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Five reasons ‘technological solutions’ are a distraction from the Irish border problem

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by Helen Margetts

Discussing the focus on ‘technological solutions’ in the context of the Irish border debate.

by Helen Margetts

Technology is increasingly touted as an alternative to the Irish backstop, especially in light of the government’s difficulty to find a Brexit strategy that can command a majority in the House of Commons. As academics, we have been following the debate around the role of technology in monitoring the border with interest, but also scepticism and frustration. Technology can foster government innovation in countless ways and digital technologies, in particular, have the potential to transform the way in which the government makes policy and designs public services. Yet, in the context of the Irish border debate, the focus on ‘technological solutions’ is becoming a red herring and distracts from the political choices ahead. Technology cannot solve the Irish border problem and it is time to face the facts. 1: Technology cannot ensure a ‘frictionless border’ Any legal or regulatory restrictions on the movement of goods or people between the UK and the Republic of Ireland post-Brexit will make border-related friction inevitable. Setting the restrictions is a matter of political agreements. Technology can help enforce the legal or regulatory restrictions, but it cannot prevent the introduction of friction compared to the status quo. For example, technology may speed up documentation, processing, and inspections, but it cannot eliminate the need for these procedures, whose existence will mean new burdens on those undergoing them. 2:  There will be a need for new infrastructure at or near the border Technology may make it possible for some checks to be carried out away from the border. For example, machine learning algorithms can assist in identifying suspicious vehicles and police forces can stop and inspect them away from the border. Regardless of where the relevant inspections are carried out, however, there will be a need for new infrastructure at or near the border, such as camera systems that record the identity of the vehicles crossing the frontier. The amount of new infrastructure needed will depend on…

Politics & Government

Can “We the People” really help draft a national constitution? (sort of..)

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by David Sutcliffe

There is a clear trend of greater public participation in the process of constitution making, and with the growth of e-democracy tools, this trend is likely to continue.

by David Sutcliffe

Þingvellir: location of the Althing, the national parliament of Iceland, established in 930 AD with sessions held at the location until 1798. Image: Luc Van Braekel (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

As innovations like social media and open government initiatives have become an integral part of politics in the twenty-first century, there is increasing interest in the possibility of citizens directly participating in the drafting of legislation. Indeed, there is a clear trend of greater public participation in the process of constitution making, and with the growth of e-democracy tools, this trend is likely to continue. However, this view is certainly not universally held, and a number of recent studies have been much more skeptical about the value of public participation, questioning whether it has any real impact on the text of a constitution. Following the banking crisis, and a groundswell of popular opposition to the existing political system in 2009, the people of Iceland embarked on a unique process of constitutional reform. Having opened the entire drafting process to public input and scrutiny, these efforts culminated in Iceland’s 2011 draft crowdsourced constitution: reputedly the world’s first. In his Policy & Internet article “When Does Public Participation Make a Difference? Evidence From Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution”, Alexander Hudson examines the impact that the Icelandic public had on the development of the draft constitution. He finds that almost 10 percent of the written proposals submitted generated a change in the draft text, particularly in the area of rights. This remarkably high number is likely explained by the isolation of the drafters from both political parties and special interests, making them more reliant on and open to input from the public. However, although this would appear to be an example of successful public crowdsourcing, the new constitution was ultimately rejected by parliament. Iceland’s experiment with participatory drafting therefore demonstrates the possibility of successful online public engagement — but also the need to connect the masses with the political elites. It was the disconnect between these groups that triggered the initial protests and constitutional reform, but also that led to its ultimate failure. We caught…

Þingvellir: location of the Althing, the national parliament of Iceland, established in 930 AD with sessions held at the location until 1798. Image: Luc Van Braekel (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

Politics & Government

Bursting the bubbles of the Arab Spring: the brokers who bridge ideology on Twitter

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by David Sutcliffe

Scholarly interest in online activism has grown with its use. Do social media really challenge traditional politics?

by David Sutcliffe

Thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Friday May 13, 2011. Image by Hossam el-Hamalawy.

Online activism has become increasingly visible, with social media platforms being used to express protest and dissent from the Arab Spring to #MeToo. Scholarly interest in online activism has grown with its use, together with disagreement about its impact. Do social media really challenge traditional politics? Some claim that social media have had a profound and positive effect on modern protest — the speed of information sharing making online networks highly effective in building revolutionary movements. Others argue that this activity is merely symbolic: online activism has little or no impact, dilutes offline activism, and weakens social movements. Given online activity doesn’t involve the degree of risk, trust, or effort required on the ground, they argue that it can’t be considered to be “real” activism. In this view, the Arab Spring wasn’t simply a series of “Twitter revolutions”. Despite much work on offline social movements and coalition building, few studies have used social network analysis to examine the influence of brokers of online activists (i.e. those who act as a bridge between different ideological groups), or their role in information diffusion across a network. In her Policy & Internet article “Brokerage Roles and Strategic Positions in Twitter Networks of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution”, Deena Abul-Fottouh tests whether social movements theory of networks and coalition building — developed to explain brokerage roles in offline networks, between established parties and organisations — can also be used to explain what happens online. Social movements theory suggests that actors who occupy an intermediary structural position between different ideological groups are more influential than those embedded only in their own faction. That is, the “bridging ties” that link across political ideologies have a greater impact on mobilisation than the bonding ties within a faction. Indeed, examining the Egyptian revolution and ensuing crisis, Deena finds that these online brokers were more evident during the first phase of movement solidarity between liberals, islamists, and socialists than in…

Thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Friday May 13, 2011. Image by Hossam el-Hamalawy.

Call for Papers, Submissions Closed

Call for Papers: Government, Industry, Civil Society Responses to Online Extremism

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by David Sutcliffe

Mapping and evaluating emerging public-private partnerships, technologies, and responses to online extremism.

by David Sutcliffe

The process of radicalization still lacks clarity, and relies on theorizing that is rife with assumptions. Image of flowers left at London Bridge in June 2017, by Gerry Popplestone (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

*Submissions for this event have closed. Please refer to the event page for further details* We are calling for articles for a Special Issue of the journal Policy & Internet on “Online Extremism: Government, Private Sector, and Civil Society Responses”, edited by Jonathan Bright and Bharath Ganesh, to be published in 2019. The submission deadline is October 30, 2018. Issue Outline Governments, the private sector, and civil society are beginning to work together to challenge extremist exploitation of digital communications. Both Islamic and right-wing extremists use websites, blogs, social media, encrypted messaging, and filesharing websites to spread narratives and propaganda, influence mainstream public spheres, recruit members, and advise audiences on undertaking attacks. Across the world, public-private partnerships have emerged to counter this problem. For example, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) organized by the UN Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate has organized a “shared hash database” that provides “digital fingerprints” of ISIS visual content to help platforms quickly take down content. In another case, the UK government funded ASI Data Science to build a tool to accurately detect jihadist content. Elsewhere, Jigsaw (a Google-owned company) has developed techniques to use content recommendations on YouTube to “redirect” viewers of extremist content to content that might challenge their views. While these are important and admirable efforts, their impacts and effectiveness is unclear. The purpose of this special issue is to map and evaluate emerging public-private partnerships, technologies, and responses to online extremism. There are three main areas of concern that the issue will address: (1) the changing role of content moderation, including taking down content and user accounts, as well as the use of AI techniques to assist; (2) the increasing focus on “counter-narrative” campaigns and strategic communication; and (3) the inclusion of global civil society in this agenda. This mapping will contribute to understanding how power is distributed across these actors, the ways in which technology is expected to address the…

The process of radicalization still lacks clarity, and relies on theorizing that is rife with assumptions. Image of flowers left at London Bridge in June 2017, by Gerry Popplestone (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Politics & Government

How can we encourage participation in online political deliberation?

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by David Sutcliffe

The Internet seems to provide an obvious opportunity to strengthen intra-party democracy and mobilise passive party members. However, these mobilising capacities are limited and participation has been low.

by David Sutcliffe

The benefits of political participation may remain unclear if public deliberation takes place without a clear goal or a real say in decision-making for the participants. Image: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen (Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Political parties have been criticised for failing to link citizen preferences to political decision-making. But in an attempt to enhance policy representation, many political parties have established online platforms to allow discussion of policy issues and proposals, and to open up their decision-making processes. The Internet—and particularly the social web—seems to provide an obvious opportunity to strengthen intra-party democracy and mobilise passive party members. However, these mobilising capacities are limited, and in most instances, participation has been low. In their Policy & Internet article “Does the Internet Encourage Political Participation? Use of an Online Platform by Members of a German Political Party,” Katharina Gerl, Stefan Marschall, and Nadja Wilker examine the German Greens’ online collaboration platform to ask why only some party members and supporters use it. The platform aims to improve the inclusion of party supporters and members in the party’s opinion-formation and decision-making process, but it has failed to reach inactive members. Instead, those who have already been active in the party also use the online platform. It also seems that classical resources such as education and employment status do not (directly) explain differences in participation; instead, participation is motivated by process-related and ideological incentives. We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings: Ed.: You say “When it comes to explaining political online participation within parties, we face a conceptual and empirical void.” Can you explain briefly what the offline models are, and why they don’t work for the Internet age? Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: According to Verba et al. (1995) the reasons for political non-participation can be boiled down to three factors: (1) citizens do not want to participate, (2) they cannot, (3) nobody asked them to. Speaking model-wise we can distinguish three perspectives: Citizens need certain resources like education, information, time and civic skills to participate (resource model and civic voluntarism model). The social psychological model looks at the role of attitudes and…

The benefits of political participation may remain unclear if public deliberation takes place without a clear goal or a real say in decision-making for the participants. Image: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen (Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Politics & Government

Making crowdsourcing work as a space for democratic deliberation

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by David Sutcliffe

Is crowdsourcing conducive to deliberation among citizens or is it essentially just a consulting mechanism for information gathering?

by David Sutcliffe

As demonstrated by the reform of Finland's off-road law, crowdsourcing legislation can function as a space for democratic deliberation. Image: Lassi Välimaa (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

There are a many instances of crowdsourcing in both local and national governance across the world, as governments implement crowdsourcing as part of their open government practices aimed at fostering civic engagement and knowledge discovery for policies. But is crowdsourcing conducive to deliberation among citizens or is it essentially just a consulting mechanism for information gathering? Second, if it is conducive to deliberation, what kind of deliberation is it? (And is it democratic?) Third, how representative are the online deliberative exchanges of the wishes and priorities of the larger population? In their Policy & Internet article “Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland”, Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore examine a partially crowdsourced reform of the Finnish off-road traffic law. The aim of the process was to search for knowledge and ideas from the crowd, enhance people’s understanding of the law, and to increase the perception of the policy’s legitimacy. The participants could propose ideas on the platform, vote others’ ideas up or down, and comment. The authors find that despite the lack of explicit incentives for deliberation in the crowdsourced process, crowdsourcing indeed functioned as a space for democratic deliberation; that is, an exchange of arguments among participants characterised by a degree of freedom, equality, and inclusiveness. An important finding, in particular, is that despite the lack of statistical representativeness among the participants, the deliberative exchanges reflected a diversity of viewpoints and opinions, tempering to a degree the worry about the bias likely introduced by the self-selected nature of citizen participation. They introduce the term “crowdsourced deliberation” to mean the deliberation that happens (intentionally or unintentionally) in crowdsourcing, even when the primary aim is to gather knowledge rather than to generate deliberation. In their assessment, crowdsourcing in the Finnish experiment was conducive to some degree of democratic deliberation, even though, strikingly, the process was not designed for it. We caught up with the authors to…

As demonstrated by the reform of Finland's off-road law, crowdsourcing legislation can function as a space for democratic deliberation. Image: Lassi Välimaa (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Politics & Government

Habermas by design: designing public deliberation into online platforms

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by David Sutcliffe

What particular platform features should we look to, to promote deliberative debate online?

by David Sutcliffe

Advocates of deliberative democracy have always hoped that the Internet would provide the means for an improved public sphere. Image: March for Our Lives, Washington, by DK Lee (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

Advocates of deliberative democracy have always hoped that the Internet would provide the means for an improved public sphere. But what particular platform features should we look to, to promote deliberative debate online? In their Policy & Internet article “Design Matters! An Empirical Analysis of Online Deliberation on Different News Platforms”, Katharina Esau, Dennis Friess, and Christiane Eilders show how differences in the design of various news platforms result in significant variation in the quality of deliberation; measured as rationality, reciprocity, respect, and constructiveness. The empirical findings of their comparative analysis across three types of news platforms broadly support the assumption that platform design affects the level of deliberative quality of user comments. Deliberation was most likely to be found in news fora, which are of course specifically designed to initiate user discussions. News websites showed a lower level of deliberative quality, with Facebook coming last in terms of meeting deliberative design criteria and sustaining deliberation. However, while Facebook performed poorly in terms of overall level of deliberative quality, it did promote a high degree of general engagement among users. The study’s findings suggest that deliberative discourse in the virtual public sphere of the Internet is indeed possible, which is good news for advocates of deliberative theory. However, this will only be possible by carefully considering how platforms function, and how they are designed. Some may argue that the “power of design” (shaped by organisers like media companies), contradicts the basic idea of open debate amongst equals where the only necessary force is Habermas’s “forceless force of the better argument”. These advocates of an utterly free virtual public sphere may be disappointed, given it’s clear that deliberation is only likely to emerge if the platform is designed in a particular way. We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings: Ed: Just briefly: what design features did you find helped support public deliberation, i.e. reasoned, reciprocal, respectful, constructive discussion? Katharina…

Advocates of deliberative democracy have always hoped that the Internet would provide the means for an improved public sphere. Image: March for Our Lives, Washington, by DK Lee (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

Ethics

Human Rights and Internet Technology: Six Considerations

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by Corinne.Cath

The United Nations Human Rights Council has reaffirmed many times that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online”.

by Corinne.Cath

The increased reliance on Internet technology impacts human rights. Image: Bruno Cordioli (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

The Internet has drastically reshaped communication practices across the globe, including many aspects of modern life. This increased reliance on Internet technology also impacts human rights. The United Nations Human Rights Council has reaffirmed many times (most recently in a 2016 resolution) that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online”. However, only limited guidance is given by international human rights monitoring bodies and courts on how to apply human rights law to the design and use of Internet technology, especially when developed by non-state actors. And while the Internet can certainly facilitate the exercise and fulfilment of human rights, it is also conducive to human rights violations, with many Internet organisations and companies currently grappling with their responsibilities in this area. To help understand how digital technology can support the exercise of human rights, we—Corinne Cath, Ben Zevenbergen, and Christiaan van Veen—organised a workshop at the 2017 Citizen Lab Summer Institute in Toronto, on ‘Coding Human Rights Law’. By gathering together academics, technologists, human rights experts, lawyers, government officials, and NGO employees, we hoped to gather experience and scope the field to: 1. Explore the relationship between connected technology and human rights; 2. Understand how this technology can support the exercise of human rights; 3. Identify current bottlenecks for integrating human rights considerations into Internet technology, and; 4. List recommendations to provide guidance to the various stakeholders working on human-rights strengthening technology. In the workshop report “Coding Human Rights Law: Citizen Lab Summer Institute 2017 Workshop Report”, we give an overview of the discussion. We address multiple legal and technical concerns. We consider the legal issues arising from human rights law being state-centric, while most connected technologies are being developed by the private sector. We also discuss the applicability of current international human rights frameworks to debates about new technologies. We cover the technical issues that arise when trying to code for human rights, in…

The increased reliance on Internet technology impacts human rights. Image: Bruno Cordioli (Flickr CC BY 2.0).

Ethics

Could Counterfactuals Explain Algorithmic Decisions Without Opening the Black Box?

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by David Sutcliffe

Exploring the role of algorithms in our everyday lives, and how a “right to explanation” for decisions might be achievable in practice

by David Sutcliffe

Algorithmic systems (such as those deciding mortgage applications, or sentencing decisions) can be very difficult to understand, for experts as well as the general public. Image: Ken Lane (CC BY-NC 2.0).

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has sparked much discussion about the “right to explanation” for the algorithm-supported decisions made about us in our everyday lives. While there’s an obvious need for transparency in the automated decisions that are increasingly being made in areas like policing, education, healthcare and recruitment, explaining how these complex algorithmic decision-making systems arrive at any particular decision is a technically challenging problem—to put it mildly. In their article “Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR” which is forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Chris Russell present the concept of “unconditional counterfactual explanations” as a novel type of explanation of automated decisions that could address many of these challenges. Counterfactual explanations describe the minimum conditions that would have led to an alternative decision (e.g. a bank loan being approved), without the need to describe the full logic of the algorithm. Relying on counterfactual explanations as a means to help us act rather than merely to understand could help us gauge the scope and impact of automated decisions in our lives. They might also help bridge the gap between the interests of data subjects and data controllers, which might otherwise be a barrier to a legally binding right to explanation. We caught up with the authors to explore the role of algorithms in our everyday lives, and how a “right to explanation” for decisions might be achievable in practice: Ed: There’s a lot of discussion about algorithmic “black boxes” — where decisions are made about us, using data and algorithms about which we (and perhaps the operator) have no direct understanding. How prevalent are these systems? Sandra: Basically, every decision that can be made by a human can now be made by an algorithm, which can be a good thing. Algorithms (when we talk about artificial intelligence) are very good at spotting patterns and…

Algorithmic systems (such as those deciding mortgage applications, or sentencing decisions) can be very difficult to understand, for experts as well as the general public. Image: Ken Lane (CC BY-NC 2.0).

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