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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).

Economics

A distributed resilience among darknet markets?

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by Martin Dittus

The actions by law enforcement were deliberately structured to seed distrust in illicit trading platforms. Did this effort succeed?

by Martin Dittus

You may have seen the news earlier this year that two large darknet marketplaces, Alphabay and Hansa, have been taken down by international law enforcement. Particularly interesting about these takedowns is that they were deliberately structured to seed distrust among market participants: after Alphabay closed many traders migrated to Hansa, not aware that it had already covertly been taken over by the police. As trading continued on this smaller platform, the Dutch police and their peers kept track of account logins, private messages, and incoming orders. Two weeks later they also closed Hansa, and revealed their successful data collection efforts to the public. Many arrests followed. The message to illicit traders: you can try your best to stay anonymous, but eventually we will catch you. By coincidence, our small research team of Joss Wright, Mark Graham, and I had set out earlier in the year to investigate the economic geography of darknet markets. We had started our data collection a few weeks earlier, and the events took us by surprise: it doesn’t happen every day that a primary information source gets shut down by the police. While we had anticipated that some markets would close during our investigations, it all happened rather quickly. On the other hand, this also gave us a rare opportunity to observe what happens after such a takedown. The actions by law enforcement were deliberately structured to seed distrust in illicit trading platforms. Did this effort succeed? Let’s have a look at the data. The chart above shows weekly trading volumes on darknet markets for the period from May to July 2017. The black line shows the overall trading volume across all markets we observed at the time. Initially, Alphabay (in blue) represented a significant share of this overall trade, while Hansa (in yellow) was comparably small. When Alphabay was closed in week 27, overall sales dropped: many traders lost their primary market. The following week,…

Economics, Governance & Security, Mapping, Social Data Science

Mapping Fentanyl Trades on the Darknet

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by Mark Graham

The US accounts for almost 40% of global darknet trade, with Canada and Australia at 15% and 12%, respectively.

by Mark Graham

My colleagues Joss Wright, Martin Dittus and I have been scraping the world’s largest darknet marketplaces over the last few months, as part of our darknet mapping project. The data we collected allow us to explore a wide range of trading activities, including the trade in the synthetic opioid Fentanyl, one of the drugs blamed for the rapid rise in overdose deaths and widespread opioid addiction in the US. The map shows the global distribution of the Fentanyl trade on the darknet. The US accounts for almost 40% of global darknet trade, with Canada and Australia at 15% and 12%, respectively. The UK and Germany are the largest sellers in Europe with 9% and 5% of sales. While China is often mentioned as an important source of the drug, it accounts for only 4% of darknet sales. However, this does not necessarily mean that China is not the ultimate site of production. Many of the sellers in places like the US, Canada, and Western Europe are likely intermediaries rather than producers themselves. In the next few months, we’ll be sharing more visualisations of the economic geographies of products on the darknet. In the meantime you can find out more about our work by Exploring the Darknet in Five Easy Questions. Follow the project here: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/economic-geog-darknet/ Twitter: @OiiDarknet

Wellbeing

Why we shouldn’t be pathologising online gaming before the evidence is in

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by David Sutcliffe

New study suggests that Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) may not, in itself, be robustly associated with important clinical outcomes.

by David Sutcliffe

There are active debates surrounding Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), however, a new study suggests that it may not, in itself, be robustly associated with important clinical outcomes.

Internet-based video games are a ubiquitous form of recreation pursued by the majority of adults and young people. With sales eclipsing box office receipts, games are now an integral part of modern leisure. However, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently identified Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) as a potential psychiatric condition and has called for research to investigate the potential disorder’s validity and its impacts on health and behaviour. Research responding to this call for a better understanding of IGD is still at a formative stage, and there are active debates surrounding it. There is a growing literature that suggests there is a basis to expect that excessive or problematic gaming may be related to lower health, though findings in this area are mixed. Some argue for a theoretical framing akin to a substance abuse disorder (i.e. where gaming is considered to be inherently addictive), while others frame Internet-based gaming as a self-regulatory challenge for individuals. In their article “A prospective study of the motivational and health dynamics of Internet Gaming Disorder”, Netta Weinstein, the OII’s Andrew Przybylski, and Kou Murayama address this gap in the literature by linking self-regulation and Internet Gaming Disorder research. Drawing on a representative sample of 5,777 American adults they examine how problematic gaming emerges from a state of individual “dysregulation” and how it predicts health—finding no evidence directly linking IGD to health over time. This negative finding indicates that IGD may not, in itself, be robustly associated with important clinical outcomes. As such, it may be premature to invest in management of IGD using the same kinds of approaches taken in response to substance-based addiction disorders. Further, the findings suggests that more high-quality evidence regarding clinical and behavioural effects is needed before concluding that IGD is a legitimate candidate for inclusion in future revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We caught up with Andy to explore the implications of the study:…

There are active debates surrounding Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), however, a new study suggests that it may not, in itself, be robustly associated with important clinical outcomes.

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