Algorithms of Fear

Each week, it seems, brings some new incendiary rhetoric in our presidential election cycle or some new global political disruption emerging from the overlapping social, economic, technological, and environmental systems that govern our lives. Each disruption seems to shock us; and the most severe of them become political milestones, referred to across our digital networks in a kind of digital shorthand: Zika, Trump's wall, Ferguson, Flint. And now, of course, there's Orlando.

Yet despite all of the displays of solidarity and outrage that digitally trail each new disruption or debate, civic technologists are becoming convinced they need to do much more, much faster, to help make the Internet a greater force for civility, resiliency, and broader civic engagement.

One big reason for that, say many civic technologists, is Donald Trump and his high-boil candidacy for the White House. Another reason is that we now live in a world run by algorithms—computer programs that make decisions or solve problems for us. They decide our credit scores; they determine stock prices and even the movies we watch. And especially in this Trump-driven presidential election cycle, say civic technologists, media companies are using content algorithms to drive readers to a lot of highly emotional content that is triggering human behaviors meant to accentuate our differences and stoke our fears—in part, to better hold our attention; people tend to share more content if it makes them afraid or angry, they say.

The trouble is, fear is the most powerful enemy of reason in a democratic society, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), an annual conference that follows how the Internet is influencing politics, governance, and advocacy. "We should be helping those online learn how to navigate their differences other than driving them into daily or hourly flame wars," he said at the annual PDF gathering in New York over the weekend. Sifry believes it's time to create new algorithms and data tools to help find new ways "to ease polarization when there are differences" online.

"The issue of how technology is now affecting our awareness and our responses to triggers in the news, or our personal triggers, and what that is doing to our politics, is a really critical issue right now," Sifry said in an interview. "Digital media that we were all celebrating a few years ago as being better, more social, more personal, and more decentralized than the old broadcast media are now being re-centralized through channels designed by giant companies like Facebook and Google." Bots that have the effect of accentuating our differences online might be good for the media business, Sifry says, "but they're not so great for democracy."

Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian activist and former Google executive who helped to catalyze the 2011 Tahrir Square pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt, says US social media companies are using what he calls "mobocratic algorithms" that give us a "missing middle" between the extremes of "likes" and "comments"—which Ghonim says tend to quickly devolve into flame wars on social and digital media platforms. In an interview, Ghonim said, "We who use the Internet now 'like' or we flame—but there's [very little] now happening [algorithmically] to drive people into the more consensus-based, productive discussion we need to have, to help us make civic progress. Productive discussions aren't getting the [media] distribution they deserve. We're not driving people to content that could help us, as a society ... come together without a flame war."

danah boyd, another PDF speaker and social media scholar, said another problem with today's content algorithms supports concerns about fear-mongering. Many content algorithms, she said, also carry data sets "rife with racial bias, and if you're not fixing that, you are building racist systems."

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014 and the author of the essay, "The Web We Have to Save," says Internet technologists need to "re-imagine new algorithms with new kinds of social values, such as diversity and equality." Can it happen? Derakhshan says yes. "DJs do this all the time," he said. "Their selections are not based on what's new and what's popular. They play old tracks we all loved in the past, and they surprise us with great stuff we would never have listened to otherwise. Maybe it's time for states to intervene and push big social networks to open up their algorithms, and to allow third-party developers to create different kinds of algorithms as plug-ins. What we need now, more than ever, is ... to be surprised."

One of the biggest challenges facing civic technologists today, Sifry says, is a lack of enough funding to build someof the tools needed to "feed us into consensus and conflict resolution," rather than "merely feed our own echo chamber of somebody's flame war." There is also a kind of "disruption fatigue" setting in among some civic activists, Sifry says. "The danger is that we're not building new systems and tools fast enough." The danger, he says, is that "people might eventually give up the notion of having a democratic debate (online) and ... will start saying they've had enough: 'Give me a strongman who will solve it for me' or ...'I'm tired of this disruption for social good.'" To help civil society create better tools faster, Sifry and his PDF co-founder, Andrew Rasiej, used their conference to launch Civic Hall Labs, a new nonprofit that aims to build technology for the public good through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach.

Ghonim is optimistic and happy for the wake-up call issued at the conference—to build the tools we need to promote a more respectful public discourse. He agrees that building a more democratic, civil space online won't be easy, but believes it's technically doable. "You can build algorithms and experiences that are designed to get the best out of people, and you can build algorithms and experiences that drive out the worst. It's our job as civic technologists to build experiences that drive th ebest. We can do that. We must do that now."

—By Marcia Stepanek

(This article originally ran in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and is being reprinted here with permission.)

Twitter Contagion

(Click on the image for a full-sized view)

"Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future," writes Kovas Boguta, creator of this data visualization (above), which analyzes the Twitter communication that erupted during the recent youth uprising in Egypt .

Boguta, founder and CTO of Infoharmoni -- which analyzes real-time social structures on the Web -- says he arranged the map to place individual Twitter users close to the people with whom they communicate. The red and blue dots represent which language users were using to communicate (Arabic is denoted in red, while English is denoted in blue). The size of the dots represents the individual's influence on the group as a whole. Different factions are placed near the factions they influence, revealing how weak ties get stronger.

Boguta offered this explanation February 11th on his blog, Computational History:

“Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organizing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The size of his node reflects his influence on the entire network.

The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not ‘disappeared’.”

"Most of those in this network speak both English and Arabic, and their choice of language says a lot about both the movement and about Twitter. Some may choose to primarily communicate with friends, while others make an effort to be visible to the rest of the world on purpose. They want to reach out, and connect with, the rest of global society."

Boguta told TechCrunch at the launch of Infoharmoni in 2009:

People are social animals, and love to both move in packs and purposefully individuate. ... Existing social groups incubate new topics of interest on Twitter, and existing interests incubate new social groups. Both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it's more like the pulse of creative networks.

Cross-border Swarming

Cairo youth didn't act alone in using social media to depose Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the New York Times says today in a front-page story. Their Facebook and YouTube activism was part of a sophisticated, two-year, online collaboration with Tunisian youth activists that used social media to reach across national borders to commiserate about torture, trade tips on evading tear gas, and plot how to use technology to duck surveillance.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons," Times correspondents David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger wrote, describing the anatomy of the movement that led to protesters' successful face-off in Tahrir Square against less tech-savvy Egyptian authorities.

"What we discovered in reporting this story was that what's happening in the Middle East now is more than just a contagion in which one group inspires the next," Sanger told WNYC Radio this morning on The Brian Lehrer Show. "There was, thanks to Facebook and other social networking elements, a lot of communication back and forth across borders, but of course there are no borders (on the Internet). ...Imagine what a shock that was to Egyptian authorities -- to discover that the entire security system they had spent billions to build and focus on the inside never even considered this other (cross-border technological) threat."

[Wael Ghonim -- the Egyptian Google executive whose Facebook page is credited with helping to catalyze the crowds in Tahrir Square -- told CBS 60 Minutes last night that "Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google and without YouTube, this (revolution) would never have happened." CBS Correspondent Harry Smith, in this blog post today, quotes Ghonim as saying that the revolution "is like Wikipedia, okay?" Social media enabled everyone to be contributing content, Ghonim told Smith. "Everyone was contributing small pieces. No one was the hero but everyone was the hero."]

Sanger agrees that social media were critical to Cairo's youth revolution, which used online social networks to help destabilize the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, forcing him to resign from his 30-year reign on February 11th. "But what was really remarkable" about the Egyptian youth movement, Sanger told WNYC, is that it used both high and low tech to organize support:

"While social media were used to organize ringleaders, once they got going, they also used some of the oldest forms of communications -- putting up leaflets and fliers and walking through some of the poorest sections to reach people without Net connections. They shouted their message in the streets and picked up a following, liked the Pied Piper. This was a combination of extremly high tech organization and extraordinarily low-tech organization."

And now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt, Sanger says. He and Kirkpatrick quote Walid Rachid, 27, one of the members of the April 6 movement in Cairo -- an Egyptian Facebook group -- as saying that "Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world." At a meeting of youth movement leaders last night in Cairo, Rachid told Kirkpatrick: "...If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes." According to the Times story, the members of the Tunis and Cairo youth movements are talking about sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.

But Sanger cautions that the movement's success in Cairo doesn't insure its success elsewhere, especially in countries where authorities are far more sophisticated in the use of the Internet to organize protest. Sanger told WNYC: "I'd love to say Facebook was protection against the military, but had the military decided it was going to open fire on protesters and round people up, this could have looked more like Tiananmen Square, then I think we would have had something very different here." Sanger added: "...Just because social networks can be organized doesn't necessarily mean they will be successful at overcoming a regime." Sanger said that some regimes, like China, "are extraordinarily adept at using the Internet and social media to follow dissidents and punish them." Mubarak's regime, he says, "was clueless" about the power of social media and the Web -- but not every regime is, nor will be in the wake of what happened to Mubarak.

Meanwhile today, The Associated Press is reporting that the U.S. State Department has begun sending Twitter messages in Farsi to reach social media users in Iran, with some of the Tweets accusing Iran's government of "illegalizing dissent" while at the same time praising Egyptian protesters. The State Department's Farsi Twitter account had 60 followers within two hours of its launch, the AP was reporting. The AP also is reporting today that the State Department launched an Arabic Twitter feed last week in an effort to communicate with the Egyptian protesters and signal its support.

For more on the role of social media in political activism in the Middle East, see Cairo's Facebook Flat, below:

(Photo of Egyptian Facebook activist Wael Ghonim by Getty Images)