposed specific algorithmic modifications to "correct" bias confirmation or embody "intersectional thinking". Instead, it seems much more likely that any bias lies in the source materials and those who produce and use them.

There is an old adage in computing circles that goes by the acronym GIGO: it means "garbage in, garbage out". In 1864 Charles Babbage wearily remarked that he had twice been asked "Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" That the vast majority of the biggest companies (with the most optimised websites and the deepest information reach) have male CEOs is not the fault of search engines which produce photos of men whenever "CEO" is entered in an image search.

Tay was not unlike the 1960s Eliza in that it basically repeated and rearranged verbal input for its responses. In Tay's case, Twitter users deliberately tried to subvert Microsoft's chatbot. And the "unprofessional hair" search results included many articles critical of bigoted attitudes against black hair styles. Most of the top hits now concern the story about the original search results.

We cannot blame tools for unpleasant characteristics of society. Indeed, ascribing responsibility so superficially shields us from realising the need for deeper societal change.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
Topics

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I found Moya Sarner's article on digital addiction and her story of Lady Geek's reverse ferret from digital guru to prophet of doom absorbing, timely, and somehow familiar (Is it time to fight the digital dictators?, 15 March).

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The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn't yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I'd already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he's 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain's EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump's election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating " Steve Bannon 's psychological warfare mindfuck tool".

In 2014, Steve Bannon - then executive chairman of the "alt-right" news network Breitbart - was Wylie's boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica's investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology - "information operations" - then turn it on the US electorate.

It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined "The great British Brexit robbery", which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. "I haven't talked about this to anyone," he said at the time. And then he couldn't stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump's chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. "It's insane," he told me one night. "The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It's like Nixon on steroids."

He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May,it was revealed that the company had "reached out" to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton's stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.

The also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was "information warfare". But Wylie offers a unique, worm's-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US's democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

"We 'broke' Facebook," he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

"Is it fair to say you 'hacked' Facebook?" I ask him one night.

He hesitates. "I'll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board."

Last month, Facebook's UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): "Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?"

Simon Milner: "No."

Matheson: "But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook's user data, don't they?"

Milner: "No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided."

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix: "Does any of the data come from Facebook?" Nix replied: "We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data."

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that - at least in 2014 - that certainly wasn't the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters - records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook's own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.

Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.

It's taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it's possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic - Robert Mueller's in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after the's first article in this investigation.

It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind - to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner's Office and the National Crime Agency's cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold.

There are many points where this story could begin. One is in 2012, when Wylie was 21 and working for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, then in government as junior coalition partners. His career trajectory has been, like most aspects of his life so far, extraordinary, preposterous, implausible.

Profile
Cambridge Analytica: the key players

Alexander Nix, CEO
An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. From 2007 he took over the company's elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from Robert Mercer.
Aleksandr Kogan, data miner
Aleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA's data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan.
Steve Bannon, former board member
A former investment banker turned "alt-right" media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. In August 2016 he became Donald Trump's campaign CEO. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the "populist, economic nationalist" agenda that would carry him into the White House. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out.

Robert Mercer, investor
Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax.

Rebekah Mercer, investor
Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father's billions. The fortysomething, the second of Mercer's three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump's presidential campaign.

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Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama's national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics.

"Politics is like the mob, though," he says. "You never really leave. I got a call from the Lib Dems. They wanted to upgrade their databases and voter targeting. So, I combined working for them with studying for my degree."

Politics is also where he feels most comfortable. He hated school, but as an intern in the Canadian parliament he discovered a world where he could talk to adults and they would listen. He was the kid who did the internet stuff and within a year he was working for the leader of the opposition.

It showed these odd patterns. People who liked 'I hate Israel' on Facebook also tended to like KitKats

"He's one of the brightest people you will ever meet," a senior politician who's known Wylie since he was 20 told me. "Sometimes that's a blessing and sometimes a curse."

Meanwhile, at Cambridge University's Psychometrics Centre, two psychologists, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, were experimenting with a way of studying personality - by quantifying it.

Starting in 2007,Stillwell, while a student, had devised various apps for Facebook, one of which, a personality quiz called myPersonality, had gone viral. Users were scored on "big five" personality traits - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism - and in exchange, 40% of them consented to give him access to their Facebook profiles. Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook "likes" across millions of people.

The research was original, groundbreaking and had obvious possibilities. "They had a lot of approaches from the security services," a member of the centre told me. "There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked 'I hate Israel' on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.

"There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat."

The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research. Boeing, a major US defence contractor, funded Kosinski's PhD and Darpa, the US government's secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is cited in at least two academic papers supporting Kosinski's work.

But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the Lib Dems. It is fair to say that he didn't have a clue what he was walking into.

"I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century," Wylie explains. "And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it's weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data.

"And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they're absent-minded professors and hippies. They're the early adopters... they're highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden."

Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren't interested.

"I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: 'Why are you so pessimistic?' They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI."

Another Lib Dem connection introduced Wylie to a company called SCL Group, one of whose subsidiaries, SCL Elections, would go on to create Cambridge Analytica (an incorporated venture between SCL Elections and Robert Mercer, funded by the latter). For all intents and purposes, SCL/Cambridge Analytica are one and the same.

Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn't resist. "He said: 'We'll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.'"

In the history of bad ideas, this turned out to be one of the worst. The job was research director across the SCL group, a private contractor that has both defence and elections operations. Its defence arm was a contractor to the UK's Ministry of Defence and the US's Department of Defense, among others. Its expertise was in "psychological operations" - or psyops -changing people's minds not through persuasion but through "informational dominance", a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.

SCL Elections had used a similar suite of tools in more than 200 elections around the world, mostly in undeveloped democracies that Wylie would come to realise were unequipped to defend themselves.

Wylie holds a British Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa - a UK work visa given to just 200 people a year. He was working inside government (with the Lib Dems) as a political strategist with advanced data science skills. But no one, least of all him, could have predicted what came next. When he turned up at SCL's offices in Mayfair, he had no clue that he was walking into the middle of a nexus of defence and intelligence projects, private contractors and cutting-edge cyberweaponry.

"The thing I think about all the time is, what if I'd taken a job at Deloitte instead? They offered me one. I just think if I'd taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn't exist. You have no idea how much I brood on this."

A few months later, in autumn 2013, Wylie met Steve Bannon. At the time, he was editor-in-chief of Breitbart, which he had brought to Britain to support his friend Nigel Farage in his mission to take Britain out of the European Union.

What was he like?

"Smart," says Wylie. "Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He's the only straight man I've ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel."

Wylie meeting Bannon was the moment petrol was poured on a flickering flame. Wylie lives for ideas. He speaks 19 to the dozen for hours at a time. He had a theory to prove. And at the time, this was a purely intellectual problem. Politics was like fashion, he told Bannon.

If you do not respect the agency of people, anything you do after that point is not conducive to democracy

Christopher Wylie

"[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking 'Ugh. Totally ugly' to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for."

But Wylie wasn't just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: "information operations", which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military's doctrine of the "five-dimensional battle space". His brief ranged across the SCL Group - the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

I tell him that another former employee described the firm as "MI6 for hire", and I'd never quite understood it.

"It's like dirty MI6 because you're not constrained. There's no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It's normal for a 'market research company' to amass data on domestic populations. And if you're working in some country and there's an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that's just a bonus."

When I ask how Bannon even found SCL, Wylie tells me what sounds like a tall tale, though it's one he can back up with an email about how Mark Block, a veteran Republican strategist, happened to sit next to a cyberwarfare expert for the US air force on a plane. "And the cyberwarfare guy is like, 'Oh, you should meet SCL. They do cyberwarfare for elections.'"

It was Bannon who took this idea to the Mercers: Robert Mercer - the co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who used his billions to pursue a rightwing agenda, donating to Republican causes and supporting Republican candidates - and his daughter Rebekah.

Nix and Wylie flew to New York to meet the Mercers in Rebekah's Manhattan apartment.

"She loved me. She was like, 'Oh we need more of your type on our side!'"

Your type?

"The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It's why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing."

Robert Mercer was a pioneer in AI and machine translation. He helped invent algorithmic trading - which replaced hedge fund managers with computer programs - and he listened to Wylie's pitch. It was for a new kind of political message-targeting based on an influential and groundbreaking 2014 paper researched at Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre, called: "Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans".

"In politics, the money man is usually the dumbest person in the room. Whereas it's the opposite way around with Mercer," says Wylie. "He said very little, but he really listened. He wanted to understand the science. And he wanted proof that it worked."

And to do that, Wylie needed data.

How Cambridge Analytica acquired the data has been the subject of internal reviews at Cambridge University, of many news articles and much speculation and rumour.

When Nix was interviewed by MPs last month, Damian Collins asked him:

"Does any of your data come from Global Science Research company?"

Nix: "GSR?"

Collins: "Yes."

Nix: "We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no."

Collins: "They have not supplied you with data or information?"

Nix: "No."

Collins: "Your datasets are not based on information you have received from them?"

Nix: "No."

Collins: "At all?"

Nix: "At all."

The problem with Nix's response to Collins is that Wylie has a copy of an executed contract, dated 4 June 2014, which confirms that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with a company called Global Science Research (GSR), owned by Cambridge-based academic Aleksandr Kogan, specifically premised on the harvesting and processing of Facebook data, so that it could be matched to personality traits and voter rolls.

He has receipts showing that Cambridge Analytica spent $7m to amass this data, about $1m of it with GSR. He has the bank records and wire transfers. Emails reveal Wylie first negotiated to use the myPersonality database using another psychologist, Aleksandr Kogan, who communicated with Michal Kosinski, one of the co-authors of the original myPersonality research paper. But when negotiations broke down, Kogan offered a solution that many of his colleagues considered unethical. He offered to replicate Kosinski and Stillwell's research and cut them and the university out of the deal. For Wylie it seemed a perfect solution. "Kosinski was asking for $500,000 for the IP but Kogan said he could replicate it and just harvest his own set of data." (Kosinski says the fee was to fund further university research; it was not for him and Stillwell personally.)

Kogan then set up GSR to do the work, and proposed to Wylie they use the data to set up an interdisciplinary institute working across the social sciences. "What happened to that idea," I ask Wylie. "It never happened. I don't know why. That's one of the things that upsets me the most."

It was Bannon's interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie's intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer's millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan's app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends' too. On average, each "seeder" - the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total - unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people's profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn't authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What's more, under British data protection laws, it's illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.

"Facebook could see it was happening," says Wylie. "Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan's apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, 'Fine'."

Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a "close working relationship" with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.

Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next - how it extracted psychological insights from the "seeders" and then built an algorithm to profile millions more.

For more than a year, the reporting around what Cambridge Analytica did or didn't do for Trump has revolved around the question of "psychographics", but Wylie points out: "Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn't you use it in your biggest campaign ever?"

In December 2015, the Guardian's Harry Davies published the first report about Cambridge Analytica acquiring Facebook data and using it to support Ted Cruz in his campaign to be the US Republican candidate. But it wasn't until many months later that Facebook took action. And then, all they did was write a letter. In August 2016, shortly before the US election, and two years after the breach took place, Facebook's lawyers wrote to Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and told him the data had been illicitly obtained and that "GSR was not authorised to share or sell it". They said it must be deleted immediately.

"I already had. But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it," says Wylie. "Facebook made zero effort to get the data back."

There were multiple copies of it. It had been emailed in unencrypted files.

Cambridge Analytica rejected all allegations the Observer put to them.

Dr Kogan - who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan - is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn't know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he's received grants from the Russian government to research "Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks". The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie's stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia's second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: "We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that "they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections" but that they were "failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers". The work, he said, would be "shared with the CEO of the business", a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

"It didn't make any sense to me," says Wylie. "I didn't understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?"

Mueller's investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America's social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with "consumers". Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a "rumour campaign" spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election - in which the company worked - by spreading the idea that the "election would be rigged". The final slide, branded with Lukoil's logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its "deliverables": "psychographic messaging".

Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it's been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere - including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder - an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals - what he made of it, he said: "Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities."

Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: "We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals."

There's no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia's biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.

Cambridge Analytica is "Chris's Frankenstein", says a friend of his. "He created it. It's his data Frankenmonster. And now he's trying to put it right."

Only once has Wylie made the case of pointing out that he was 24 at the time. But he was. He thrilled to the intellectual possibilities of it. He didn't think of the consequences. And I wonder how much he's processed his own role or responsibility in it. Instead, he's determined to go on the record and undo this thing he has created.

Because the past few months have been like watching a tornado gathering force. And when Wylie turns the full force of his attention to something - his strategic brain, his attention to detail, his ability to plan 12 moves ahead - it is sometimes slightly terrifying to behold. Dealing with someone trained in information warfare has its own particular challenges, and his suite of extraordinary talents include the kind of high-level political skills that makes House of Cards look like The Great British Bake Off. And not everyone's a fan. Any number of ex-colleagues - even the ones who love him - call him "Machiavellian". Another described the screaming matches he and Nix would have.

"What do your parents make of your decision to come forward?" I ask him.

"They get it. My dad sent me a cartoon today, which had two characters hanging off a cliff, and the first one's saying 'Hang in there.' And the other is like: 'Fuck you.'"

Which are you?

"Probably both."

What isn't in doubt is what a long, fraught journey it has been to get to this stage. And how fearless he is.

After many months, I learn the terrible, dark backstory that throws some light on his determination, and which he discusses candidly. At six, while at school, Wylie was abused by a mentally unstable person. The school tried to cover it up, blaming his parents, and a long court battle followed. Wylie's childhood and school career never recovered. His parents - his father is a doctor and his mother is a psychiatrist - were wonderful, he says. "But they knew the trajectory of people who are put in that situation, so I think it was particularly difficult for them, because they had a deeper understanding of what that does to a person long term."

Facebook has denied and denied this. It has failed in its duties to respect the law

Paul-Olivier Dehaye

He says he grew up listening to psychologists discuss him in the third person, and, aged 14, he successfully sued the British Columbia Ministry of Education and forced it to change its inclusion policies around bullying. What I observe now is how much he loves the law, lawyers, precision, order. I come to think of his pink hair as a false-flag operation. What he cannot tolerate is bullying.

Is what Cambridge Analytica does akin to bullying?

"I think it's worse than bullying," Wylie says. "Because people don't necessarily know it's being done to them. At least bullying respects the agency of people because they know. So it's worse, because if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you're doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy."

Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook's role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye - a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica's processes - says it's become increasingly apparent that Facebook is "abusive by design". If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform's data flows, he says. And Wylie's revelations only move it on again.

"Facebook has denied and denied and denied this," Dehaye says when told of the Observer 's new evidence. "It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it's failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn't. It's failed time and time again to be open and transparent."

Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said: "Protecting people's information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it's a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question."

Millions of people's personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn't have seen, and couldn't have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, "would work for anyone". Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. Would they subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?

It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.

"Yes."

Nato or non-Nato?

"Either. I mean they're mercenaries. They'll work for pretty much anyone who pays."

It's an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing - at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public - our intimate family connections, our "likes", our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that's expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire.

The Facebook data is out in the wild. And for all Wylie's efforts, there's no turning the clock back.

Tamsin Shaw, a philosophy professor at New York University, and the author of a recent New York Review of Books article on cyberwar and the Silicon Valley economy, told me that she'd pointed to the possibility of private contractors obtaining cyberweapons that had at least been in part funded by US defence.

She calls Wylie's disclosures "wild" and points out that "the whole Facebook project" has only been allowed to become as vast and powerful as it has because of the US national security establishment.

"It's a form of very deep but soft power that's been seen as an asset for the US. Russia has been so explicit about this, paying for the ads in roubles and so on. It's making this point, isn't it? That Silicon Valley is a US national security asset that they've turned on itself."

Or, more simply: blowback.

Revealed: 50m Facebook profiles harvested in major data breach
How 'likes' became a political weapon

This article was amended: on 18 March 2018 to clarify the full title of the British Columbia Ministry of Education; and on 24 July 2019 to clarify details about the 2014 negotiations over possible use of the myPersonality materials.

The Observer

The Observer is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in 1791. It is published by Guardian News & Media and is editorially independent.

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'I made Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool': meet the data war whistleblower

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The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn't yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle. By the time I met him in person, I'd already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time.

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The message to investors from Spotify last week had a familiar ring for any veteran of the tech gold rush: "The trend towards profitability is clear."

The music streaming service is hoping to banish the memory of a difficult year for technology flotations. Similar promises of digital alchemy - heavy cash investment transforming into an ever-burgeoning bottom line - followed the stock-market launch of Snap last year. So far, investors in the owner of Snapchat have been underwhelmed, but last week 35-year-old Daniel Ek, Spotify's co-founder and chief executive, was adamant that his music streaming service would deliver the kind of returns that have proved elusive for tech upstarts since the blockbuster float of Facebook.

The test for Stockholm-based Spotify will come when it floats in New York on 3 April, while Dropbox, the online file storage company, is preparing to launch its initial public offering this week. Those companies must answer two simple questions: will Spotify ever go into the black and justify the near-$20bn (£14.4bn) valuation that private trades in its shares put on it; and is Dropbox really worth between $7bn and $8bn?

With both companies preparing to join US stock markets, they could determine whether investors regain their enthusiasm for new technology stocks after a disappointing year in 2017, during which Snap, meal-kit company Blue Apron and big-data business Cloudera all went for public listings - and disappointed. Shares in Snap are down a quarter since it floated - a poor performance for investors hoping it would emulate Facebook, which has risen nearly 400% since it floated in 2012. (Twitter, meanwhile, finally recorded its first quarterly profit last month, five years after going public.)

One analyst thinks the latest flotations will restore faith. "Spotify and Dropbox have a very good chance of success because the technology world is about one company dominating one sector," says Mark Mulligan, a tech analyst at Midia Research. "Spotify and Dropbox are each dominant forces in their respective sectors. Snapchat wasn't, because of the might of Facebook and its Instagram service. Snapchat is a second-tier player: Spotify and Dropbox are top-tier players. It is a completely different ballgame."

Some big names are counting on Ek and his counterpart at Dropbox, Drew Houston. Lining up behind Dropbox and Spotify are ride-hailing service Uber - given a notional value of $50bn in 2015 - and the short-term letting agency Airbnb. The former isn't profitable; the latter is. With markets jittery, both Spotify and Dropbox are working hard to push a story of future profits and growth.

On Wednesday, Spotify used a web presentation to reassure would-be investors that it has a clear path to profit, pointing out that revenues grew 39% to €4.1bn (£3.6bn) in 2017, though financing costs from a €1bn loan helped push operating losses up 8% to €378m. "The trend towards profitability is clear when you look at operating losses as a percentage of revenue," it said soothingly.

Spotify is also taking an unusual approach to its listing - going direct, so that its shares aren't handled by an investment bank or underwriters, but simply offered from the company on the exchange to would-be buyers.

Analysing that approach last year, the business magazine Fortune said: "If an IPO is like a wedding, a direct listing is running off to elope. A faster, easier, cheaper route to the same result." Of course, like an elopement, you might not get the big benefits: an IPO guarantees money from institutional buyers snapping up millions of shares. A direct listing could flop.

Others aren't so sure about Spotify's potential, based on its finances and its business model. Spotify users have the option of a free service, in exchange for listening to adverts intermittently, or paying a monthly subscription fee of £9.99, $9.99 or €9.99 for no-advert streaming. It is a compelling service with 71 million paying users, but the cost in payments to artists and record companies is huge: it has forked out $9bn in royalties since it launched.

According to one investor, Spotify's gross margin - a measure of profitability once certain costs are stripped out - is not high enough and indicates that royalty rates have to come down. "A 20% gross margin business is not a good business," says venture capitalist David B Pakman. "One of two things has to happen: they have to enter new business lines with higher gross margins, or somehow magically transform the rate structure with labels." The latter rate is how much Spotify has to pay per track streamed.

Dropbox, meanwhile, was valued at $10bn when it last raised capital in 2014, but that has been slashed to between $7bn and $8bn for its forthcoming IPO, which is intended to raise about $610m. Steve Jobs was famously dismissive of the company: in a 2009 meeting, the late Apple chief told Houston that he had "a feature, not a product". In other words: Apple or Microsoft or Google could add Dropbox's functionality - you drop a file in the folder on your PC, and it's available on your phone or tablet - to their existing software for free.

Houston shrugged off Jobs's disdain to build a company that in 2017 had 500 million users and $1.11bn in revenues. Not bad for a "feature".

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Spotify's Daniel Ek has some big startups watching his IPO closely. Photograph: Ilya S Savenok/Getty Images

So why has its notional value gone down? Partly it's the company's revenues: in the absence of profits (it made a net loss of $112m in 2017, almost halved from $210m in 2016), a typical measure of capitalisation is a five- or six-fold revenue multiple. With the company's filings showing revenues up 31% in 2017, the $7bn figure looks reasonable compared to rivals such as Box, which does the same file synchronisation but with a focus on commercial clients.

"The pricing [for Dropbox] had to come down to lure in the investors," says Phil Davis of the investment advice service Phil's Stock World. Eric Schiffer, of private equity company the Patriarch Organization, calls the pricing "a slap in the face to investors of the 2014 round".

It's therefore starting to look as though the sky-high valuations of a few years ago were mistakes born of over-optimistic expectations. In 2012, the venture capitalist Bill Gurley called Dropbox "a major disruption", saying that Houston and his team had "taken a hard problem - file synchronisation - and made it brain-dead simple". But now such synchronisation is a feature offered by almost everyone. Microsoft has OneDrive, Apple has iCloud, Google has Drive.

Dropbox's broader problem is also its biggest opportunity. Of its 500 million users (of which 100 million signed up in 2017), only about 11 million pay for its extra features, such as more storage, administrative tracking, and integration with Microsoft Office.

With only 2% of users paying, there's plenty of headroom for revenue growth: Spotify's figure of 71 million paying users from a total of 159 million is an impressive 44%. Dropbox's challenge is persuading people to flip over to paying for something they can largely get for free: Apple and Google both offer unlimited photo storage and as much free file storage as Dropbox.

So, for both companies, plenty of ancillary questions remain over these valuations. Is Dropbox really a product? Or has the march of technology turned it into just another feature? And will Spotify ever make a profit when its margins seem to be determined by its suppliers - the record labels? Investors' feelings about the answers to those questions could have a knock-on effect on many other businesses.
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Can Spotify and Dropbox finally prove that tech is a sound investment?

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The message to investors from Spotify last week had a familiar ring for any veteran of the tech gold rush: "The trend towards profitability is clear." The music streaming service is hoping to banish the memory of a difficult year for technology flotations.

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Subscribe and review: Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter & email us as podcasts@theguardian.com
People don't spread rumours any more, they spread fake news. One of the most widely used phrases throughout the 2016 US presidential election, "fake news" was named Collins dictionary's word of the year for 2017, and it's still going strong. This has left some people questioning the validity of every story that pops up on their social media feeds.

According one MIT paper, published this month in the journal Science, lies spread six times faster than the truth on Twitter. It also showed that we need to take a hard look at ourselves, as it is humans that are most likely to spread fake news - we can't just blame the bots.

But why are we so quick to believe fake news over the truth? Will this problem just get worse in the future? And is there some technological way to detect the presence of fake news before it starts to spread?

To try to figure it out, Jordan Erica Webber speaks to the MIT professor Sinan Aral and the entrepreneur Or Levi.

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Fake news is Twitter's flu: Chips with Everything podcast

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Subscribe and review: Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter & email us as podcasts@theguardian.com People don't spread rumours any more, they spread fake news. One of the most widely used phrases throughout the 2016 US presidential election, "fake news" was named Collins dictionary's word of the year for 2017, and it's still going strong.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee's optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a "nasty storm" of issues including the rollback of net neutrality protections, the proliferation of fake news, propaganda and the web's increasing polarisation.

The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity - the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee's vision for an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries" has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators.

"I'm still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence," said the British computer scientist.

"We have to grit our teeth and hang on to the fence and not take it for granted that the web will lead us to wonderful things," he said.

Quick guide
Net neutrality
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What is net neutrality?

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) treat everyone's data equally - whether that's an email from your mother, a bank transfer or a streamed episode of Stranger Things. It means that ISPs, which control the delivery pipes, don't get to choose which data is sent more quickly, or which sites get blocked or throttled (for example, slowing the delivery of a TV show because it is streamed by a video company that competes with a subsidiary of the ISP) or who has to pay extra. For this reason, some have described net neutrality as the "first amendment of the internet".

Why is net neutrality under threat?

On 14 December 2017, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to scrap regulations protecting net neutrality in America. In a 3-2 vote, the commission repealed the rules, which had been introduced by the Obama administration in 2015 to replace the patchwork of authorisations that had previously regulated the internet.

In response, a number of states vowed to introduce their own state-wide protections of net neutrality.

Who benefits from the FCC ruling?

The most obvious beneficiaries are the large ISPs, who frequently have local monopolies and have now been handed the ability to discriminate between their own services and those of competitors, and charge other companies for access or bandwidth.

But larger internet companies, such as Google or Facebook, are also likely to benefit from the decision. They stand little risk of being blocked or throttled, given how unpopular such a move would be, and can afford to pay access fees. They would also benefit from the reduced competition from smaller firms and startups, who are at risk of discrimination from ISPs.

Are there implications outside of the US?

Other nations have their own net neutrality regulations. The EU, for instance, passed a directive in 2016 guarding some key tenets of net neutrality, although allowing some controversial practices, such as "zero-rating" - declaring some sites free for the purposes of data limits.

But globally, internet users will experience the indirect effects of the US decision, since its impact on the competitive market within America's borders will ripple around the world. For some, that could even be positive: if new startups can't get traction in the US, they may decide to relocate elsewhere.

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The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people's attention.

"People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them," said Berners-Lee.

In some cases, these platforms offer users who create content a cut of advertising revenue. The financial incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with "no political skin in the game" to generate political clickbait fake news that was distributed on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google's automated advertising engine AdSense.

"The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned," said Berners-Lee, who in March called for the regulation of online political advertising to prevent it from being used in "unethical ways".

Since then, it has been revealed that Russian operatives bought micro-targeted political ads aimed at US voters on Facebook, Google and Twitter. Data analytics firms such as Cambridge Analytica, which builds personality profiles of millions of individuals so they can be manipulated through " behavioural micro-targeting", have also been criticised for creating "weaponised AI propaganda".

"We have these dark ads that target and manipulate me and then vanish because I can't bookmark them. This is not democracy - this is putting who gets selected into the hands of the most manipulative companies out there," said Berners-Lee.

It is not too late to turn things around, he said, provided people challenge the status quo.

"We are so used to these systems being manipulated that people just think that's how the internet works. We need to think about what it should be like," he said.

"One of the problems with climate change is getting people to realise it was anthropogenic - created by people. It's the same problem with social networks - they are manmade. If they are not serving humanity, they can and should be changed," he said.

Will the situation get worse before it gets better? "It already has got worse," he said, referencing the rollback of Obama-era rules to protect net neutrality.

Net neutrality, which some have described as the "first amendment of the internet", is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat everyone's data equally - whether that data consists of an email from your grandmother, an episode of Stranger Things on Netflix or a bank transfer. It ensures that the large cable ISPs, including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, don't get to choose which data is sent more quickly and which sites get blocked or throttled depending on which content providers pay a premium.

In February 2015, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to more strictly regulate ISPs as utilities and enshrine in law the principles of net neutrality. Trump's FCC, headed by the former Verizon employee Ajit Pai, wants to kill the rules, arguing that "nothing is broken" and that the rules were established over "hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom".

Berners-Lee, who is in Washington urging lawmakers to reconsider the rollback, disagrees and cites problematic examples in which ISPs have violated net neutrality principles. For example, AT&T blocked Skype and other similar services on the iPhone so it would make more money from regular phone calls. Verizon blocked Google Wallet from smartphones when it was developing a competing mobile payment service.

"When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask Vint Cerf [the 'father of the internet'] for permission to use the internet," said Berners-Lee, who previously stated that the internet should remain a "permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression".

These powerful gatekeepers, Berners-Lee said, control access to the internet and pose a threat to innovation if they are allowed to pick winners and losers by throttling or blocking services. It makes sense, therefore, that ISPs should be treated more like utilities.

"Gas is a utility, so is clean water, and connectivity should be too," said Berners-Lee. "It's part of life and shouldn't have an attitude about what you use it for - just like water."
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Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is failing'

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee's optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a "nasty storm" of issues including the rollback of net neutrality protections, the proliferation of fake news, propaganda and the web's increasing polarisation.

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"Enough is enough," said Theresa May outside 10 Downing Street after the London Bridge attack last month. "When it comes to taking on extremism and terrorism, things need to change." And one of those things was the behaviour of internet firms, which should not allow extremism a place to breed. "Yet that is precisely what the internet - and the big companies that provide internet-based services - provide," she continued.

May's speech was only the latest example of the frustration among governments with the way that the internet, and internet companies, seem to elude and ignore the rules by which everyone else has to live. From encrypted apps used by terrorists (but also by peaceful activists) to online abuse, and fake news to hacking and radicalisation, the friction between the two sides is growing. France and Germany have implemented fines for companies that allow Nazi content to remain online, while in the US the FBI demanded that Apple write software to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers, and took the firm to court when it refused.

Internet companies, meanwhile, suggest that governments should butt out because these companies control the tools that can sort out the problems. However, governments have much to say on the matter. The European commission's decision to fine Google €2.4bn (£2.1bn) for favouring its own shopping service - with decisions yet to come on its control of Android and the Google Play app store - suggest that some problems, at least, are seen as the province of legislators.

In the meantime, the public is caught in the middle: relying on both tech companies and government, and often as puzzled as the politicians why so little can be done. (In the FBI-Apple case, public opinion about which side was correct was almost evenly split; the FBI eventually dropped the case when it found another company to carry out the hack.)

Why, politicians and public ask, can't these companies give us just the benefits of digital communication, and not the downsides? It's the implication of May's remarks; it's the implication of the frosty meetings between successive home secretaries and internet executives, such as the one two weeks ago between Amber Rudd and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, who, the Sun reported, planned to "refuse MI5 access to terror plotters' encrypted messages". This makes it sound as though Sandberg could somehow personally reverse the encryption built in to WhatsApp (which Facebook owns) or Telegram (favoured by terror groups for features such as time-limited messages - and which Facebook doesn't own). She can't, or at least in WhatsApp's case to do so would render it hopelessly insecure for everything, while leaving untouched the scores of other apps using the unbottled genie of unbreakable encryption.

At this point, the word "regulation" always surfaces. Can't governments regulate the internet, or regulate the companies? The idea of a "bonfire of regulations" was popular after the Brexit vote. Following the Grenfell Tower calamity, however, the notion that regulation might actually be useful is back in vogue. If you enforce regulations for cladding, why not for videos and other content online?

To some, the idea of regulation is more complex. "Since when has the internet not been regulated? It's simply regulated poorly," says Douglas Rushkoff, a media commentator who was one of the earliest to spot the potential of the internet in the early 1990s. Back then, he says, "we cyberpunks saw the law as the enemy. They had been arresting the best of us for 'hacking' into things. Teenagers were thrown into jail in Operation Sun Devil [in 1990]. So we agreed with [ Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry] Barlow when he established the net as a government-free zone in his declaration of independence of cyberspace."

That document, published in 1996, proclaimed (with a certain pompous certainty) that the internet was a new place entirely, which would be beyond the regulatory grasp of the "weary giants of flesh and steel" and that "you [governments] have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear".

Bill Clinton's administration was happy enough to allow that idea to flourish in order to let this new avenue of commerce to grow, effectively turning the net into the equivalent of an economic free-trade zone by loosening tax laws (a move that significantly benefited Amazon, among others). Everyone was happy - for a while, at least. "What we didn't realise was that pushing government off the net made it a free for all for corporations, and a new form of digital capitalism was born," Rushkoff says.

That capitalism has enabled the rise of "winner takes all" businesses, where Google and Facebook get more than 70% of all US online advertising spending, and are increasing that share. Tick off a few names - Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter - and you have the names of the companies whose platforms control almost all of what you see online.

There are two driving forces behind any internet company: first, capture a gigantic audience that depends on your service. Second, figure out how to make money from them. Ultra-growth often comes from breaking the usual rules of business (particularly the initial need to make a profit) and exploiting loopholes in, or just ignoring, the law. Many companies operate with an underlying assumption that the law somehow doesn't apply to the internet; a number of companies have discovered belatedly that it certainly does, from Napster ( shut after court rulings) to TV re-broadcaster Aereo ( shut down after a US supreme court ruling) to Airbnb ( reined in by local rental regulations) to Uber ( reined in by city transport regulations).

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Uber's activities have attracted the ire of governments and city authorities around the world. Photograph: Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images

When it works, though, that growth creates a "network effect" (where you want to join a network because your friends are on it; you won't leave for another one because none of your friends are on that). Monetisation then draws in the money being spent in that niche, and depletes the money available for rivals, including those using old technology. Because the internet favours the nimble, smaller companies reap the early benefits, and then increase their grip by strengthening the network effect.

Is that good, though? Jaron Lanier, an internet pioneer who first espoused the idea of commercial virtual reality (in the 1990s), worried in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? that the way new companies such as Instagram use the internet is destroying the middle class by removing jobs and offering no replacement. " It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustainable," he told Salon. He pointed to Instagram, not then owned by Facebook, as having just 13 employees, and having effectively wiped out Kodak, the camera and film-maker, which had employed thousands. Where, he asked, had those thousands of jobs gone? No one quite knows.

Even as they revel in their network-reinforced positions, the big tech companies are battling with problems so big and intractable, and so far-reaching in their effects, that to find comparisons in the real world you have to look for truly global phenomena. The problems engendered by the internet have crept up on us over the years, but only recently have they seemed overwhelming. It's like a social form of climate change, and the analogy works surprisingly well.

When the indu

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Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?

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"Enough is enough," said Theresa May outside 10 Downing Street after the London Bridge attack last month. "When it comes to taking on extremism and terrorism, things need to change." And one of those things was the behaviour of internet firms, which should not allow extremism a place to breed.

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SINGAPORE - Facebook admitted it should have told users earlier about a breach of its policies, when its Asia-Pacific vice-president of public policy appeared before Singapore's Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods on Thursday (March 22).

Quizzed by Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam on the alleged misuse of Facebook data by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US presidential election, Mr Simon Milner agreed that Facebook did have a "moral obligation" to inform users earlier that their data had been breached between 2014 and 2015 by the British firm.

Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan was said to have used an app to extract the information of more than 50 million users, transferring it to Cambridge Analytica for commercial and political use, according to media reports. By allegedly accessing the profiles, the data mining company could infer the political preferences of United States voters and target personalised messages at them to benefit Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Mr Milner's remarks came after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform is changing the way it shares data with third-party applications.

Mr Zuckerberg said in a post on his official account in the wee hours of Thursday (Singapore time) that there was "a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it".

He added it was something the company needed to fix.

During the hearing, when asked if further steps should have been taken to verify that data accessed by developers had been deleted after users stop using the app, Mr Milner said: "With hindsight, we wish we'd done that.

"That's one of the lessons for us, as to why we're now going to audit all other apps and not just going to take their affirmation... that they have deleted data and not passed it on," said Mr Milner, who said he has also provided evidence to Parliaments in three other countries, including Britain.

However, he did not have an answer to why Facebook did not tell users of the breach earlier, saying he would not speculate on the reason as he had not been involved in the decision making.

In a lengthy exchange with Mr Shanmugam, who is a Select Committee member, that got testy at times, Mr Milner was questioned on whether he had given "full and frank" answers before the British parliament last month.

Mr Milner had previously told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data.

Mr Milner stressed repeatedly to Mr Shanmugam that he was "giving truthful answers" to the committee based on what he knew at the time, but later conceded that he could have provided a fuller response.

On Thursday, representatives of technology companies Facebook, Twitter, Google as well as the Asia Internet Coalition appeared before Singapore's Select Committee.

In their written submissions to the committee, Facebook and Twitter expressed concerns about a possible move by Singapore to introduce new legislation to deal with the problem of fake news.

Ms Kathleen Reen, Twitter's director of Public Policy for Asia Pacific, wrote: "No single company, governmental or non-governmental actor, should be the arbiter of truth."

She added: "Instead, we see journalists, experts and engaged citizens tweeting side-by-side to affirm, correct and challenge public discourse in seconds."

Similarly, Mr Alvin Tan, Facebook's head of public policy for South-east Asia, said it does not believe legislation is the best approach, noting that Singapore already has laws to address hate speech and the spread of false news.

"Prescriptive legislation and requirements would make it harder for us and other online platforms to find the right technical solutions, consumer messaging and policies to address this shared challenge," he said.

Mr Tan also noted that Facebook is making efforts to remove fake accounts and introduce transparency in advertising, among other measures. It aims to allow users to view all advertisements that any page is running by end-2018, even if they are not in the audience for these promotions, he added.

At the hearing, Mr Milner thanked Mr Shanmugam for his queries on the issue, adding: "We are having to make amends for significant mistakes."

Mr Milner said: "I hope you see from the statement from our CEO overnight... there is determination from the very top to figure out what went wrong, to correct it, and to make sure it doesn't happen again."
Public hearings to fight online falsehoods: Read the submissions here and watch more videos.

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Facebook admits it should have told users earlier about breach of policy

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SINGAPORE - Facebook admitted it should have told users earlier about a breach of its policies, when its Asia-Pacific vice-president of public policy appeared before Singapore's Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods on Thursday (March 22).. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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There are no easy solutions to 'fake news' or misinformation. They are symptoms of systemic problems. Journalists should challenge them with humility, writes Charlie Beckett (LSE): by looking at how they work, becoming more open about how they source and produce stories, and more emotionally literate about how people feel about and socialise the information they consume.
'Fake news' is a real problem in all its forms: the viral hoaxes created for profit or political disruption, the hyper-partisan distortion, and malicious misinformation. Deliberately-created false information is not new, but it is more extensive and harder to identify or counter than before. Digital technologies and the Internet make it easier to create and spread. It misleads citizens, misrepresents reality and causes damage to the information system itself. It helps create a culture of mistrust, cynicism, relativism and confusion. So it should be a concern, even if you voted for Donald Trump or for the UK to leave the European Union. It damages us all.

As has been pointed out, the term 'fake news' has become problematic now that politicians, for example, use it to attack any media that they disagree with it. It is better seen as 'misinformation' - including deliberate disinformation or malicious mal-information, including hyper partisan distortion and false propaganda.

There are specific things that can be done by citizens, journalists and networks to identify it, filter and counter it. In the wake of the explosion of misinformation around the US presidential election journalists and civil society organisations have responded, for example, with fact-checking initiatives. The digital giants such as Facebook have started to explore ways to clean up the content they now carry so effectively. However, it could get a lot worse.

Firstly, because governments and other agencies of power are starting to deploy it as weapon in internal political and external diplomatic strategies. Often, they have far greater resources than those seeking to produce good information and the fake news they create deliberately undermines healthy media systems.

Secondly, fake news can exploit new technologies and channels such as closed messaging apps where lies can spread undetected. New video manipulation tools offer even more sophisticated ways to create credible bogus material.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there is a danger that we will not appreciate that misinformation is a symptom of systemic problems in our information ecosystem. It can't be 'solved' - certainly not in the short term - because this is an endemic condition of our increasingly mediated, complex lives.

So we need to address structural challenges and opportunities presented by 'fake news'. Those structures are changing profoundly and so must our solutions. We need to think again about fundamental ideas. What do we mean by 'reason' or 'objectivity', for example? The challenge is not just about eradicating the bad information that we see now, but more importantly, about investing in new and better ways to connect people to better information and healthier debate in the future.

In the short term, so-called 'fake news' is good news for journalism. It has been good for the mainstream media business as it reminds the public of the value of credible, professional mainstream journalism. But what are the key questions we should be asking for the future? A new LSE Commission on Truth, Trust and Technology will convene a variety of stakeholders to address these questions and to publish a report that will set out an agenda for the news media, technology companies and wider society to adopt strategies for improving public information around topical issues and events. It will first report on the UK scene but will then become an international project.

Truth

We can see what is 'fake' but what is truth in a world of diverse opinions and increasing subjectivity? Are we really in a post-truth world or is it really a multi-truth world? It is generally accepted that in principle the idea of low barriers to entry into media and the proliferation of voice can enhance both democracy and the public sphere. However, mainstream journalism has struggled to cope with this new diversity. It has not convinced the public that it is good enough at understanding and explaining what is happening in our complex world. The wider problem is not just misinformation, but the overabundance of information and sources.

Many of the issues and events that the news media attempts to cover are difficult, long-term and complicated. There is a rising tide of facts and opinions that are brought constantly and immediately into people's lives through new intimate mobile technologies. So in the face of that perhaps it is not surprising that people increasingly rely on instinctive and emotional responses to consuming and sharing information.

Mainstream media has too often complained about this instead of engaging with emerging new realities. Journalists and other information producers need to think more strategically. Not just about how they create credible, content but how they bring evidence and informed, balanced analysis to where the public are having their conversations and getting their information?

Trust

Fake news is popular partly because of the lack of trust in the news media. The news media were never as trusted as much as it thought. It has often been as fallible, biased and unaccountable as the 'fake news' merchants that it likes to criticise. What should it do to be trusted in the future? How can journalism build credibility?

Perhaps we need to redefine what we mean by trust. It should not mean blind faith. Deference is over and forms of scepticism are routine towards authority in general and news media in particular. This can be a healthy, intelligent response that can increase media literacy, especially if media producers are open and 'I trust the source I agree with'. Trust must become a multi-directional relationship that shares the process of understanding. Certainly, more of a conversation than a lecture, but a dialogue that has effects not just an exchange of views.

Transparency and interactivity are key to this. Journalists should show their sources, admit what they don't know, find better experts from a wider range of perspectives, listen to your audience through a number of channels and act with greater humility and engagement. Journalists have begun to realise from the experience of the recent elections in the US and UK - and from the Brexit vote and the rise of populism in established democracies in Europe - that mainstream media is 'out of touch'. It does not reflect the variety of views and experiences of people in a world where a combination of globalisation, technological change and societal shifts have restructured the way we live and communicate. Newsrooms have to go much further to understand and reflect the diversity of the publics they serve. This may involve pursuing different policies of recruitment, commissioning and production as well as marketing.

Trust is not a given, it has to be earned everyday and re-invented for new circumstances. In a world where we rightly encourage scepticism, journalists should be as self-critical of their own conduct, agendas and purpose as they are of others. Journalists do have special rights and a need for independence that allows them to create challenging and unpopular content. However, that does not absolve them from their responsibilities which themselves are changing as media and society puts new demands on information.

Technology

Technology has enabled and amplified misinformation. It has also given journalism new digital tools to create relationships that connect the public to reliable and relevant information and debate. Around the world newsrooms are going on new platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat to reach the public, often offering the opportunity to connect to demographics that traditionally have not consumed mainstream news.

But are journalists doing this to chase advertising and subscriber revenue or is there an editorial strategy that sustains the brand's quality as well as income? There are too many examples of digital companies who now see audience data, personalisation and engagement as marketing devices rather than a way of building a sustainable relationship. Journalists need to understand much better the role of media in people's lives and the value that good information can bring to them.

The platforms and networks now face the challenge of facilitating a healthier digital public sphere without compromising on the value of the open internet. Google, Twitter, Facebook and other digital intermediaries are facing increasing pressure to remove offensive, dubious or disruptive information from their networks. They are already changing their algorithms to try to promote 'good' content and to steer us away from the 'bad'. The platforms have removed or closed millions of accounts and material in this clean-up act after pressure from politicians. But how much do we know about the principles that these platforms are acting on?

They can no longer make the dubious claim that they are merely neutral channels. But neither are they traditional publishers with control over a defined editorial product. By pushing them to take more responsibility for the content on their platforms there is a danger that we are ceding more power to relatively unaccountable and inexperienced media corporations. Do we want Mark Zuckerberg as the editor-in-chief of the world's biggest information distribution system?

Critical is now the state of the relationship between those platforms and the publishers. At present this has been seen as largely an economic question over advertising revenue. Both publishers and platforms now have a common interest in considering the public interest. If they do not then the danger is of authoritarian interventions and the loss of public trust. They need to work together in consultation with civil society to create sustainable and credible information marketplaces.

Conclusion

News media should not abandon traditional journalism values. Journalists have much needed skills in processing information as well as ethical and political values that are needed to foster democracy, healthy societies and efficient economies. But the answer is not to seek a return to a mythical model with journalists as gatekeepers of objectivity. Journalism needs to go with the grain of human nature on social media. They need to think more about the human and political as well as technological reasons why bad information is so popular.

They have a choice about they use audience data. It can be deployed simply to chase traffic and create clickbait. Or it can be used to understand what audiences are interested in, how they use information and to serve them personally with content that is relevant but also stimulating and even challenging. To counter misinformation we need good journalism, but reinvented journalism. We need to make journalism part of the emotional as well as material lives citizens now lead online. Journalists must become more literate about the information systems that are evolving around us. But they must also be more emotionally literate about how people feel about and socialise the information they consume.
This is the (slightly revised) text of an article by Professor Charlie Beckett, director of the LSE's Truth, Trust and Technology Commission published by the Media Asia journal. It is based on a speech to the Asia Journalism Forum conference on Reporting Facts and the Future of Journalism, Singapore, 17-18 August 2017. You can view a video of the speech, which starts at 24 minutes in, here. Charlie Beckett is the founding director of Polis, the think-tank for research and debate around international journalism and society in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. He is also director of the Media Policy Project and Lead Commissioner for the LSE Truth, Trust & Technology Commission (T3).

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Dealing with the disinformation dilemma: a new agenda for news media

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There are no easy solutions to 'fake news' or misinformation. They are symptoms of systemic problems. Journalists should challenge them with humility, writes Charlie Beckett (LSE): by looking at how they work, becoming more open about how they source and produce stories, and more emotionally literate about how people feel about and socialise the information they consume.

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Technologists are focused on text-based misinformation, but visual misinformation is often more popular

By Hannah Guy, The Visual Social Media Lab
Following the London Westminster terrorist attack in March of this year, an image representing the strength and solidarity of Londoners emerged on Twitter. It's not uncommon for workers on the London Underground to write messages of national unity on tube signs following tragic events, and the March terrorist attack seemed no different. The image proceeded to spread like wildfire, with TV personalities, members of parliament, and the media quick to tweet out a photograph of a tube station sign displaying a 'very British response to the attack'. Within a couple of hours, these tweets had been shared thousands of times. By noon, a member of Parliament had read out the sign, which Prime Minister Theresa May called a "wonderful tribute".

The problem, however, is that the sign never existed. It was a fabricated image, created using an online image generator.

This wasn't the only piece of misinformation shared during and immediately after the terrorist attack. However, the majority had one thing in common: a visual element. Rarely were stories shared exclusively in text-form; they were often visuals accompanying a piece of text. (Buzzfeed produced a helpful catalogue of all the fabricated and misleading stories distributed online.)

Visuals are regularly being used as persuasive vehicles for mis- and dis-information. And photographs are not the only kind of visuals to consider. Graphs and charts - with their uniform, scientific format - are increasingly used as agents for misinformation, as they can give a false sense of authority.

These trends are concerning. Recent research has demonstrated that people are very poor at identifying manipulated images. And while the technology companies have vowed to combat the sharing of mis- and dis-information, their efforts have focused solely on text, which is much easier to discover and interpret.

Visual misinformation might differ from text-based information in important ways. What cognitive processes in our brains might make visual information seem more believable? Does the type of imagery used affect the likelihood that a piece of information is false? What kinds of deception are supported by visual information?

These are the types of questions we are attempting to answer as we build our typology of visual misinformation. To do so, we are using the data from the CrossCheck French election project and First Draft's UK election project, which tracked and fact-checked the highly shared, misleading 'content' during these two elections. By creating a typology that identifies the types of misleading visuals spread during these elections - as well as the different types of deception used - we hope to help people understand how visual information is used as a tool of deceit, and in turn combat the spread of misinformation online.

One focus of our research is memes, which have become a particularly important stand-alone method of disseminating misinformation. Gone are the days of LOLcats. Memes are now used as a powerful information sharing tool and are evolving into a phenomenon with no fixed definition. Whereas ten years ago image macros (or meme shells) were used to create funny captions, they are now used a tools of political maliciousness. This analysis by Ryan Broderick from Buzzfeed during the French election highlighted how US teenagers attempted to influence the French Twittersphere using anti-Marcon memes.

In an interview from a few years ago, Richard Dawkins argued that his original 1976 definition of meme still fits. It's something that spreads, like a virus. But is this loose definition enough? Is a more concrete one required?

Leading scholars within meme research, such as Limor Shifman, have offered various definitions in recent years, aiming to address the different ways and modes through which memes become part of popular culture. The most recent meme definition was offered by Ryan Milner in ' The World Made Meme', and repeated by An Xiao Mina at a panel on memes and journalism at the International Journalism Festival earlier this year: 'Internet memes are digital objects that are shared and remixed by multiple people'. But is this an appropriate and useful description for a phenomenon that is unpredictable and ever-changing?

Memes are frustratingly fluid in their definition, but they are now critical to understanding the current information ecosystem. While the term is often used to describe visuals with the aesthetic pictured above, we desperately need a more sophisticated typology to explain different visual techniques to mislead. We also need to pay close attention to the element of 'memes' that is so frequently forgotten in this discussion around information pollution: the fact that memes, crucially, are socially constructed. It is this social aspect - memes' role as a representation of the collective social conscious - that solidifies the their importance in this debate.

We hope our research will provide a much-needed framework for the way people talk about visuals, particularly as they apply to mis- and dis-information.
This research is a collaboration between First Draft News and The Visual Social Media Lab.

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Why we need to understand misinformation through visuals

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By Hannah Guy, The Visual Social Media Lab Following the London Westminster terrorist attack in March of this year, an image representing the strength and solidarity of Londoners emerged on Twitter. It's not uncommon for workers on the London Underground to write messages of national unity on tube signs following tragic events, and the March terrorist attack seemed no different.

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Our report for the Council of Europe provides a new definitional framework for information disorder, overviews current responses and summarizes key academic studies

By Claire Wardle
After months of reporting on the impact of misleading, manipulated and fabricated content spread among peers on technology platforms, we're beginning to see governments and regulators grapple with these issues. It's not a moment too soon, as it's more important than ever that we start to think about information disorder from a more sophisticated perspective.

Back in February, I published an article where I outlined seven types of mis- and dis-information, attempting to underline the complexity of this subject. Today, after six months of work, we're publishing a substantial research report, co-authored by myself and the writer and researcher Hossein Derakhshan, that builds on that earlier thinking.

Commissioned by the Council of Europe, the report lays out a new definitional framework for thinking about information disorder, provides an overview of current responses and summarizes key academic studies on how people consume information, particularly fact-checks and debunks. It ends with thirty-five recommendations, targeted at technology companies, national governments, media organizations, civil society, education ministries and funding bodies.

In the nine months since February, the debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand - in terms of its global scale, the nuances between behavior on different communication platforms (both closed and open) and the fact that information consumption is not rational, but driven by powerful emotional forces.

Unsurprisingly, the report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press.

Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. This is because we can only begin to implement workable solutions after breaking down the phenomenon in this way. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness:

Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant.

Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm.

Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere.

We also recommend thinking about the agents, messages and interpreters of information disorder as separate elements. This is important because even small differences in any of these elements will necessitate significantly different solutions. For example, we argue those who create mis-, dis- or mal-information do so for four main motivations - financial, political, social and psychological. Solutions that target financial motivations requires careful consideration on their own. Lumping together those who are financially motivated by profits with those who seek political gains is unhelpful.

Research on differently formatted messages also call for very separate sets of questions. The debate about misleading and/or harmful messages has been overwhelmingly focused on fabricated text news sites, when visual content is just as widespread and much harder to identify and debunk. Likewise, many assumptions are made about the impact of misleading and fabricated content, but we need much more research to understand how different audiences consume, interpret and respond to these messages. Is this content being re-shared as the original agent intended? Are they being re-shared with an oppositional message attached? Are these rumors traveling online exclusively, or do they move offline into personal conversations that are difficult to capture.

We also argue a need to examine the three phases of information disorder discretely. As we explain, the agent who creates a fabricated message might be different to the agent who produces that message, who might still be different from the agent who distributes the message.

The final key conceptual argument of the report, which draws from the work of the scholar James Carey, is that we need to understand the ritualistic function of communication. Rather than simply thinking about communication as the transmission of information from one person to another, we must recognize that communication plays a fundamental role in representing shared beliefs. It is not just information, but drama - "a portrayal of the contending forces in the world." The most 'successful' of problematic content is that which plays on emotions of contempt, anger or fear. That's because these factors drive sharing among people who want to connect with their online communities and 'tribes'. It's easy to understand why emotional content travels so quickly and widely - even as we see an explosion in fact-checking and debunking organizations - when most social platforms are engineered for people to publicly 'perform' through likes, comments or shares.

Beyond our conceptual proposals, we provide a round-up of research, reports and practical initiatives connected to the topic of information disorder. We examine solutions that have been rolled out by the social networks, and consider ideas for strengthening existing media, news literacy projects and regulation. Lastly, we discuss future trends - in particular the rise of closed messaging apps and artificial intelligence that manufactures or detects disinformation.

We hope this report will be a resource to academics embarking on research in this area, policy-makers advising regulatory bodies and funders making decisions about where to allocate philanthropic resources. While many people only became aware of the challenges of information disorder after the election of Donald Trump - and the subsequent reporting on fabricated news sites, micro-targeting and dark 'posts' - these issues have been building for a long time, and are not caused solely by the technology companies. Rather, we're seeing the symptoms of a host of global socio-economic shifts. As such, solutions will need to take aim at these deep-rooted causes as well, rather than simply tweaking algorithms or writing regulations.

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One year on, we're still not recognizing the complexity of information disorder online

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By Claire Wardle After months of reporting on the impact of misleading, manipulated and fabricated content spread among peers on technology platforms, we're beginning to see governments and regulators grapple with these issues. It's not a moment too soon, as it's more important than ever that we start to think about information disorder from a more sophisticated perspective.

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At recent hearings for the UK House of Commons' digital, culture, media and sport committee and the European Commission, I mentioned the importance of reporting by journalists and researchers of disinformation. It's been the main reason we've seen the action we have from the platforms.

Finally, I was asked to put together a list of that reporting, and so I've done so below. If I've missed any articles, please add them to this Google Doc.
(Note: These reports analyse the output of platforms. They are not just pieces that discuss disinformation in general.)
Impact and Influence

Craig Silverman (December 28, 2017), These Are 50 Of The Biggest Fake News Hits On Facebook In 2017. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo & Jeremy Singer-Vine (August 8, 2017), Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman & Jeremy Singer-Vine (December 16, 2016), The True Story Behind The Biggest Fake News Hit Of The Election. BuzzFeed.

John Herrman (August 28, 2016), Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine. New York Times.

Facebook

Craig Timberg & Elizabeth Dwoskin (October 12, 2017), Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation. Washington Post.

Nicholas Confessore & Daisuke Wakabayashi, with research from Jonathan Albright (October 9, 2017). How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics. New York Times.

Craig Timberg, with research from Jonathan Albright (October 5, 2017), Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says. Washington Post.

Craig Silverman (April 28, 2017), 5 Ways Scammers Exploit Facebook To Feed You False Information. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman & Jeremy Singer-Vine (December 6, 2016), Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman (November 16, 2016), This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman & Lawrence Alexander (November 3, 2016), How Teens In the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman, Lauren Strapagiel, Hamza Shaban, Ellie Hall & Jeremy Singer-Vine (October 20, 2016), Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman (August 30, 2016), Facebook Must Either Innovate Or Admit Defeat At The Hands Of Fake News Hoaxsters. BuzzFeed.

Twitter

Jonathan Albright (February 15, 2018), Trolls on Twitter: How Mainstream and Local News Outlets Were Used to Drive a Polarized News Agenda. Medium.

Donie O'Sullivan (February 8, 2018), Twitter failed to remove hundreds of Russian propaganda videos aimed at Americans. CNN.

Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris & Mark Hansen (January 27, 2018), The Follower Factory. New York Times.*

YouTube

Jack Nicas (February 7, 2018), How YouTube Drives People to the Internet's Darkest Corners. Wall Street Journal.

Paul Lewis (February 2, 2018), 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth. The Guardian.

Davey Alba (December 28, 2017), YouTube Has A Massive Child Exploitation Problem. How Humans Train Its Search AI Is Partly Why. BuzzFeed.

Jonathan Albright (January 17, 2017), FakeTube: AI-Generated News on YouTube. Medium.

Google

Jonathan Albright (February 21, 2018), #NotOKGoogle Search Suggestions: 2018 Edition. Medium.

Carole Cadwalladr (December 11, 2016), Google is not 'just' a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world. The Guardian.

Carole Cadwalladr (December 4, 2016), Google, Democracy and the Truth about Internet Search. The Guardian.

Instagram

Craig Silverman (January 20, 2018), Russian Propaganda From Deleted Troll Accounts Is Still Live On Twitter And Instagram Thanks To These Apps. BuzzFeed.

Jonathan Albright (October 8, 2017), Instagram, Meme Seeding, and the Truth about Facebook Manipulation, Part 1. Medium.

Tumblr

Craig Silverman & Jonathan Albright (February 7, 2018), Russian Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr And The Company Refuses To Say Anything About It. BuzzFeed.

Discriminatory Ads on Facebook

Jeff Larson, Madeleine Varner, Ariana Tobin, Julia Angwin & Noam Scheiber (December 19, 2017), These Are the Job Ads You Can't See on Facebook If You're Older. ProPublica and the New York Times.

Julia Angwin, Ariana Tobin & Madeleine Varner (Nov. 21, 2017), Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race. ProPublica.

Julia Angwin, Madeleine Varner & Ariana Tobin (September 14, 2017), Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach 'Jew Haters'. ProPublica.

Ad Fraud

Craig Silverman (January 8, 2018), Twitter Allowed Hackers To Run An Ad On Its Platform That Pretended To Come From Twitter Itself. BuzzFeed.

Craig Silverman (October 17, 2017), Attack of the Zombie Websites. BuzzFeed.

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Most Powerful Reporting on Disinformation - First Draft - Medium

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At recent hearings for the UK House of Commons' digital, culture, media and sport committee and the European Commission, I mentioned the importance of reporting by journalists and researchers of disinformation. It's been the main reason we've seen the action we have from the platforms. Finally, I was asked to put together a list of that reporting, and so I've done so below.

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When, how and why do we report on rumors and fabricated content?

By Claire Wardle and Nic Dias
Can silence be the best response to mis- and dis-information?

First Draft has been asking ourselves this question since the French election, when we had to make difficult decisions about what information to publicly debunk for CrossCheck. We became worried that - in cases where rumours, misleading articles or fabricated visuals were confined to niche communities - addressing the content might actually help to spread it farther.

As Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis noted in their 2017 report, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, "[F]or manipulators, it doesn't matter if the media is reporting on a story in order to debunk or dismiss it; the important thing is getting it covered in the first place." Buzzfeed's Ryan Broderick seemed to confirm our concerns when, on the weekend of the #MacronLeaks trend, he tweeted that 4channers were celebrating news stories about the leaks as a "form of engagement."

We have since faced the same challenges in the UK and German elections. Our work convinced us that journalists, fact-checkers and civil society urgently need to discuss when, how and why we report on examples of mis- and dis-information and the automated campaigns often used to promote them. Of particular importance is defining a "tipping point" at which mis- and dis-information becomes beneficial to address. We offer 10 questions below to spark such a discussion.

Before that, though, it's worth briefly mentioning the other ways that coverage can go wrong. Many research studies examine how corrections can be counterproductive by ingraining falsehoods in memory or making them more familiar. Ultimately, the impact of a correction depends on complex interactions between factors like subject, format and audience ideology.

Reports of disinformation campaigns, amplified through the use of bots and cyborgs, can also be problematic. Experiments suggest that conspiracy-like stories can inspire feelings of powerlessness and lead people to report lower likelihoods to engage politically. Moreover, descriptions of how bots and cyborgs were found give their operators the opportunity to change strategies and better evade detection. In a month awash with revelations about Russia's involvement in the US election, it's more important than ever to discuss the implications of reporting on these kinds of activities.

Following the French election, First Draft has switched from the public-facing model of CrossCheck to a model where we primarily distribute our findings via email to newsroom subscribers. Our election teams now focus on stories that are predicted (by NewsWhip's "Predicted Interactions" algorithm) to be shared widely. We also commissioned research on the effectiveness of the CrossCheck debunks and are awaiting its results to evaluate our methods.

Without further ado, here are some questions our work has inspired:

1. Who is my audience?
Are they likely to have seen a particular piece of mis- or dis-information already? If not, what are the consequences of bringing it to the attention of a wider audience?

2. When should we publish stories about mis- and dis-information?
How much traffic should a piece of mis- and dis-information have before we address it? In other words, what is the "tipping point," and how do we measure it? On Twitter, for example, do we check whether a hashtag made it to a country's top 10 trending topics?

3. How do we think about the impact of mis- and dis-information, particularly on Twitter?
Do we care about how many people see the content? Or do we care about who sees the content? In particular, is Twitter important in virtue of the number of people who use it, or is it important because certain groups, like news organizations and politicians, use it? How do our answers to these questions change how we evaluate the impact of information?

4. How do we isolate human interactions in a computationally affordable manner?
When we talk about the "reach" of a piece of content, we should be referring to how many humans saw it. Yet, identifying the number of humans who saw a piece of information can be difficult and computationally expensive. What algorithms might be devised to calculate human reach (at least on Twitter) in a timely and inexpensive way?

5. For those of us whose primary goal is to stop mis- and dis-information, what strategies of distribution beyond publishing might we consider?
Should we target accounts who have engaged with problematic content with direct messages, to decrease our chances of perpetuating the falsehood? Should we be using Facebook ads that target certain groups? Is this even the role of news organizations or non-profits like First Draft?

6. How do we write our corrections?
How can we use research from the fields of psychology and communication to maximize the positive impact of our corrections and minimize chances of blowback?

7. Why do we report on attempts at manufactured amplification?
Are we putting the popularity of artificially boosted content into proportion? Are we trying to make people aware of bots so that they'll be more vigilant? Are we trying to encourage platforms or government to take action against mis- and dis-information?

8. Who should be talking about manufactured amplification?
News organizations aren't in a position to do work that won't be published. So, given that it may sometimes be counterproductive to publish about bot networks, should news organizations be investigating them?

9. Where do the responsibilities of journalists end and the responsibilities of the intelligence community start?
The monitoring and active debunking of information is falling uncomfortably across different sectors. We're seeing more disinformation monitoring initiatives emerge outside journalism, such as the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was co-created by current and former counterterrorism analysts. What role should journalists have in actively combating attempts to influence public opinion in another country?

10. How should we write about attempts at manufactured amplification?
Should we focus on debunking the messages of automated campaigns (fact-checking), or do we focus on the actors behind them (source-checking)? Do we do both? How might we show our investigations are credible without informing bot operators or perpetuating the content they were boosting?

The questions above, though fundamental, are not easy to answer. Nor is it simple to decide what to do once we have answers to these questions. Perhaps we need new ethical policies for reporting on these topics. Maybe newsrooms should coordinate about handling large-scale attempts to manipulate the media, such as strategically timed leaks.

Organizations covering mis- and dis-information need to discuss these issues, and it's clear that those conversations should include academic researchers, some of whom have been studying corrections and disinformation for decades. This is too important to get wrong.

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10 questions to ask before covering mis- and dis-information

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By Claire Wardle and Nic Dias Can silence be the best response to mis- and dis-information? First Draft has been asking ourselves this question since the French election, when we had to make difficult decisions about what information to publicly debunk for CrossCheck.

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Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com

An Instagram account purportedly documenting a migrant's journey from Dakar, Senegal, to Spain began trending on Sunday after the Huffington Post shared a story about it.

The story, " Migrant Instagrams His Perilous Journey By Truck And Rowing Boat To Reach Spain From North Africa," gives a synopsis of the photos, posted by an Abdou Diouf, showing a smiling man as he appeared to make his way from his home in Senegal to Nouadhibou, a city in neighboring Mauritania, and then to Morocco and across the Mediterranean to Spain.

The Huffington Post was not alone in treating Diouf's story as legitimate. After the article was posted Sunday evening, the account was hit by a barrage of activity and followers. A number of Instagram users began commenting on Diouf's photos, sharing messages that were both congratulatory and xenophobic.

The Abdou Diouf account, which was in fact created by a Spanish production company, is emblematic of the hazards that come with taking what we see on social media at face value.

At the time that Storyful found the Instagram account, we investigated it as we would any emerging social story. We reached out to the uploader, who responded by email, saying, "Im in tarifa at the moment with reduced conextion. My phone doesnt work here only wifi internet. What you want to know about my journey? Bless."

The person described as Abdou Diouf of Dakar did not appear to have any social media presence outside of his Instagram account, which began sharing photos on July 21. Storyful searched the email address that was used in his correspondence - it turned up nothing in reverse searches.

Spanish production company Manson shared this video on July 22 showing a selection of scenes featured on Diouf's account. The footage corresponds with the images from his journey. The video, which was posted on Vimeo, credits various people for the directing, casting, and production. It was also featured on a Facebook page for GETXOPHOTO, a festival dedicated to photography, which "supports the exploration of formats, stands and unconventional exhibition spaces to show [...] different images."

A photograph from the production company's Instagram shows a poster featuring its name; it also appears in one of Diouf's photographs.

Through further investigation of the Instagram account, Storyful unearthed the profile of a handball player named Hagi Toure, who appears to be the same man pictured in the Abdou Diouf account. According to his Facebook profile, Toure lives in Pineda, in Catalonia, Spain.

Storyful asked both Manson and GETXOPHOTO about Diouf's story. Both parties confirmed with a press release that Diouf's story was a project for the GETXOPHOTO exhibition aimed at reflecting "the way we process and share images of displacement and migration, in established media and on social networks." See full press release below:

The creative agency and production company Volga presents this years press campaign for the GETXOPHOTO photography exhibition.

Directed by the Barcelona studio Manson, this years campaign in formed of a 60 second video and linked Instagram account that acts as a reflection on the way we process and share images of displacement and migration, in established media and on social networks

The piece is also a comment on how the use and importance of photography has changed radically in the last few years, with the image of travel inexorably linked to it's 'reality'. In this way photography is key to the social construct of 'travel' in a globalized society.

If this is true for industrial tourism - the endless search and sharing of 21st century takes on pastoral ideals - it applies equally to the increasing numbers of those who's journeys are the result of necessity. Migrants and refugees, displaced by dictatorial regimes, the horrors of war and environmental and economic disasters.

About Getxophoto 2015

The festival, now in it's eighth edition has chosen this years participants for the quality and integrity of their work. Examples include Paul Fusco, a Magnum photographer who will show 'Funeral Train', a work which takes as its focus the train that transported the corpse of President Kennedy from New York to Washington. Also showing work will be Spanish photographers including Reinaldo Louerio, who working from images from the archive of the national police force posits a reflection on the role of immigrants in Spanish society. All of this years participants are linked by the aesthetic, political and ethical content of their work.

The main takeaway for journalists is clear - it's critical to treat all social content with a heavy dose of skepticism. When we are all searching and scanning for that one person who presents a narrative perfectly, particularly around current topics like migration into Europe, there is a readiness to believe that a story is true.

Tomás Peña, the director of the project, said in an email to Storyful that they knew people could believe Diouf's story.

"We wanted to make people think," Peña said.

Joana Sendra of GETXOPHOTO said in an email to Storyful that the goal of the project was to play with Western attitudes.

"It was a way of denouncing Western frivolity, in which we have to take selfies at all times and it seems that an event has not been experienced if you have not shared it," Sendra wrote.

Some 137,000 migrants arrived in Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain between January and June of this year, according to data collected by the UN refugee agency. Nearly 2,000 more died in the attempt to reach Europe. By harnessing the language of Instagram - selfies and hashtags - Manson tapped into a collective desire to see the migrant's perspective, to see the individual behind the statistics.
For more information on Storyful, visit Storyful.com and follow us at
But the fact remains that very few of those 137,000-plus people have been able to share their experiences in this way. The challenge for journalists, then, is to find a way to tell those stories humanely, genuinely and accurately.

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How a Production Company Faked 'Instagram Migrant' Account

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Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com An Instagram account purportedly documenting a migrant's journey from Dakar, Senegal, to Spain began trending on Sunday after the Huffington Post shared a story about it.

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Unrest in Baltimore, like any other dramatic event these days, created a surge of activity on social media. In the age of the selfie and ubiquitous cameras, many people have become compulsive chroniclers of all their activities - sometimes unwisely so.

Reactions ranged from shock and disgust to disbelief and amusement when a series of images started to circulate showing looters proudly displaying their ill-gotten gains. Not all, however, was as it seemed.

Few things say America like KFC, and it was no surprise to see that the Colonel had fallen victim to the violence:

I often get asked about the fundamentals of verification, and one of the first things I alway mention is the ability - and indeed the reflex - to always perform a reverse image search. I also mention, only half-jokingly, that this should possibly even be added to the school curriculum. It's not as if it would take up much of the school year; it can be taught in approximately 30 seconds.

In the case of the trashed KFC above, a quick check via Google reverse image search or TinEye showed that the photo was taken in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2012.

Several other tweets portraying similar scenes were just as easily debunked:

The photo showing the pile of cosmetics has been online for at least three years.

This photo and the accompanying declaration were admittedly worrying:

But the young man shown had already been the subject of an April 17 news report from Fox13, a Memphis-based Fox affiliate.

Given the provenance of the images, it should come as no surprise that the profile photographs used on the Twitter accounts are not exactly 100 percent legitimate. The gentleman named as Da'Marious Trufton connected to the KFC photo turns out to be Dupree Johnson, from South Florida.

'Tanisha', who appeared to have looted an entire cosmetics counter, was represented by a photograph of a Canadian rapper, Honey Cocaine.

The profile photograph of 'Jayrome', who was preparing to take his heat-packing kid brother on a crime spree, actually showed a young man who goes by the name of "VonMar":

VonMar appears to be a Chicago-based Jackass wannabe who has a taste for mischief but not, as far as we know, looting.

There are numerous other examples, but you get the picture.

We could speculate all day on the motivations of the people who posted these tweets, from the sinister to the silly. One thing for certain is that they were getting dozens of favourites and retweets, and there was no shortage of people taking them seriously.

Some notified law enforcement officials...

... others were disappointed...

... and still others grabbed the opportunity to display the worst side of their own nature:

The 'confessions' were shared widely, being retweeted by plenty of people, half a dozen of them by a blogger with more than 23,000 followers:

I approached the blogger ahead of writing this article and, after a bit of back and forth, received some counsel:

The full conversation is here.

The point, of course, is not whether these things happened or not. The point is that the tweets were not portraying what they purported to be. Worse, they used photos of real people and connected them to these acts.

Tineye and Google image search provide browser add-ons, meaning these kinds of checks can be performed in seconds. Cultivate the habit - increased credibility is only a right-click away.

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Baltimore 'looting' tweets show importance of quick and easy image checks

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Unrest in Baltimore, like any other dramatic event these days, created a surge of activity on social media. In the age of the selfie and ubiquitous cameras, many people have become compulsive chroniclers of all their activities - sometimes unwisely so.

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Today, the world wide web turns 29. This year marks a milestone in the web's history: for the first time, we will cross the tipping point when more than half of the world's population will be online.

When I share this exciting news with people, I tend to get one of two concerned reactions:

1. How do we get the other half of the world connected?

2. Are we sure the rest of the world wants to connect to the web we have today?

The threats to the web today are real - from misinformation and questionable political advertising to a loss of control over our personal data. But I remain committed to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space - for everyone.

That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people. I founded the Web Foundation to fight for the web's future. Here's where we must focus our efforts:

Close the digital divide

The divide between people who have internet access and those who do not is deepening existing inequalities, inequalities that pose a serious global threat. Unsurprisingly, you're more likely to be offline if you are female, poor, live in a rural area or a low-income country, or some combination of the above. To be offline today is to be excluded from opportunities to learn and earn, to access valuable services, and to participate in democratic debate. If we do not invest seriously in closing this gap, the last billion will not be connected until 2042. That's an entire generation left behind.

A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease tensions

In 2016, the UN declared internet access a human right, on par with clean water, electricity, shelter and food. But until we make internet access affordable for all, billions will continue to be denied this basic right. The target has been set - the UN recently adopted the Alliance for Affordable Internet's threshold for affordability: 1GB of mobile data for less than 2% of average monthly income. The reality, however, is that we're still a long way off from reaching this target - in some countries, the cost of 1GB of mobile broadband remains more than 20% of average monthly income.

What will it take to actually achieve this goal? We must support policies and business models that expand access to the world's poorest through public access solutions, such as community networks and public wifi initiatives. We must invest in securing reliable access for women and girls, and empowering them through digital skills training.

Make the web work for people

The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.

These dominant platforms are able to lock in their position by creating barriers for competitors. They acquire startup challengers, buy up new innovations and hire the industry's top talent. Add to this the competitive advantage that their user data gives them and we can expect the next 20 years to be far less innovative than the last.

What's more, the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponise the web at scale. In recent years, we've seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data.

We've looked to the platforms themselves for answers. Companies are aware of the problems and are making efforts to fix them - with each change they make affecting millions of people. The responsibility - and sometimes burden - of making these decisions falls on companies that have been built to maximise profit more than to maximise social good. A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectivesmay help ease those tensions.

Bring more voices to the debate on the web's future

The future of the web isn't just about those of us who are online today, but also those yet to connect. Today's powerful digital economy calls for strong standards that balance the interests of both companies and online citizens. This means thinking about how we align the incentives of the tech sector with those of users and society at large, and consulting a diverse cross section of society in the process.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it's too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people - and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. We can design a web that creates a constructive and supportive environment.

Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfil our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.

As the late internet activist, John Perry Barlow, once said: "A good way to invent the future is to predict it." It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve after the setbacks of the last two years, but I want us to imagine that future and build it.

Let's assemble the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts and academia to tackle the threats to the web's future. At the Web Foundation, we are ready to play our part in this mission and build the web we all want. Let's work together to make it possible.

Tim Berners-Lee is the founder of the world wide web

Topics

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The web can be weaponised - and we can't count on big tech to stop it | Tim Berners-Lee

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Today, the world wide web turns 29. This year marks a milestone in the web's history: for the first time, we will cross the tipping point when more than half of the world's population will be online.

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By Claire Wardle, First Draft News Research Director

By now we've all agreed the term "fake news" is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we're left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we're struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it's about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn't begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false).

To understand the current information ecosystem, we need to break down three elements:

1. The different types of content that are being created and shared

2. The motivations of those who create this content

3. The ways this content is being disseminated

This matters. As Danah Boyd outlined in a recent piece, we are at war. An information war. We certainly should worry about people (including journalists) unwittingly sharing misinformation, but far more concerning are the systematic disinformation campaigns. Previous attempts to influence public opinion relied on 'one-to-many' broadcast technologies but, social networks allow 'atoms' of propaganda to be directly targeted at users who are more likely to accept and share a particular message. Once they inadvertently share a misleading or fabricated article, image, video or meme, the next person who sees it in their social feed probably trusts the original poster, and goes on to share it themselves. These 'atoms' then rocket through the information ecosystem at high speed powered by trusted peer-to-peer networks.

This is far more worrying than fake news sites created by profit driven Macedonian teenagers.

The Different Types of Mis- and Disinformation

Back in November, I wrote about the different types of problematic information I saw circulate during the US election. Since then, I've been trying to refine a typology (and thank you to Global Voices for helping me to develop my definitions even further). I would argue there are seven distinct types of problematic content that sit within our information ecosystem. They sit on a scale, one that loosely measures the intent to deceive.

Why is this type of content being created?

If we're serious about developing solutions to these problems, we also need to think about who is creating these different types of content and why it is being created.

I saw Eliot Higgins present in Paris in early January, and he listed four 'Ps' which helped explain the different motivations. I've been thinking about these a great deal and using Eliot's original list have identified four additional motivations for the creation of this type of content: Poor Journalism, Parody, to Provoke or 'Punk', Passion, Partisanship, Profit, Political Influence or Power, and Propaganda.

This is a work in progress but once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patterns in terms of the types of content created for specific purposes.

Dissemination Mechanisms

Finally, we need to think about how this content is being disseminated. Some of it is being shared unwittingly by people on social media, clicking retweet without checking. Some of it is being amplified by journalists who are now under more pressure than ever to try and make sense and accurately report information emerging on the social web in real time. Some of it is being pushed out by loosely connected groups who are deliberately attempting to influence public opinion, and some of it is being disseminated as part of sophisticated disinformation campaigns, through bot networks and troll factories. (As you can see I need to work up a 3D matrix to map my graph against the different dissemination mechanisms).

As this Buzzfeed article highlights, a group of US Trump supporting teenagers have connected online to influence the French election in April. They have shared folders of sharable 'meme-shells' so even those who can't speak French can drop visuals into hashtag streams. It's now incredibly easy for loosely connected groups to mobilize, using free tools to co-ordinate private messaging.

When messaging is coordinated and consistent, it easily fools our brains, already exhausted and increasingly reliant on heuristics (simple psychological shortcuts) due to the overwhelming amount of information flashing before our eyes every day. When we see multiple messages about the same topic, our brains use that as a short-cut to credibility. It must be true we say - I've seen that same claim several times today.

On the night of the Inauguration attendees at the Deploraball boasted to This American Life they "memed" Trump into the White House. Listen to an excerpt.

They understand that we're much less likely to be critical of visuals. We're much less likely to be critical of information that supports our existing beliefs. And, as information overload exhausts our brains, we're much easier to influence.

What can we do?

We all play a crucial part in this ecosystem. Every time we passively accept information without double-checking, or share a post, image or video before we've verified it, we're adding to the noise and confusion. The ecosystem is now so polluted, we have to take responsibility for independently checking what we see online.

In the weeks after the US election, we saw journalists track down fake news creators. One consistent element was that creators talked about trying to create news that would fool people on the Left and how they failed. As fake news creator Jestin Coler told NPR, "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

But liberal debunking primacy was short lived. Since Trump's inauguration, we're seeing both sides falling for and sharing false information.Whether it's the 'rogue' Twitter accounts that no one has been able to independently verify, the Trump executive order meme generator, users re-tweeting a post by Jill Stein's parody account desperately wanting it to be real, or claiming Vice-President Pence has deleted a tweet condemning the Muslim ban when it was still sitting on his timeline from December, the Left is showing that it is just as human as the Right. When humans are angry and fearful, their critical thinking skills diminish.

Craig Silverman was a guest on the "On The Media" radio show and talked about the need for emotional skepticism. I couldn't agree more. This isn't just about funding more news literacy projects, this is about teaching people to second guess their instinctual reactions. If you find yourself incredibly angry at a piece of content or feeling smug (because your viewpoint has been reaffirmed), take another look.

In the same way that you're told to wait 20 minutes before you reach for a second helping of food, because you need to wait for your brain to catch up with your stomach, the same is true with information. Maybe you don't need to wait 20 minutes before clicking the share button, but two minutes is probably sensible.

This is a crucial time. If we're going to truly understand the situation we find ourselves in, we need to understand the severity and we need to understand what we're fighting. Throwing the term fake news around, even with air quotes, is getting us nowhere.

If you are interested in this topic. I have created an ongoing reading list.

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By now we've all agreed the term "fake news" is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we're left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we're struggling with a...

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Last month, Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook in charge of changes to the News Feed, announced steps Facebook is taking to prevent the spread of fake news and hoaxes on the platform. The solution - a mix of user engagement, third-party fact checkers, user-experience design, and disrupting financial incentives - is interesting because of its multi-modal approach. Facebook should be lauded for engaging with the problem head-on, but there are still significant weaknesses in the steps that have been suggested by the company.

As this issue continues to unfold, and as more countries deal with the prospect of fake news and hoaxes influencing their own political process, we should take stock of the potential fallout of Facebook's new approach.

Facebook will rely on users to report fake news despite evidence that suggests users have a difficult time assessing or identifying fake news. Teens seem to be especially vulnerable to fake news. A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that middle and high school students have a difficult time detecting fake news from real news, or detecting bias in tweets and Facebook statuses. In Pew's recent study on fake news, they found that individuals are often confident in their ability to identify fake news (around 2/3 of those surveyed), but we don't know if that confidence translates to being able to identify fake news. The same study found that a fourth of respondents admitted to sharing fake news on at least one occasion. If Facebook's solution is to rely, in part, on users to report fake news through a system of flagging, users need to be trained in this type of identification.

Facebook's fake news software may have unintended consequences for the news media industry and reporting. In addition to relying on reports from users, Facebook is deploying their own software to help them identify fake news through patterns in user behavior. Reports of how Facebook's software would determine fake news have been unclear. Following an interview with Mosseri, Recode reported that Facebook would use data available to them to determine if a story had been read, and then shared, as an indicator of truthfulness. The presumption Mosseri and his Facebook colleagues are working under is, per Peter Kafka at Recode, "If I click on/read a story and then don't share it with my friends...that's a sign it may be 'problematic content.'" The obvious problem with this measurement of truthfulness is that there are a great many variables contributing to why a user would read content and not share it.

And the logic of clickbait - content that is highly personal or includes calls to action is more likely to be shared - makes Facebook's changes worrisome because they could lead to the production of more share-worthy news and less hard-hitting investigative pieces exploring the often dry and less shareable nuances of domestic and foreign policies. As we've seen in the past, because Facebook has become so central to the news media industry, changes like these can have drastic effects on newsroom operations and reporting, affecting variables like referral traffic that have become so powerful in generating ad-based revenues.

Third-party fact checkers will need to find a sustainable business model to continue this work long-term. The third-party fact checkers or "partners" (in Facebook's language) will not be receiving any sort of compensation from Facebook for contributing labor to this cause. Currently this list includes ABC news, The Associated Press, Politifact, FactCheck, and Snopes, which have agreed to vet potentially fake news that is identified by users or Facebook's software ( Facebook puts these stories into a list that is available to the fact-checking organizations on the back-end for verification). ABC News has said their team will include about a half dozen journalists who were fact checking during the election and who will be redirected by the organization to this work.

Though this system could have indirect financial benefits to news organizations - e.g., fake news gets less traction leaving more room for real news - it's still a fairly significant investment to make. (And it presumes that people trust fact checkers themselves, which isn't always the case.) It also relies on the notion that the flow of reports from users and software will be manageable, when content moderation is often an incredibly large undertaking. In a 2014 story for Wired by Adrien Chen, the potential number of moderators for social media sites (often working in areas like the Philippines) was estimated in the hundreds of thousands. It's unclear how this model will be translated internationally as well. U.S.-based fact checkers may not have the context, knowledge, or bandwidth, to address fake news and hoax claims now entering into the online ecosystems of Germany, France, Myanmar, Brazil, India, and other countries.

Facebook will continue to restrict ads on fake news, disrupting the financial incentives for producers. This is something that Facebook and other platforms, like Google, had already committed to doing over the past two months. For Facebook, this currently means that they will not " integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading, or deceptive." However, until Facebook changes its own financial model, which prioritizes content that is easily shared, there is little hope for disrupting the current norms affecting the production of fake news or misleading content. While these policies do inhibit fake news producers from generating money on their own site, Facebook still benefits from the increased traffic and sharing on the News Feed. It's unclear how Facebook will reduce their own reliance on easily shareable content, which has influenced the spread of fake or misleading news.

This proposal rests on the assumption that "fake news" will be easy to spot and define. At its base, "fake news," the concept and practice, is clickbait, and has been, in part, manufactured by the incentives baked into how organizations and individuals gain attention over social media networks (through clicks, shares, and likes). It's a term that has come to refer to a wide-range of media practices that build upon clickbait logics. In more black-and-white cases, fake news refers to intentionally made-up stories hosted on hastily built websites (i.e. The Denver Guardian or The Baltimore Gazette). These types of fake news websites, built by teenagers in Macedonia or by citizens in the U.S. to make money (or just lulz) off the circulation of outrage, fear, or anxiety. But most fake news is very gray. It consists of misleading headlines, deceptive edits, consensus-based truthmaking in communities like reddit or 8chan (i.e. pizzagate), or by the absorption of fake news by political figures, like Donald Trump, who have the power to make fake news, newsworthy.

Facebook and other platforms may, in addition, have to consider how they would actively prevent this misleading news, as well as hate speech, from trending over their networks soon, at least in certain areas of the world. Legislation recently proposed by Thomas Oppermann, of the German Social Democratic Party in Germany, would require Facebook to have a German-based team dedicated to fielding reports of fake news and hate speech, and would require Facebook to remove fake news items or be subject to a $522,575 fine for each post that is not removed.

How countries seek to limit the spread of hate speech and misinformation will continue to be an important counterweight to efforts proposed by companies based in the U.S. (subject to much less stringent media laws); companies will seek to maintain their market share within jurisdictions attempting to extend the media regulations and protections of the print, broadcast, and cable eras to newly dominant information and news distributors like Facebook.

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How do you deal with a problem like "fake news?"

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Last month, Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook in charge of changes to the News Feed, announced steps Facebook is taking to prevent the spread of fake news and hoaxes on the platform. The solution - a mix of user engagement, third-party fact checkers, user-experience design, and disrupting financial incentives - is interesting because of its multi-modal approach.

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"Saturday Night Live" is, in its forty-second season, more essential to the culture than ever, not because it is necessarily funnier than during its best seasons (though it has been very funny) but because it has had the rapt attention of an American President. Donald Trump has been tweeting bitterly about the show for months, and, last week, Politico reported that his Administration had been " rattled" by Melissa McCarthy's devastating impersonation of Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, with the President himself angry that Spicer had been so aptly skewered by a woman.

The show has seen a spike in ratings-but, while all viewers are equal, some viewers are more equal than others. The show's urgency relies on Trump and his Administration, not only to provide the astounding real-life premises for the jokes but to respond with regular and ridiculous wounded intensity to those jokes, reminding us all that they are watching. Alec Baldwin, who has played Trump this season, and who, last night, hosted for a record seventeenth time, said in an interview last week, "What's weird about the stuff we're doing-we're just repeating back what he says." The result is a call-and-response between the executive branch and the show. Trump doesn't like women in drag? This week, "S.N.L." brought McCarthy back to play Spicer again, and had the uncannily versatile Kate McKinnon play Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Then, later on, Leslie Jones dressed up as Trump himself. (Though, unfortunately, Rosie O'Donnell did not make a cameo as Steve Bannon, as fans had demanded all week on Twitter.)

There was, on Saturday and into Sunday morning, a feeling that this all couldn't go on much longer. It's not that the performers and writers are running out of ideas-Melissa McCarthy's Spicer impression was still wildly funny (this time in high heels!), and a recorded sketch in which the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway (McKinnon, brilliant again) and the CNN host Jake Tapper (Beck Bennett, with an unkind hairline) are trapped in a "Fatal Attraction"-style relationship of violent attraction and revulsion was a risky, frankly terrifying bit of comedy that also dramatized Trumpism's sickening allure.

Instead, the weariness coming from the show seems to be more emotional and civic-minded-an expression of shared uncertainty, a common lament about the absurd pace of the new Administration's outrages and follies. Michael Che, during a "Weekend Update" segment that again savaged Trump, said, "I'm starting to feel bad for Donald Trump . . . I hope he quits. Donald, is this really how you want to spend the last two years of your life?" (The segment also obliquely referred to the show's own guilt in this relationship of co-dependency, and its original sin of having Trump host, in 2015.) In a "People's Court" sketch, Cecily Strong, playing a judge, says to Trump, "You're doing too much, O.K.? I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me." And in another video short, this one imagining Jones's quest to portray Trump on the show, she says to a fellow cast member, of Baldwin, "Do you really think he's going to do this for the next four years? Doesn't he have other stuff to do?" Jones could also have been talking about Trump, and his habit of watching "S.N.L." through his fingers and then tweeting about it.

If, in the past, "Saturday Night Live" had been goading Trump to lash out, now it seemed that the show, like the rest of us, was asking him to cut it out. From Trump's critics, anger at his policies continues to be mixed with a persistent bewilderment at his psychology: Why would a man who was just elected President still feel the need to argue about the scope of his electoral victory, the size of the crowd at his Inauguration, or the jokes that a variety show was making at his expense? As with so many of Trump's battles, simply disengaging from the argument would seem to be his best chance at winning. And yet, like the scorpion, he is a slave to his nature. This weekend, Trump was busy doing Presidential-esque things, hosting Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. Perhaps, finally, he had found something better to do. On Sunday morning, there was not yet a sign that Trump had watched the latest episode of "S.N.L."-or, at least, he had not been moved to complain about it. Instead, Trump had more important proclamations to issue: about CNN being fake news, and about his ongoing feud with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. The day was young.

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"Saturday Night Live" and the Limits of Trump Mockery

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"Saturday Night Live" is, in its forty-second season, more essential to the culture than ever, not because it is necessarily funnier than during its best seasons (though it has been very funny) but because it has had the rapt attention of an American President.

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"Saturday Night Live," now in its 43rd season, is an American pastime. The show has produced incredible talent like Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, as well as classic sketches like those mocking "Celebrity Jeopardy" and the Coneheads. In modern times, the show is probably best known for its political impersonations, with actors portraying Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and, of course, President Trump.

But the show so many Americans once loved may have surrendered its influence, and its humor, to its one-sided political obsession. This only adds to Americans' frustration that even our weekends, whether on football fields or late-night comedy shows, are becoming increasingly politically divisive. Americans desperately need to laugh and play together, not in separate silos divided by race and politics.

"SNL" has featured an impersonation of President Trump (or a Trump administration associate like Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer or even Steve Bannon) on nearly every episode of the 42nd season. But surely, Trump supporters and opponents alike tire of him eventually. Is there no other material out there?

This is not to say that politics has no place in comedy. To the contrary, humor, as we also see in political cartoons, is sometimes the best way to make a point and open people's minds to even their own inconsistencies. Censorship or silence is not the answer. Indeed, many comedians, including Jerry Seinfield, have expressed concern at American audiences' inability to listen to and laugh at politically incorrect jokes. That's a bad trend.

And of course, the current administration invites attention. The president's constant tweets and comments often go beyond what's politically correct or appropriate. It would be absurd for "SNL" or any other outlet for cultural commentary to ignore the president, especially one with such a ... dynamic personality. But isn't the cycle of Trump attacking the media and the media attacking back getting a little old? The feud has become predictable, and thus often un-funny.

"Saturday Night Live" should recognize this and avoid the mistake that other late-night comedy shows have made in allowing an obsession with Trump to remake them. For example, Steven Colbert's anti-Trump turn might increase ratings and revenues, but it's not funny and also not good for the country. He's purged his audience of right-leaning viewers, now appealing only to the #Resistance. And now there's no hour of the day, no place or activity, where Americans are not divided.

"SNL" is at its best when it mocks both sides of the aisle. Indeed, "SNL" occasionally pokes fun at liberals, as they did last season in their sketch mocking incredulous Millennials as they watched the results from Election 2016, and in their hilarious "Slackivism" video with Louis C.K. Let's hope for better balance in the 43rd season ahead.

Some of the best sketches of the last season were light on politics altogether. And it's worth noting that the best episode of the season - starring Tom Hanks - was funny and effective precisely because the political commentary focused on bringing Americans together, not deriding the other side. In "Black Jeopardy," Hanks played a Trump supporter who, we find out, has much more in common with his fellow contestants (all black) than anyone first thought. We could use more of that, too.

"SNL" has a big stage, and a big platform. Like NFL players, many in the cast likely feel a social responsibility to use that platform for their political causes. That's admirable and good. But they will be more effective - and more entertaining - if they can connect with people who disagree with them.

Americans of all political stripes need to be able to listen to and even occasionally tell a joke at our own expense. If we can't laugh at ourselves, we're boring. If we can't laugh together, we're lost. In its coming season, let's hope the cast of "SNL" will be fair and funny, by focusing on giving all Americans a much-needed laugh.
Hadley Heath Manning is policy director at the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative organization. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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Opinion: Don't let politics ruin 'Saturday Night Live'

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"Saturday Night Live," now in its 43rd season, is an American pastime. The show has produced incredible talent like Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, as well as classic sketches like those mocking "Celebrity Jeopardy" and the Coneheads.

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PressReader.com - Connecting People Through News

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Connecting People through News. All-you-can-read digital newsstand with thousands of the world's most popular newspapers and magazines. Vast selection of top stories in full-content format available for free.

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These ad services, like many other forms of pattern-based algorithms, create a never-ending feedback loop that spreads like wildfire. Users read an inherently biased article (or simply read a misleading headline), repost it, and the false information reaches an even larger audience. Before you know it, Donald Trump is out there throwing Twitter fingaz.

Cathy O'Neil, former quant and big data extraordinaire, describes the issue of math-powered applications and ad services in her novel "Weapons of Math Destruction." While detailing examples of biased programs or algorithms that lead to increased inequality, she describes how targeting certain individuals can lead to further deviation from the truth.

"Opaque and invisible models are the rule, and clear ones very much the exception. We're modeled as shoppers and couch potatoes, as patients and loan applicants, and very little of this do we see [...]. Even when such models behave themselves, opacity can lead to a feeling of unfairness," O'Neil said.

Ads and unique headlines are commonly tailored to specific individuals, often with total disregard for accuracy or an intended bias. As it is, humans are often unaware of their own unconscious bias. Combine this with how headlines are often intended to "pop" rather than "inform," and it's easy to see how individuals can find themselves in a bit of a predicament.

But, if the use of loaded terminology and biased headlines has been prominent for years, then why has the situation became progressively worse? Again, the answer lies partly within the use of math-based algorithms on Twitter and Facebook.

According to Clifford Lampe, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, social media has created even larger filter bubbles. "More people now receive their news (depending on their age demographic a bit) from social media than they do from direct viewing of news media. The outcome of this appears to be exacerbating filter bubbles. People naturally are connected to other people who share their characteristics and values, which means that the news people see shared in social media can match their pre-existing beliefs," Lampe said.

Lampe does not believe social media is necessarily the one to blame for the prevalence of misleading news articles or headlines. Instead, the responsibility lies in the ad market and tendency for these ads within sites such as Facebook to automatically redirect inaccurate information.

"I'm not sure the issue is social media per se, but is rather the broader set of Internet technologies that make it very easy for people to create and disseminate "news" that is either fake or heavily biased. Social media does play a role in that it often is centered around emotional responses (for example, the reaction options on Facebook are all emotions) which leads to less critical or rational consumption of news," Lampe said.

Interestingly enough, the statistic from the Pew Research Center further aids any argument for people's unwillingness to decipher truth from fiction. Many automatically assume statistics as accurate representations of the bigger picture, but fail to dive deeper into how the research was conducted.

I'm in no way claiming that research centers spread false information, but rather, people have a tendency to not question the accuracy at all. Does the data employ a large enough sample size? Were questions asked in a weighted way? Does the information have a cultural or geographic bias?

When people fail to raise questions, they are easily manipulated and can believe just about anything. Hence, create a false news report on Facebook, but make it look as real as possible, and more than likely someone is going to repost it. Not to mention, they'll probably use that same statistic to aid them in a heated Fox News Facebook comment argument. If you're lucky, Trump might even tweet about it.

By liking certain articles on Facebook which fall under this broad category, the chances of seeing similar misleading information increases. After all, just like many of the "Weapons of Math Destruction" O'Neil describes, the permeation of fake news occurs in a never ending feedback loop.

Although Spicer and Trump may come across as irresponsible, the need to hold news sources in check is a reality. However, the problem doesn't lie with the mainstream media, it lies with those controlling ad services and social media pattern recognitions.

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Fake News: Is Social Media to Blame? - The Michigan Review

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The prevalence of so-called "fake news McCarthyism" and unsubstantiated accusations targeted at the mainstream media has expanded as a result of the growing number of people who receive the majority of their news from social media. In the exponential world of big data, particularly evident in Google Ad algorithms, market manipulators have gained the ability ...

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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/social-media-fake-news-inflaming-the-gullibility-of-illinformed-voters/news-story/ba8fb401b3c2c47a714361bf007eedf0

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1. Open the Internet Browser

2. Click Tools (or "gear" icon at top right hand corner) > Internet Options > Privacy > Advanced

3. Check Override automatic cookie handling

4. For First-party Cookies and Third-party Cookies click Accept

5. Click OK and OK

Enabling Cookies in Internet Explorer 10, 11

1. Open the Internet Browser

2. Click the Tools button, and then click Internet Options.

3. Click the Privacy tab, and then, under Settings, move the slider to the bottom to allow all cookies, and then click OK.

Enabling Cookies in Google Chrome

1. Open the Google Chrome browser

2. Click Tools icon Or type in Go to chrome://settings/ to the URL window, hit enter

3. Click 'Advanced settings' > Select Privacy > Content settings

4. Check 'Allow local data to be set (recommended)'

5. Click 'Done'

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Open the Internet Browser Click Tools (or "gear" icon at top right hand corner) > Internet Options > Privacy > Advanced Check Override automatic cookie handling For First-party Cookies and Third-party Cookies click Accept Click OK and OK Enabling Cookies in Internet Explorer 10, 11 Open the Internet Browser Click the Tools button, and then click Internet Options.

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Photographer: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

How can we fight back against the fake news infecting our information feeds and political systems? New research suggests that education and filtering technology might not be enough: The very nature of social media networks could be making us peculiarly vulnerable.

The intentional spreading of false stories has been credited with swaying such monumental events as last year's Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election. Tech firms such as Alphabet Inc. unit Google and Facebook Inc. have been trying to find ways to weed it out, or at least help users spot it. Some say we need to start earlier, educating children on how to think critically.

But understanding the unique epidemiology of fake news may be no less important. Unlike a typical virus, purveyors of falsehood don't have to infect people at random. Thanks to the wealth of information available on social media and the advent of targeted advertising, they can go straight for the most susceptible and valuable victims -- those most likely to spread the infection.

This insight emerges from a recent study by network theorists Christoph Aymanns, Jakob Foerster and Co-Pierre Georg, who ran computer simulations of the way fake news moves through social networks. Using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, they examined how individuals might learn to recognize false news, and sought to identify the most important factors in helping fake news spread.

They found that the most important catalyst of fake news was the precision with which the purveyor targeted an audience -- a task that can easily be accomplished using the data that tech companies routinely gather and sell to advertisers. The key was to seed an initial cluster of believers, who would share or comment on the item, recommending it to others through Twitter or Facebook. False stories spread farther when they were initially aimed at poorly informed people who had a hard time telling if a claim was true or false.

Hence, we've unwittingly engineered a social media environment that is inherently prone to fake news epidemics. When marketers use information on surfing habits, opinions and social connections to aim ads at people with just the right interests, this can facilitate beneficial economic exchange. But in the wrong hands, the technology becomes a means for the precision seeding of propaganda.

It's hard to see how this can change without altering the advertising-centric business model of social media. Aymanns suggests that big social media companies could counteract fake news by preventing advertisers from targeting users on the basis of political views, or even by suspending all targeted ads during election campaigns. But this might be impossible, given how important such advertising has become to the economy. Alternatively, opponents of fake news could use the same targeting technology to identify and educate the most vulnerable people -- say, providing them with links to information that might help them avoid being fooled.

The study does offer one positive conclusion: Broad awareness of fake news should tend to work against its success. Campaigns were much less successful when individuals in the model learned strategies to recognize falsehoods while being fully aware that purveyors were active. This suggests that public information campaigns can work, as Facebook's seemed to do ahead of the French election in May.

In other words, fake news is like a weaponized infectious agent. Immunization through education can help, but it might not be a comprehensive defense.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Mark Buchanan at buchanan.mark@gmail.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Mark Whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net

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Why Fake News Spreads So Fast on Facebook

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How can we fight back against the fake news infecting our information feeds and political systems? New research suggests that education and filtering technology might not be enough: The very nature of social media networks could be making us peculiarly vulnerable.

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Political messaging through fake news featured during Kenya's recent general election. Shutterstock

The recent Kenyan elections firmly demonstrated the incursion and perhaps even gradual institutionalisation of fake news as an actor in modern politics, particularly during elections. Although the term fake news is now so liberally used to the extent it eludes precise definition, many agree it's the deliberate dissemination of false information expressly intended to misinform.

The presidential election, which pitted the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta against his political nemesis, opposition leader Raila Odinga, was fiercely fought on many fronts. One of these fronts, arguably the most significant, was the unprecedented investment in political messaging.

Kenyatta's Jubilee Party and Odinga's National Super Alliance (NASA) invested heavily in media and public relations consultants, communication experts and political advertising. The Jubilee Party even enlisted the services of Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analysis company credited with playing an influential role in the election of US President Donald Trump. The company also had a hand in the UK's Brexit campaign.

Added to this heady mix was clandestine messaging through fake news on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Numerous fake news stories were widely circulated on social media as unsubstantiated allegations were posted against both parties, some even through paid adverts on Google.

This was a step up from previous elections where politicians would pay backstreet newspaper publishers to tarnish the names of their opponents. Kenya has always had publishers for hire, a particularly thriving industry at election time. These publishers quite often have no known addresses, are defined by their impermanence and therefore impossible to sue even when one is legitimately aggrieved by their publications.

In 2017 the mudslinging migrated online and become much more nuanced and sophisticated. Stories that featured fake opinion polls and others that directly attacked the characters of both Kenyatta and Odinga were widely circulated online and in print. Some of these were slickly produced videos that were passed off as originating from CNN and the BBC.

In one fake CNN video Kenyatta's popularity rating was shown to be well ahead of Odinga's. Another fake video, this time purportedly an outtake from the BBC's Focus on Africa programme, also featured an opinion poll showing Kenyatta beating Odinga.

And fake newspapers bearing the plagiarised mastheads of widely circulating dailies including the Daily Nation and The Star were sold to unsuspecting readers.

This proliferation of fake news in Kenya can be explained on two grounds. The first relates to the history of the country's media, and the second to the increasing importance of online platforms in shaping the African news agenda.

The Kenyan media

The Kenyan media has become a prisoner of its history. It remains shackled to the consequences of its role in the country's 2007 disputed presidential elections. A section of the press were accused of actively promoting the violence that engulfed the country in the aftermath of the polls. At least 1,000 people died and more than 500,000 thousand were displaced.

This legacy has turned the media into a bystander in the political process, especially at election time. In 2013 it hardly raised any objections to electoral malpractices that led to the disputed presidential election. Instead, media houses promoted "peace" to preempt a repeat of the 2007-2008 post-election violence.

It was a decision that was supported financially by a number of local and international agencies who spent months training the local press in "peace journalism". This peace narrative has now became normalised in election coverage in the country. The consequence has been the creation of an information vacuum which has now been filled by fake news.

Rise of social media

The circulation of fake news also seems to have benefited from the changing profile of the Kenyan voter. Nearly half of about 20 million registered voters in Kenya are aged between 18 and 35. A significant number source their news from social media where fake news circulates the most.

According to a recent consumer survey only 28% of young Kenyans read newspapers regularly. Social media is slowly but surely becoming their platform of choice for news.

And the audience for fake news is growing given that two out of three young Kenyans now either own a mobile device or have access to one, and Internet connectivity costs go down annually.

This election revealed the fact that fake news has not only become commonplace, it's become mainstream and is evolving into a distinct news genre.

Fake news thrives on the modern news consumer's insatiable appetite for speedy information. We are living in a news ecosystem where urgency trumps the core values of journalism such as accuracy, fact checking and objectivity.

Traditional news media, with brands built on the back of their ability to fact check or investigate stories before publication, are struggling to do so when they are simultaneously expected to publish with speed. While gate keeping is key to ensure that news outlets remain trustworthy, the speed at which audiences now expect information has seen media houses haemorrhage audiences.

That lag in providing speedy information has created a vacuum which fake news producers are exploiting. They don't have brands or reputations to protect. Fake news is positively sustained by an online economy which prioritises sensationalism over quality. Sensational 'news' very quickly goes viral and this is its most effective weapon.

Fake news is slowly intruding on virtually every aspect of life. We must first understand its appeal and then make every effort to counter it. This is especially the case because it is now a genre sustained by a much larger social, economic and political infrastructure that the news media alone is incapable of dealing with.

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How social media and fake news are battering traditional media in Kenya

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The recent Kenyan elections firmly demonstrated the incursion and perhaps even gradual institutionalisation of fake news as an actor in modern politics, particularly during elections. Although the term fake news is now so liberally used to the extent it eludes precise definition, many agree it's the deliberate dissemination of false information expressly intended to misinform.

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The news story looked at first glance like it had come straight from one of America's most established and trusted news sources - ABC TV - and it was an eye-opener.

A man claimed Hillary Clinton's team paid him US$3,500 to pretend to be a protester at a Donald Trump rally, simultaneously calling into question the sincerity of anti-Trump demonstrators and Clinton's ethics.

Eric Trump, the candidate's son, soon tweeted a link to it - "Finally the truth comes out," he commented - as did his father's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who called the practice "deplorable."

The problem? The story was undiluted fiction, the product not of ABC News, but of AbcNews.com.co, whose suffix is usually associated with Colombia - and whose creator uses his own name as a character in his mock articles.

The item was part of a burgeoning phenomenon in U.S. politics: partly or mostly made-up "news" items casting one presidential candidate or the other in a negative light, and - thanks to the immense power of Facebook and other social media - seen by millions of Americans.

If cable-news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC revived an era of overtly partisan political coverage, producers of so-called fake news have taken the trend to a new and distorted level, largely dispensing with facts in their zeal to generate money-making clicks and/or promote one political side.

Now it's on all sides and it's just incredible how it has metastasized

"It's really disconcerting the scale that misinformation can achieve relatively quickly and with relatively little effort," says Craig Silverman, Canadian chief of the Buzzfeed website. "It's driving divisions between people ... It has made it very difficult for the public square to have some reasonable debate."

Silverman spearheaded a study recently of "hyper-partisan" Facebook pages, finding that during a two-week period, 38 per cent of news material on three right-wing pages and 19 per cent on left-leaning ones were partly or mostly false.

Just as troubling, Buzzfeed concluded the fabricated posts were shared by readers far more than the legitimate ones, or than stories on mainstream news sites.

And while such material resided largely on the fringes of political debate in the past, it is now seeping into the mainstream.

This week, Sean Hannity, the influential Fox News commentator and Trump backer, aired a story suggesting Michelle Obama had erased all her pro-Clinton tweets in the wake of the renewed FBI email probe. It was a fake, easily disproved simply by examining Obama's Twitter feed. Hannity later apologized.

On the left, popular partisan news operations have posted pieces suggesting Russian hackers manipulated online polls to make it appear Trump won the first debate, and that the Republican presidential candidate wants to expel all Muslims.

Snopes.com, the myth-busting, fact-checking website, saw the germs of such a phenomenon with items attacking Barack Obama in 2008, says Brooke Binkowski, the site's managing editor.

"Now it's on all sides and it's just incredible how it has metastasized."

Of course, rumour and innuendo designed to discredit candidates have always been a shadowy part of elections, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Opponents even whispered that Thomas Jefferson, a crusader for religious freedom, planned to confiscate Americans' bibles, notes Paul Brewer, research director of the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication.

But the practice has changed in key ways. Fake stories dress up such insinuation as news - a relatively trusted commodity - and the Internet provides a delivery system of unprecedented efficiency and reach.

More specifically, Facebook is, in Silverman's words, the "game-changer," a site used by 1.7 billion humans where "friends" trade information with each other - including news stories.

A study published by Brewer and colleagues last year hinted that its unique potency extends beyond just the massive number of users.

When a test group was exposed to a fictional candidate's Facebook page, the faux politician's own statements held little sway. But study subjects reacted positively to positive comments by other users and negatively to negative remarks, suggesting the opinions of peers made a key difference.

The same effect may be at work with fake news shared between users, Brewer says.

"These messages don't just reinforce what some people believe, but they're also socially validated by actual (Facebook) friends ... and that gives them added credibility."

But if Facebook is the inadvertent seed spreader of fake news, it has the ability to make the soil less fertile with concerted action, argue media commentators like Alexios Mantzarlis of the journalist-training Poynter Institute.

The social-media giant's software ensures, for example, that posts with photos or videos are disseminated more widely, and it could do the same to favour true over false information on its Newsfeed, he says.

In fact, Facebook is aware of the controversy and currently working on addressing it with tweaks to its algorithms, a spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, that heady cocktail of misinformation and social media may have been stirred up further by another trend. The deepening red ink of mainstream news organizations has shrunk the number of journalists, leaving fewer people to counter or correct false news, says Binkowski.

"Proliferation of fake news is a direct result of the fact that newsrooms have been cut dramatically," she argues.

Yet the motivations and sources of that proliferation seem to vary.

Some sites and pages, for instance, are designed wholly to hoax, mislead or satirize.

Paul Horner, the man behind the AbcNews.com.co site and others designed to look like those of established news operations, declined an interview request but linked to articles suggesting he was a "satirist."

Many of his articles would seem to lack a key ingredient of satire - humour - and, regardless, are often picked up and disseminated as real news.

When such articles go viral, they can be lucrative, as well as politically pungent.

The operator of one site - Make America Great - that propagates dubious pro-Trump news told The New York Times he earns about US$20,000 a month from it. And unlike mainstream organizations that have reporters actually gathering and verifying information, his costs are minimal.

The concern is that Democrats and Republicans, they're not just divided on issues, but they have alternate realities: they have different facts, or what they think are fact

That site is part of another group of online news entities often described as "hyper-partisan" and the subject of the Buzzfeed study.

Their reach is staggering. The three left-wing Facebook pages examined had between 1.2 million and 4.1 million fans; the rightist ones 623,000 to 3.3 million.

For both, less truth meant more audience. Right Wing News, for instance, had an average of 91 shares for its generally true posts and 568 for partly or totally false ones, according to Buzzfeed's analysis.

Silverman says he also discovered that a small town in Macedonia, of all places, has 100 dubious news sites pumping out mostly pro-Trump material. Four of its top five stories recently - with a combined million Facebook shares and likes - were wholly false, he says.

As troubling as the trend seems, a chicken-and-egg question remains: is phoney, partisan "news" swaying voters, or simply luring in Americans who already have similar leanings?

The answer is unclear, no one having studied the issue empirically. But even if fake political news is chiefly an ideological echo chamber - confirming rather than dramatically shifting voters' opinions - it may at least be hardening those positions, in a country that's already polarized.

"The concern is that Democrats and Republicans, they're not just divided on issues, but they have alternate realities: they have different facts, or what they think are facts," says Brewer. "It's hard to have a conversation that leads to constructive solutions when you don't even agree on what the reality is."

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The scourge of the U.S. election: Fake news, exploding on social media, is seeping into the mainstream

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The news story looked at first glance like it had come straight from one of America's most established and trusted news sources - ABC TV - and it was an eye-opener. A man claimed Hillary Clinton's team paid him US$3,500 to pretend to be a protester at a Donald Trump rally, simultaneously calling into question the sincerity of anti-Trump demonstrators and Clinton's ethics.

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HALF MOON BAY, Calif. - Under fire for Russian abuse of its service during the 2016 presidential election, the spread of fake news and more, Facebook has promised to right the ship this year.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated his personal goal for 2018 is "fixing" problems like these at Facebook, rather than taking on something more personal like learning Mandarin or reading 25 books.

Facebook is also opening up, at least a little. The Associated Press recently spoke with Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, about changes in the way Facebook handles fake news and foreign influence. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

--

Q: A big challenge is fake news. How do you detect it? Where are the battle lines and how are things going on a technological front?

A: The first thing you want to do is detect. That's when we work with partners like you and others to try and evaluate whether this is truthful or not. (The Associated Press helps fact-check stories that appear on Facebook.)

Once we figure out something is truly bad, obviously fake, usually those are by someone who's trying to do this for bad reasons. So we dramatically reduce the distribution or move it where people don't see it. If I'm trying to make money by scamming people, I'm not making so much money doing that.

--

Q: Does fact-checking actually work? By the time it's flagged and a journalist looks at it and does all the research, a piece may have already gotten a huge run on Facebook.

A: Sometimes these things have a longer shelf life than you'd expect. They get re-shared or reconstituted. And that's where, once you decide that this is another fake version of this, you can detect that and you can get there sooner.

--

Q: Can you measure the monetary impact you've had on fake news purveyors?

A: At some point later in the year we'll share some of that. We've seen a marked decrease.

--

Q: There's another election happening pretty soon. How do you feel about steps you've taken to combat foreign influence?

A: Election integrity is huge. Keeping the community safe, making sure that bad actors aren't misusing the platform, is THE focus. A lot of this boils down to people who are inauthentic. They claim they're advocating for this social movement in the U.S. Really, they're not in the country at all, don't represent it and they have a fake profile or a fake page.

--

Q: Can you tell someone isn't where they say they are?

A: These folks are smart. They know that you're looking at IP (internet protocol) addresses, so they'll take over a machine with malware in the U.S. and post from there instead. People say, "Why don't you just check the currency or the IP address?" And as soon as you do that, literally that afternoon, they will change tactics.

So I think we've got be even smarter. We said we're hiring another 10,000 people to help us review content. We've put the best people we have in the company working on these problems and I think we've made good progress, but there's lots more to do.

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Q&A: Facebook's CTO talks about fake news, Russia

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HALF MOON BAY, Calif. - Under fire for Russian abuse of its service during the 2016 presidential election, the spread of fake news and more, Facebook has promised to right the ship this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated his personal goal for 2018 is "fixing" problems like these at Facebook, rather than taking on something more personal like learning Mandarin or reading 25 books.

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I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.

But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.

There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn't see the false claims - possibly amplified by propaganda bots - that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn't see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Sen. Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn't true.

Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I've never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.

Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes - and the more malicious misdirection - that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers - The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle - plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news - I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I'm embarrassed about how much free time I have - in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we're entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an "information apocalypse." And we're all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix.

But don't you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.
Get News
I know what you're thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn't everyone reading this story already appreciate print?

Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

I'm nearly 40, but I'm no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go.

Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can't get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can't even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that's about the price of Apple's best iPhone.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it - and you realize how much of what you get online isn't quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: "Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over 'Dreamers,'" ran The Times' headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal.

Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news.

This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don't just post stories - they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

There's nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd - to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself - that makes us susceptible to misinformation.
Not Too Quickly
It has been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we're all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you're driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.

This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social

Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a "tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans' grasp of time and memory," as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there's still a lot of news - but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone's lock screen.

You don't need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters like those from Axios, or listening to a daily news podcast. What's important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out.
Avoid Social
This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn't newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today - and every one we will battle tomorrow - is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness' sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

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For two months, I got my news from print newspapers. Here's what I learned

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I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.