Collective Action, Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Exploring the Ethics of Monitoring Online Extremism

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

(Part 2 of 2) The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. In the second of a two-part post, Josh Cowls and Ian Brown discuss the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen. Read the first post. Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorised in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet? Josh: I think that is right—many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US). A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing! Ed: So…

Education, Social Data Science

Two years after the NYT’s ‘Year of the MOOC’: how much do we actually know about them?

by Rebecca Eynon 13/11/2014

Despite the hype around MOOCs to date, there are many similarities between MOOC research and the breadth of previous investigations into (online) learning.

by Rebecca Eynon 13/11/2014

Timeline of the development of MOOCs and open education, from: Yuan, Li, and Stephen Powell. MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education White Paper. University of Bolton: CETIS, 2013.

Ed: Does research on MOOCs differ in any way from existing research on online learning? Rebecca: Despite the hype around MOOCs to date, there are many similarities between MOOC research and the breadth of previous investigations into (online) learning. Many of the trends we’ve observed (the prevalence of forum lurking; community formation; etc.) have been studied previously and are supported by earlier findings. That said, the combination of scale, global-reach, duration, and “semi-synchronicity” of MOOCs have made them different enough to inspire this work. In particular, the optional nature of participation among a global-body of lifelong learners for a short burst of time (e.g. a few weeks) is a relatively new learning environment that, despite theoretical ties to existing educational research, poses a new set of challenges and opportunities. Ed: The MOOC forum networks you modelled seemed to be less efficient at spreading information than randomly generated networks. Do you think this inefficiency is due to structural constraints of the system (or just because inefficiency is not selected against); or is there something deeper happening here, maybe saying something about the nature of learning, and networked interaction? Rebecca: First off, it’s important to not confuse the structural “inefficiency” of communication with some inherent learning “inefficiency”. The inefficiency in the sub-forums is a matter of information diffusion—i.e., because there are communities that form in the discussion spaces, these communities tend to “trap” knowledge and information instead of promoting the spread of these ideas to a vast array of learners. This information diffusion inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing, however. It’s a natural human tendency to form communities, and there is much education research that says learning in small groups can be much more beneficial / effective than large-scale learning. The important point that our work hopes to make is that the existence and nature of these communities seems to be influenced by the types of topics that are being discussed…

Interviews, Tools

The social economies of networked cultural production (or, how to make a movie with complete strangers)

by Isis Hjorth 28/04/2014

Looking at “networked cultural production”—ie the creation of cultural goods like films through crowdsourcing platforms—specifically in the ‘wreckamovie’ community

by Isis Hjorth 28/04/2014

Nomad, the perky-looking Mars rover from the crowdsourced documentary Solar System 3D (Wreckamovie).

Ed: You have been looking at “networked cultural production”—ie the creation of cultural goods like films through crowdsourcing platforms—specifically in the ‘wreckamovie’ community. What is wreckamovie? Isis: Wreckamovie is an open online platform that is designed to facilitate collaborate film production. The main advantage of the platform is that it encourages a granular and modular approach to cultural production; this means that the whole process is broken down into small, specific tasks. In doing so, it allows a diverse range of geographically dispersed, self-selected members to contribute in accordance with their expertise, interests and skills. The platform was launched by a group of young Finnish filmmakers in 2008, having successfully produced films with the aid of an online forum since the late 1990s. Officially, there are more than 11,000 Wreckamovie members, but the active core, the community, consists of fewer than 300 individuals. Ed: You mentioned a tendency in the literature to regard production systems as being either ‘market driven’ (eg Hollywood) or ‘not market driven’ (eg open or crowdsourced things); is that a distinction you recognised in your research? Isis: There’s been a lot of talk about the disruptive and transformative powers nested in networked technologies, and most often Wikipedia or open source software are highlighted as examples of new production models, denoting a discontinuity from established practices of the cultural industries. Typically, the production models are discriminated based on their relation to the market: are they market-driven or fuelled by virtues such as sharing and collaboration? This way of explaining differences in cultural production isn’t just present in contemporary literature dealing with networked phenomena, though. For example, the sociologist Bourdieu equally theorised cultural production by drawing this distinction between market and non-market production, portraying the irreconcilable differences in their underlying value systems, as proposed in his The Rules of Art. However, one of the key findings of my research is that the shaping force of these productions is…

Methods, Politics & Government

How easy is it to research the Chinese web?

by Han-Teng Liao 18/02/2014

The research expectations seem to be that control and intervention by Beijing will be most likely on political and cultural topics, not likely on economic or entertainment ones.

by Han-Teng Liao 18/02/2014

Access to data from the Chinese Web, like other Web data, depends on platform policies, the level of data openness, and the availability of data intermediary and tools. Image of a Chinese Internet cafe by Hal Dick.

Ed: How easy is it to request or scrape data from the “Chinese Web”? And how much of it is under some form of government control? Han-Teng: Access to data from the Chinese Web, like other Web data, depends on the policies of platforms, the level of data openness, and the availability of data intermediary and tools. All these factors have direct impacts on the quality and usability of data. Since there are many forms of government control and intentions, increasingly not just the websites inside mainland China under Chinese jurisdiction, but also the Chinese “soft power” institutions and individuals telling the “Chinese story” or “Chinese dream” (as opposed to “American dreams”), it requires case-by-case research to determine the extent and level of government control and interventions. Based on my own research on Chinese user-generated encyclopaedias and Chinese-language twitter and Weibo, the research expectations seem to be that control and intervention by Beijing will be most likely on political and cultural topics, not likely on economic or entertainment ones. This observation is linked to how various forms of government control and interventions are executed, which often requires massive data and human operations to filter, categorise and produce content that are often based on keywords. It is particularly true for Chinese websites in mainland China (behind the Great Firewall, excluding Hong Kong and Macao), where private website companies execute these day-to-day operations under the directives and memos of various Chinese party and government agencies. Of course there is some extra layer of challenges if researchers try to request content and traffic data from the major Chinese websites for research, especially regarding censorship. Nonetheless, since most Web content data is open, researchers such as Professor Fu in Hong Kong University manage to scrape data sample from Weibo, helping researchers like me to access the data more easily. These openly collected data can then be used to measure potential government control, as has…

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