The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Martina Mahnke, who is approaching algorithms from a human rather than technical perspective. Indeed, the term algorithm is often used to avoid explaining exactly how automated systems function, and what logics them embed; the study of algorithms from the user’s or programmer’s view has a considerably shorter history to date.
From this perspective, the, algorithms are communicative constructs; the narratives of algorithms influence directly how people engage with them. But this also implies that there is the narrative of algorithms that is created by the programmers, as well as a potential …
The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Noemi Festic, whose focus is on algorithmic content selection processes by automated systems. This includes search applications, recommendation systems, and a broad range of other automated tools; these govern user behaviour by limiting and shaping activities but thereby also provide a space for new forms of engagement.
Such applications have an effect on the social order in human societies at the macro-level, but the extent of that effect is debatable and needs to be tested by empirical research. Part of the question here is how aware users are of the agency of these …
The first paper in the final session at AoIR 2018 today is SeongJae Min, who is interested in the role of algorithms in determining what we are exposed to on social media; the major finding from his research is that people’s choices matter at least as much as algorithmic shaping.
Concepts such as ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ have become popularised in recent times, but there is a significant lack of empirical evidence for such phenomena; if anything, they are more prevalent in localised offline contexts than global online networks, where cross-cutting exposure is considerably more likely to occur. But …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the continuing consequences of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – and in particular its anti-circumvention elements that criminalise the bypassing of copyright protection mechanisms such as encryption, even in contexts where ‘fair use’ exceptions apply.
But there are some exceptions; the U.S. Copyright Office engages in triennial rulemaking processes that grant exemptions for particular, tightly defined cases of bypassing. However, do such exemptions work? While copyright users are by now well aware of the DMCA, they are less aware of the bypassing prohibitions …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.
Internet.org was subsequently renamed as Free Basics, and continues its activities; it was expelled from India, however. It represents an attempt to establish a socio-technical imaginary informed by a significant level of technological determinism …
The next AoIR 2018 speaker is Nathalie Maréchal, who focusses on digital rights technology: any kind of hardware or software that improves users’ privacy, access to information, and freedom of expression. This threatens government and corporate control of information flows in an age of surveillance capitalism, and is therefore also controversial; it challenges the networked authoritarianism that is beginning to take hold in many countries around the world.
Even as the U.S. government is itself sliding towards authoritarian governance, it has also been a major funder of the development of such technologies. Current key technologies in this context include Psiphon …
The next session at AoIR 2018 starts with Efrat Daskal, who begins with a brief review of the development of the digital rights discourse since the original UN Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights in the digital age have developed especially since 2000, and especially the Internet Rights and Principles Charter of 2014 has made an important contribution. This enshrined the rights to access to information and technology, privacy and safety, and freedom of speech.
Several civic campaigns have also contributed to this, driven by various digital activists and civil society organisations around the world. These operate at national …
The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Emma von Essen and Joakim Jansson, whose focus is on online hate speech towards women and foreigners, and the role of anonymity in enabling the expression of such hate; her project’s interest is especially in the Swedish context, and it hopes to predict the expression of hateful ideas.
The focus of the project is on relevant fora on the Swedish platform Flashback, which emphasised the anonymity of its participants but was subsequently shown to be less secure than claimed; the project scraped posts from these fora, and coded these posts …
Next up in this AoIR 2018 session is Julia deCook, who shifts our focus to Reddit – and particular its /r/TheRedPill men’s rights activism (MRA) space. MRA has grown in recent years, and represents a particularly virulent and misogynist form of male hegemony; Reddit’s TheRedPill forum plays an important role as a hub for this online community, which focusses on hypermasculinity, pick-up artistry, and anti-feminist topics.
TheRedPill references the famous scene from The Matrix, and thereby suggests that men have been duped by feminism into an increasively submissive role in society. The forum has been reported by other Reddit …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Luke Heemsbergen, whose interest is in the evolution of radical leaking online, after the initial WikiLeaks moment. Originally, circa 2007, the platform suggested the possibility of a new form of radical transparency, yet for WikiLeaks itself that moment subsequently passed because of the way it has evolved further; other, more recent platforms have stepped into that breach to offer alternative models, however.
For transparency to be radical it must be able to subvert or disrupt dominant attitudes, and Luke defines radical transparency as disclosure that uproots expectations across communicative, organisational, and …
