Economics, Governance & Security, Mapping, Social Data Science

Mapping Fentanyl Trades on the Darknet

by Mark Graham 16/10/2017

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

by Mark Graham 16/10/2017

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

Development

New Report: Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work at the Global Margins

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

The report poses questions for all stakeholders regarding how to improve the conditions and livelihoods of online gig workers.

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

The cartogram depicts countries as circles sized according to dollar inflow during March 2013 on a major online labour platform. The shading of the inner circle indicates the median hourly rate published by digital workers in that country. See the report for details.

The growth of online gig work—paid work allocated and delivered by way of internet platforms without a contract for long-term employment—has been welcomed by economic development experts, and the world’s largest global development network is promoting its potential to aid human development. There are hopes that online gig work, and the platforms that support it, might catalyse new, sustainable employment opportunities by addressing a mismatch in the supply and demand of labour globally. Some of the world’s largest gig work platforms have also framed their business models as a revolution in labour markets, suggesting that they can help lift people out of poverty. Similarly, many policymakers expect that regions like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia can capitalise on this digitally mediated work opportunity as youth-to-adult unemployment rates hit historic peaks. More broadly, it has been suggested that online gig work will have structural benefits on the global economy, such as raising labour force participation and improving productivity. Against this background, a new report by Mark Graham, Vili Lehdonvirta, Alex Wood, Helena Barnard, Isis Hjorth, and David Peter Simon, “The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work At The Global Margins” [PDF] highlights the risks alongside the rewards of online gig work. It draws on interviews and surveys, together with transaction data from one of the world’s largest online gig work platforms, to reveal the complex and sometimes problematic reality of this “new world of work”. While there are significant rewards to online gig work, there are also significant risks. Discrimination, low pay rates, overwork, and insecurity all need to be tackled head-on. The report encourages online gig work platforms to further develop their service, policymakers to revisit regulation, and labour activists to examine organising tactics if online gig work is to truly live up to its potential for human development, and become a sustainable situation for many more workers. The final section of the report poses questions for all stakeholders…

Development

What Impact is the Gig Economy Having on Development and Worker Livelihoods?

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

Reflecting on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work.

by Mark Graham 20/03/2017

There are imbalances in the relationship between supply and demand of digital work, with the vast majority of buyers located in high-income countries (pictured). See full article for details.

As David Harvey famously noted, workers are unavoidably place-based because “labour-power has to go home every night.” But the widespread use of the Internet has changed much of that. The confluence of rapidly spreading digital connectivity, skilled but under-employed workers, the existence of international markets for labour, and the ongoing search for new outsourcing destinations, has resulted in organisational, technological, and spatial fixes for virtual production networks of services and money. Clients, bosses, workers, and users of the end-products of work can all now be located in different corners of the planet. A new article by Mark Graham, Isis Hjorth and Vili Lehdonvirta, “Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods”, published in Transfer, discusses the implications of the spatial unfixing of work for workers in some of the world’s economic margins, and reflects on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, it highlights four key concerns for workers: bargaining power, economic inclusion, intermediated value chains, and upgrading. As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it is important to understand how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. The authors show that although there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that could negatively affect the livelihoods of digital workers. They conclude with a discussion of four broad strategies – certification schemes, organising digital workers, regulatory strategies and democratic control of online labour platforms—that could improve conditions and livelihoods for digital workers. We caught up with the authors to explore the implications of the study: Ed.: Shouldn’t increased digitisation of work also increase transparency (i.e. tracking,…

Development, Economics

Broadband may be East Africa’s 21st century railway to the world

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa.

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

Connecting 21st-century Africa takes more than just railways and roads. Steve Song, CC BY-NC-SA

Reposted from The Conversation. The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa—the last major populated region of the world to gain a wired connection to the internet. Before 2009, there wasn’t a single fibre-optic cable connecting the region to the rest of the world. After hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, cables were laid to connect the region to the global network. Prices for internet access went down, speeds went up, and the number of internet users in the region skyrocketed. Politicians, journalists and academics all argued that better connectivity would lead to a blossoming of economic, social, and political activity—and a lot of influential people in the region made grand statements. For instance, former Kenyan president Mwai Kibai stated: I am gratified to be with you today at an event of truly historic proportions. The landing of this fibre-optic undersea cable project in Mombasa is one of the landmark projects in Kenya’s national development story. Indeed some have compared this to the completion of the Kenya-Uganda railway more than a century ago. This comparison is not far-fetched, because while the economies of the last century were driven by railway connections, the economies of today are largely driven by internet. The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, also spoke about the revolutionary potentials of these changes in connectivity. He claimed: In Africa, we have missed both the agricultural and industrial revolutions and in Rwanda we are determined to take full advantage of the digital revolution. This revolution is summed up by the fact that it no longer is of utmost importance where you are but rather what you can do – this is of great benefit to traditionally marginalised regions and geographically isolated populations. As many who have studied politics have long since noted, proclamations like these can have an important impact: they frame how scarce resources can be…

Development, Economics

Investigating virtual production networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded.

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

Ed: You are looking at the structures of ‘virtual production networks’ to understand the economic and social implications of online work. How are you doing this? Mark: We are studying online freelancing. In other words this is digital or digitised work for which professional certification or formal training is usually not required. The work is monetised or monetisable, and can be mediated through an online marketplace. Freelancing is a very old format of work. What is new is the fact that we have almost three billion people connected to a global network: many of those people are potential workers in virtual production networks. This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded. What we plan to do in this project is better map the contours of some of those changes and understand who wins and who doesn’t in this new world of work. Ed: Are you able to define what comprises an individual contribution to a ‘virtual production network’—or to find data on it? How do you define and measure value within these global flows and exchanges? Mark: It is very far from easy. Much of what we are studying is immaterial and digitally-mediated work. We can find workers and we can find clients, but the links between them are often opaque and black-boxed. Some of the workers that we have spoken to operate under non-disclosure agreements, and many actually haven’t been told what their work is being used for. But that is precisely why we felt the need to embark on this project. With a combination of quantitative transaction data from key platforms and qualitative interviews in which we attempt to piece together parts of the network, we want to understand who is (and isn’t) able to capture and create value within these networks. Ed: You note that “within virtual production networks, are we seeing a shift…

Development

Why global contributions to Wikipedia are so unequal

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others. But the internet seemed to promise something different: a greater diversity of voices, opinions and narratives from more places. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass in quite the manner some expected it to. Many parts of the world remain invisible or under-represented on important websites and services. All of this matters because as geographic information becomes increasingly integral to our lives, places that are not represented on platforms like Wikipedia will be absent from many of our understandings of, and interactions with, the world. Mapping the differences Until now, there has been no large-scale analysis of the factors that explain the wide geographical spread of online information. This is something we have aimed to address in our research project on the geography of Wikipedia. Our focus areas were the Middle East and North Africa. Using statistical models of geotagged Wikipedia data, we identified the necessary conditions to make countries “visible”. This allowed us to map the countries that fare considerably better or worse than expected. We found that a large part of the variation between countries could be explained by just three factors: population, availability of broadband internet, and the number of edits originating in that country. Areas of Wikipedia hegemony and uneven geographic coverage. Oxford Internet Institute While these three variables help to explain the sparse amount of content written about much of sub-Saharan Africa, most of the Middle East and North Africa have much less geographic information than might be expected. For example, despite high levels of wealth and connectivity, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have far fewer articles than we might expect. Constraints to creating content These three factors matter independently, but they will also be subject to other constraints. A country’s population will probably affect the number of activities, places, and practices…

Development, Mapping

What explains the worldwide patterns in user-generated geographical content?

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of the world.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geographies of codified knowledge have always been uneven, affording some people and places greater voice and visibility than others. While the rise of the geosocial Web seemed to promise a greater diversity of voices, opinions, and narratives about places, many regions remain largely absent from the websites and services that represent them to the rest of the world. These highly uneven geographies of codified information matter because they shape what is known and what can be known. As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of, and interaction with, the world. We know that Wikipedia is important to the construction of geographical imaginations of place, and that it has immense power to augment our spatial understandings and interactions (Graham et al. 2013). In other words, the presences and absences in Wikipedia matter. If a person’s primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world will look fundamentally different from the world presented through the lens of the English Wikipedia. The capacity to represent oneself to outsiders is especially important in those parts of the world that are characterised by highly uneven power relationships: Brunn and Wilson (2013) and Graham and Zook (2013) have already demonstrated the power of geospatial content to reinforce power in a South African township and Jerusalem, respectively. Until now, there has been no large-scale empirical analysis of the factors that explain information geographies at the global scale; this is something we have aimed to address in this research project on Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa. Using regression models of geolocated Wikipedia data we have identified what are likely to be the necessary conditions for representation at the country level, and have also identified the outliers,…

Development

Geotagging reveals Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal.

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal. This now ubiquitous source of information offers everything you could want to know about the US and Europe but far less about any other parts of the world. This structural openness of Wikipedia is one of its biggest strengths. Academic and activist Lawrence Lessig even describes the online encyclopedia as “a technology to equalise the opportunity that people have to access and participate in the construction of knowledge and culture, regardless of their geographic placing”. But despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are fears that the platform is simply reproducing the most established worldviews. Knowledge created in the developed world appears to be growing at the expense of viewpoints coming from developing countries. Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopedia is far from “equal”, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out. For a start, if you look at articles published about specific places such as monuments, buildings, festivals, battlefields, countries, or mountains, the imbalance is striking. Europe and North America account for a staggering 84% of these “geotagged” articles. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia, too. In fact, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica (14,959) than any country in Africa. And while there are just over 94,000 geotagged articles related to Japan, there are only 88,342 on the entire Middle East and North Africa region. Total number of geotagged Wikipedia articles across 44 surveyed languages. Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming). When…

Development, Mapping

What is stopping greater representation of the MENA region?

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Negotiating the wider politics of Wikipedia can be a daunting task, particularly when in it comes to content about the MENA region.

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Wikipedia has famously been described as a project that “ works great in practice and terrible in theory”. One of the ways in which it succeeds is through its extensive consensus-based governance structure. While this has led to spectacular success—over 4.5 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone—the governance structure is neither obvious nor immediately accessible, and can present a barrier for those seeking entry. Editing Wikipedia can be a tough challenge—an often draining and frustrating task, involving heated disputes and arguments where it is often the most tenacious, belligerent, or connected editor who wins out in the end. Broadband access and literacy are not the only pre-conditions for editing Wikipedia; ‘digital literacy’ is also crucial. This includes the ability to obtain and critically evaluate online sources, locate Wikipedia’s editorial and governance policies, master Wiki syntax, and confidently articulate and assert one’s views about an article or topic. Experienced editors know how to negotiate the rules, build a consensus with some editors to block others, and how to influence administrators during dispute resolution. This strict adherence to the word (if not the spirit) of Wikipedia’s ‘law’ can lead to marginalization or exclusion of particular content, particularly when editors are scared off by unruly mobs who ‘weaponise’ policies to fit a specific agenda. Governing such a vast collaborative platform as Wikipedia obviously presents a difficult balancing act between being open enough to attract volume of contributions, and moderated enough to ensure their quality. Many editors consider Wikipedia’s governance structure (which varies significantly between the different language versions) essential to ensuring the quality of its content, even if it means that certain editors can (for example) arbitrarily ban other users, lock down certain articles, and exclude moderate points of view. One of the editors we spoke to noted that: “A number of articles I have edited with quality sources, have been subjected to editors cutting information that doesn’t fit their ideas […]…

Development, Mapping

How well represented is the MENA region in Wikipedia?

by Mark Graham 22/07/2014

There are more Wikipedia articles in English than Arabic about almost every Arabic speaking country in the Middle East.

by Mark Graham 22/07/2014

Image of rock paintings in the Tadrart Acacus region of Libya by Luca Galuzzi.

Wikipedia is often seen to be both an enabler and an equaliser. Every day hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on an (encyclopaedic) range of topics; writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content. This structural openness combined with Wikipedia’s tremendous visibility has led some commentators to highlight it as “a technology to equalise the opportunity that people have to access and participate in the construction of knowledge and culture, regardless of their geographic placing” (Lessig 2003). However, despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are also fears that the platform is simply reproducing worldviews and knowledge created in the Global North at the expense of Southern viewpoints (Graham 2011; Ford 2011). Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopaedia is far from ‘equal’, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out (Hecht and Gergle 2009; Graham 2011, 2013, 2014). These second-generation digital divides are not merely divides of Internet access (so discussed in the late 1990s), but gaps in representation and participation (Hargittai and Walejko 2008). Whereas most Wikipedia articles written about most European and East Asian countries are written in their dominant languages, for much of the Global South we see a dominance of articles written in English. These geographic differences in the coverage of different language versions of Wikipedia matter, because fundamentally different narratives can be (and are) created about places and topics in different languages (Graham and Zook 2013; Graham 2014). If we undertake a ‘global analysis’ of this pattern by examining the number of geocoded articles (ie about a specific place) across Wikipedia’s main language versions (Figure 1), the first thing we can observe is the incredible human effort that has gone into describing ‘place’ in Wikipedia. The second is the clear and highly uneven geography of information, with Europe and North America home to 84% of all geolocated articles. Almost all of Africa is…