Data & Tech Archives - Page 2 of 2

Jack Fulton: Why the Online Harms White Paper should be amended

By Sam LampierCentre Write, Data & Tech

The rate at which social media has become integrated into our lives has been astonishing. 2019 saw 45 million active social media users, or 67% of the British population; a quantity so profound that for many of us it now feels impossible to imagine a world without social media.

Society today enjoys a level of social networking and correspondence never before experienced in human history. It is, therefore, no wonder that we consume so much of it in our daily lives; members of ‘Generation Z’ being the worst offenders, spending over three hours a day on some sort of social media. As a result, we have a society bound to their phones and tablets. But is this level of dependence, and in turn influence by media platforms, a cause for concern?

Social media platforms currently operate under an embryonic regulatory system which is not properly engineered to promote online safety. This can be observed in cases of online misconduct such as Cambridge Analytica. More distressingly, it can too be seen in tragic cases, for example, the Molly Russell suicide in 2017. In this instance “bleak depressive material, graphic self-harm content and suicide-encouraging memes” contributed to the suicide of the 14-year-old girl. Her father, Ian Russell, said he has “no doubt that social media helped kill [his] daughter.” Sadly, this does not seem to be the exception: NSPCC estimates that 90 cyber-crimes are recorded a day against children. With this in mind, one cannot help but sympathise with the view of the NSPCC head of Child Safety Online Policy, that ‘crystal clear regulation cannot come soon enough’. Searching for a specific cause, Damian Hinds, as education secretary, attributed the endemic nature of these cases to media platforms for confusing a child’s digital age of consent for their relinquishing of their legal status as minors.

The government seems to have recognised how social media facilitates child abuse, particularly against young girls. In April 2019 the government published an Online Harms White Paper, forcing media companies to both pay for research concerning online harm and share data regarding the actions their company is taking to tackle online abuse. This follows an international trend toward closer social media management, with some countries now imposing fines to platforms which do not remove hate speech within 24 hours.

What exactly does this white paper change? It proposes to introduce a legally enforceable regulatory framework designed to ensure platforms comply with their duty of care; those which fail to do so can expect punitive sanctions including “substantial fines”. In other words, it goes much further than any previous attempt to safeguard people online from illegal or harmful content. Civil rights groups have opposed making media companies liable for content on their sites, on the grounds that people should have autonomy over their online activity and not to be made to feel like “lab rats.”

The concern here is one of censorship. The Online Harms White Paper may incentivise media firms to become overly zealous in censoring content in the pursuit of avoiding governmental sanctions. It places the burden of deciding what content is lawful and what is unlawful at the door of private companies; action which, as Human Rights Watch points out, results in the creation of “no accountability” zones, given censorship avoids judicial inspection. In this regard the white paper is at risk of being too broad, a fault highlighted of the German Network Enforcement Act 2017, legislation enforcing similar action to that of the Online Harms white paper, when a satirical magazine had their content blocked.

What should the government do? It is clear action is needed now. Indeed, NSPCC figures show that “more than 25,000 offences involving child abuse images and sexual grooming have occurred since the publication of the Online Harms White Paper” in April 2019. Government is right to recognise the need for stricter age verification processes, to ensure young children do not see potentially harmful content, but it should be open to more indirect methods, such as the assembling of an online rights ombudsman, or the restructuring of the content promotion mechanism, which traps users in a bubble of possibly damaging imagery.

It is unquestionable that reform is needed. Yet government should gear policy toward preventative measures, not risk-based auditing techniques, as the latter risks breaching freedom of expression.

Jack Fulton is currently undertaking work experience at Bright Blue. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

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January 29, 2020

Hetan Shah: Time to seize the data opportunity

By Sam LampierCentre Write, Data & Tech

Many of the most successful corporations these days such as Google or Amazon are
essentially data companies. While technology has reshaped the private sector, government
risks getting left behind. The new Government has an opportunity to invest in the data
opportunity that will improve policymaking, make us more prosperous, and strengthen our
democracy.

Policymaking in most areas could be made more effective and efficient by strengthening the
sharing of data within government, while maintaining privacy safeguards. We tend to think of
government as one body, but in practice data is siloed in different departments. The
incentives are not there to share data across departments as a way of improving our
education system or healthcare. And if government can’t get hold of its own data, outside
academics wanting to use it for independent research find it even tougher. We need
leadership from the top to change this.

Data, especially scientific data, is a driver of prosperity and productivity. We are falling
behind other leading nations in the levels of our national investment in scientific research
and development, which leads to technological innovation and prosperity. Government will
need to invest, and also show how it can lever in more private sector funding. It is great to
see a commitment from the Government to increasing R&D expenditure to 2.4% of GDP, but
given likely economic pressures in the coming years, it will take political will to stick with this.

Data can also improve our democracy, but it will require us to have better local and regional
statistics. The Office for National Statistics has made some headway in this area, but there’s
much more to be done. We are a country of marked regional inequalities, and so need to
move beyond national averages to understand regional differences, especially on matters
such as productivity. Communities should easily be able to find the data about their local
area, so that the public sees itself reflected in the data. The upcoming census in 2021 is an
opportunity to test new kinds of data for quicker, more real-time information about the UK.

There are also new data challenges. In policymaking, the data revolution will challenge the
skills of old school civil servants who lack training in number and data skills. When it comes
to our prosperity, it is increasingly a challenge to measure how wealthy our nation really is in
a ‘Facebook’ intangible economy where we receive services but no money changes hands.
And democracy also faces new data challenges: how to counter misinformation, especially in
elections, and how to safeguard public privacy in the light of powerful data driven
technologies such as facial recognition?

The danger is that we have analogue policy in a digital age, and that we miss the
opportunities, and fail to meet the challenges, of our new data driven era.

Hetan Shah is executive director of the Royal Statistical Society and on Twitter
@HetanShah. The RSS’s Data Manifesto is available at www.rss.org.uk/manifesto

December 28, 2019

Nicola Yates: Cities of the future

By Sam LampierCentre Write, Data & Tech, Towns & Devolution

Cities are shaped by complex, often competing, local, national and global forces. That makes it hard for place leaders, both public and private, to accurately predict and plan for the forces that shape our streets, towns and cities – especially when trying to look further ahead than a few years. Successful future cities will therefore be characterised by adaptability. Luckily, the very forces driving the transformation of our cities and towns also offer the tools needed to enable such adaptability.

From the winding pedestrian lanes of Brighton, conceived by people who never imagined the need to make space for ‘horseless carriages’, to the planners behind the likes of Swindon and Milton Keynes, who could think of little else, developers and planning officers are often making decisions about tomorrow based on today’s ideas. Of course, the best planners and developers do consider the future, but in doing so they face an uphill struggle. In a rapidly changing world, anyone making decisions about something as complex as a city must channel their inner mystic when developing and evaluating plans – considering not just one set of trends, but a complex interplay of different possible futures that intersect and overlap.

At the Connected Places Catapult, the UK government-backed centre of excellence for innovation in mobility and the built environment, we see four key technology-enabled trends which are shaping towns and cities by redefining our collective relationship with the built environment, the economy and each other.

The first of these trends, ‘Space-as-a-Service’, has emerged from the recent shift in the way the commercial real estate industry provides products and services to tenants, transforming their role from rent collectors to service providers. In short, it is the change from accessing space through ownership or long-term rent, to a model where space is something we can access when and where we want. This trend can be seen across UK cities, from Box Park’s ‘meanwhile use’ retail centres to WeWork’s co-working spaces, The Collective’s co-living spaces and peer-to-peer home sharing platforms like AirBnB. These businesses represent a distinct shift towards the agile optimisation of space and services within cities.

Moving on to the theme of augmented and navigable space, the emergence of services like Google Lens and Google Map Augmented Reality (AR) means our experience of the world around us is increasingly mediated through digital filters, adding a new layer of information to our everyday lives. With the rollout of ‘smart street furniture’ like BT’s InLink UK pods, which serve advertisements and hyperlocal content tailored to individual passers-by, soon everyone will have a city experience unique to themselves. Just as we are using tech to find our way through the city, it is tracking our movement as well – generating valuable new data, but also raising questions about individual privacy and public trust.

Which brings us to predictable behaviour – a trend grounded in the ever-growing bank of data about how people, vehicles and goods move through cities, and the increasingly intelligent algorithms which can sift valuable insights from that data. Such analysis allows for complex urban modelling and more accurate insights into how cities function today and how they might work tomorrow. Since 2007, Google has provided live traffic information in its wayfinding apps to help users avoid congested areas of the city in real-time. This year, CrimeRadar launched in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, using machine-learning to predict where and when crime is likely to occur. Drawing on five years of crime data and 14 million crimes provided by the state police, every part of the city is now rated. Meanwhile, academics at University College London and the Centric Lab are looking at how cutting edge neuroscience data can be integrated to models to improve the fidelity of behavioural predictions still further.

Advances in data analysis and monitoring are not limited to things that move. They are also being applied to the built environment itself to create intelligent infrastructure. From sensors threaded throughout the London Underground which enable predictive maintenance and reduced management costs, to the proliferation of smart metres which will enable more dynamic energy networks (‘smart grids’), infrastructure and the services they support are becoming more responsive and resilient.

For both city managers and private developers, staying ahead of the innovation curve is as essential as it is challenging. Places that plan for and harness innovative connected places technologies are likely to reap benefits in terms of economic productivity, prosperity and citizen satisfaction, while those which fail to adapt to the changing world may fall behind.

To ensure that more places enjoy the fruits of innovation, the Connected Places Catapult is working with place leaders and private firms across the UK to support local authorities engage the market with confidence, and with the private sector to help firms develop and demonstrate solutions to the pressing needs of buyers. In particular, we have been working with planning authorities and developers to catalyse an urgent upgrade in the UK’s planning sector. This ‘PlanTech’ revolution has seen firms large and small applying data analysis, augmented reality, machine learning and a range of other digital technologies to bring land use and transport planning into the twenty-first century, reducing risk and therefore cost for developers, driving efficiency in planning services and delivering transparency for the public. With our help, many of these once futuristic products are on the market today to help place leaders make smarter choices that will stand the test of time.

Looking ahead, the next level of innovation will see whole infrastructure systems and the places they support reproduced in the form of ‘digital twins’ – incredibly sophisticated virtual models which can be used to test proposed changes before making costly interventions in the real world. Combining dynamic data about fixed assets like buildings, transport infrastructure and utilities networks with real time and modelled data about the movement of people and goods through the space, these digital twins will be an essential tool for city managers of the future.

Nicola Yates OBE is the CEO of Connected Places Catapult. This article first appeared in our Centre Write magazine On the home front. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

December 19, 2019

Sam Robinson: Social media – echo chamber or public forum?

By Bright BlueCentre Write, Data & Tech, Sam Robinson

Against a backdrop of tumultuous political events such as the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, worries abound that political polarisation is increasing. A conventional wisdom has emerged that social media is fuelling this process by producing ‘echo chambers’ whereby people view only sources that confirm their pre-existing beliefs and are insulated from opposing perspectives, making them susceptible to groupthink and radicalisation.

The concern over echo chambers has been compounded by findings of ‘gated’ online communities. Examination of Twitter discussions on US politics has found that users on the platform are, by and large, exposed to views in accordance with their own. It seems also that those who try to bridge the ideological gap between different groups pay a penalty in terms of influence in debates and endorsement from other users; in other words, you get more attention on Twitter by being partisan.

The think tank Demos analysed the behaviour of politically engaged Twitter users in the UK. They found that supporters of political parties tend to interact amongst themselves, share news consistent with their ideological position, and that “certain topics are much more prevalently discussed by certain political groups than by others”, indicating divides not just in terms of media outlets but content as well. According to Demos’ report, such groups “reinforce ideological positions”. Considering that during the 2016 referendum campaign only around 10% of tweets by Remain supporters were sent to Leave supporters and vice-versa, it is perhaps not hard to see why.

Echo chambers have been observed on Facebook, too. Quantitative analysis of users in the US and Italy shows the emergence of “closed, non-interacting communities” centred around different narratives – in this case, science and conspiracy theories. The effect of these groups was found to be powerful. The more active users were in the groups, the more they interacted with others of similar beliefs. When researchers posted deliberately false information in these groups, this served only to reinforce the conviction of the echo chamber and harden attitudes further.

This phenomenon seems to apply to the Brexit debate as well. Researchers found the spontaneous emergence of two distinct Facebook communities, with users’ attention confined to specific news outlets. As a result, the same topics were both presented and perceived differently in each echo chamber.

But if echo chambers exist, how worried should we be about them? Recent research puts their importance into question. One issue with the narrative around echo chambers is that many studies confirming their existence only take one platform into account. Intuition might suggest that this is an unrealistic portrayal of how people consume media. Indeed, UK internet users look at an average of four different media sources and have accounts across three different social media platforms.

Not only do most people shop around for information online, but a diverse media diet and political interest have been shown to be strong predictors of behaviours that help avoid getting trapped in an echo chamber. Based on these findings, the Oxford Internet Institute concluded that only a small minority – around 8% of British adults – have sufficiently low political interest and media diversity to be at significant risk of being caught in an echo chamber.

Another interesting finding is that although articles found through social media are associated with greater ideological segregation than other channels such as direct browsing, social media is also associated with greater exposure to opposing viewpoints. Underlining this insight is the fact that while only 21.6% of UK social media users claim to often agree with the political content they see, a much greater proportion – 32.3% – claim to often disagree. The upshot is that although echo chambers are real, their effects are confined to a minority of social media users. In other words, most social media users are not cut off from other viewpoints.

So, far from being an echo chamber, for many people social media is a way to broaden their media horizons. The most worrying aspect of this is that despite increased exposure to opposing views on social media, political polarisation can still deepen. The suggestion is that the problem lies not so much with digital echo chambers as good old-fashioned psychological biases such as the ‘backfire effect’ – our tendency to dig our heels in even further when presented with evidence contradicting our views.

While echo chambers are out there, then, it seems that in fact they only ensnare a small segment of social media users and don’t present a major threat. If we are to find a solution to our polarised political climate, perhaps we’d do better to look in the mirror than at our feeds.

Sam Robinson is a Research Assistant at Bright Blue.

May 22, 2019

Data & Tech