All posts by The Good Doc

Information and the public sphere

Inter-institutional trust deficit

Piece in Axios about tech companies’ contingency planning for election night and its aftermath. The last paragraph sums up the conundrum:

Every group tasked with assuring Americans that their votes get counted — unelected bureaucrats, tech companies and the media — already faces a trust deficit among many populations, particularly Trump supporters.

In this case it is not even clear whether a concurrence of opinion and a unified message would strengthen the credibility of these actors and of their point of view or rather confirm sceptics even further in their conspiracy beliefs.

Domestic politics and elections

Authoritativeness of intelligence briefings

Good article about the politicization of the US Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence briefings with regard to alleged Russian disinformation activities during the presidential campaign. Beyond the merits of the specific case, it is interesting that within the federal system a chief purpose of DHS’s intelligence gathering is to provide broader context for local law enforcement; however, given the competitive nature of the US intelligence ecosystem, perceived politicization of one agency leads to a loss in authoritativeness compared to other parts of the intelligence community. This would be a self-correcting mechanism. If, on the other hand, such briefings were not primarily intended as a guide for action but as an instrument for the steering of public debate, a sort of public diplomacy, their perceived internal authoritativeness would not matter so much: they would still provide official cover for decisions taken along sympathetic ideological lines. One single tool cannot fulfil both these tasks well, and shifts in public perception are extremely hard to reverse.

Organizational behavior and reputation

Schools as digital front lines

Politico‘s Andrew Atterbury reports a DDoS attack against the Miami-Dade public school system in Florida today, disrupting the beginning of the Fall semester. Although no sensitive data was stolen, hundreds of thousands of students were prevented from attending class. Of course, the problem with schools as an institution is that its own “customers” are not always committed to the integrity of the service…

Political economy and visibility

The marketplace scam as paradigm

Good article by Zoe Schiffer in The Verge on Instagram scams. In thinking about trust and its abuse it is important to remember how general the problem is, especially in marketplace interactions, and what institutional boundaries have evolved in all societies over the ages to police it. Thinking about misleading commercial behavior can be a useful baseline in modelling issues of trustworthiness in many digital domains (such as surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, platform content moderation, electoral disinformation, and so forth) where interactions do not immediately and obviously entail an exchange of goods and services in the market.

Information and the public sphere

Ideological balance in banning

Interesting article in The Intercept about Facebook’s attempt to achieve ideological balance in its banning practices by juxtaposing its purge of QAnon-related accounts with one of Antifa ones. Whether such equivalence is at all warranted on its merits is largely beside the point: FB finds itself in exactly the same situation as the old-media publishers of yore, desperate for the public to retain the perception of its equidistance. Antifa was merely the most media-salient target available for this type of operation.

It is unclear to me that there still is a significant middle-ground public who cares about this type of equidistance in its editorial gatekeepers, so perhaps the more cynical suspicions, such as Natasha Lennard’s, that this is simply a move to curry favor with the current Administration in the middle of an election might not be off-track. What is more significant in the long term is that the content-moderation scrutiny FB now undergoes, chiefly because of its size, will only intensify going forward, forcing it to conduct ever more of these censoring operations. This restriction on debate will, in turn, eventually and progressively push more radical political discourse elsewhere online.

On the whole, I think this is a positive development: organizations that think of themselves as radically anti-establishment should own up to the fact that there is no reason they should count on being platformed by so integral a part of the contemporary establishment as FB. Public space for political mobilization is not confined to the internet, and the internet is not confined to giant social media platforms.