This week, the CITAP is thinking about how and where limits on transparency perpetuate harm by obscuring its underlying mechanisms.
The case of the Alamance County Judge
The first story is local and decidedly low-tech: in neighboring Alamance County, the district court is trying cases that stem from an October march to the polls at which police arrested 23 marchers and dispersed many more using pepper spray. Charges filed against the marchers drew national attention, and this week, the court blocked local journalists from sitting in on proceedings. Police deputies removed Alamance News publisher Tom Boney Jr. from the court in handcuffs, and Judge Fred Wilkins threatened to hold him in contempt for entering the courtroom.
As UNC law professor and CITAP affiliate David Ardia explained to The Washington Post, the North Carolina state constitution provides journalists and the public access to courts, a right that “can only be limited if specific findings are made in court and those findings are made available to the public… it cannot be closed on a whim.”
What Facebook doesn’t want Washingtonians to know about political ads
On Monday, Shannon McGregor appeared in Eli Sanders’s Wild West newsletter for a conversation about the challenges of demonstrating cause-and-effect relationships between disinformation campaigns and political behavior. At the end of their interview, Sanders raised the topic of ad transparency—Wild West’s focus is providing coverage and context for the ongoing Washington State v Facebook legal case over “repeated refusal by Facebook and Google to turn over public records about election ads.”
Dr. McGregor’s answer is worth including here in full:
Transparency behind political ads is important for a number of reasons. First, despite platforms’ efforts (uneven as they are), malicious ads designed to mislead or dissuade people from voting do appear online. Greater transparency around online political ads means advertisers who violate platform guidelines or act in undemocratic ways can be held accountable by journalists, researchers, and the public.
Greater transparency—especially around targeting—means that campaigns or groups could target that same (or a similar) audience with counter-speech, mitigating the risk of any potential deleterious effects. Also, transparency is pretty popular—even a bi-partisan group of political professionals support greater transparency as one aspect of ethical political digital advertising.
Finally, I believe the public has a right to know by whom, and how, they are being targeted online. We all have an idea of who we think we are—and I think it is incredibly revealing to understand who the people or organizations that target us think we are. This is especially true because my research shows that political campaigns rely on data from online political ads as one way to understand public opinion.
If you care about transparency in political advertising and aren’t yet subscribed, check out Wild West.
Today’s Direct Message is brought to you by the number 6 and the letter b
(What, you hoped 230 was the only statute you’d have to study this year?) The FTC is making big moves: shortly after announcing their antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, commissioners also voted to launch an extensive research study into the data collection, use, and and presentation of nine major tech platforms.
Section 6(b) of the FTC Act authorizes the agency to act as a research body. Under a 6(b) study, the FTC can require that companies provide data and responses to detailed surveys that allow the agency to better understand industry-wide practices and norms. These studies are valuable but rarely noted outside small policy circles.
This particular study may prove to be more… interesting. One FTC commissioner voted against issuing the survey, calling it “an undisciplined foray into a wide variety of topics, some only tangentially related to the stated focus.” A former FTC technologist explained on Twitter how unusual the scope is:
In a joint statement on the inquiry, three commissioners wrote
“Constant access allows these firms to monitor where users go, the people with whom they interact, and what they are doing. But to what end? Is this surveillance used to build psychological profiles of users? Predict their behavior? Manipulate experiences to generate ad sales? Promote content to capture attention or shape discourse? Too much about the industry remains dangerously opaque.”
The breadth of the study may pose real challenges. It also represents an unprecedented level of transparency into these companies’ data and business practices in ways that could illuminate how they’re intertwined. It’s a long wait until any report comes out—here’s hoping it’s the must-read window into data practices the FTC has set out to deliver.
(In the meantime, there’s no shortage of legal challenges to Big Tech to fill the days.)
Recent publications and appearances
“Do tweets on data privacy public hearings reflect or imply the Twitter users’ (dis)trust of institutional actors such as corporations and the US government? And Is the (dis)trust similarly or differently presented in the federal and the California discourses?” Sophia Jeeyun Baik offers a new paper comparing popular narratives about federal versus California privacy regulations.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed both the ongoing precarities of everyday existence in our communities as well as exposing who is unevenly at risk when social safety nets fail.” Post-doctoral fellow Rachel Kuo co-authored an article on Asian American collective politics and digital media in the time of COVID-19.
“The connections between safe housing and abolition may not have been so immediately obvious if we were not seeing them in such visceral and immediate ways. Not having safe housing clearly meant being more susceptible to state violence.” A World Without Cages released a new collection of essays edited by Dr. Kuo.
“...platforms play an important role in facilitating, amplifying, and incentivizing forms of expression — including harassment — that potentially weaken the cultures, norms, and institutions of democracy.” Daniel Kreiss and Bridget Barrett were featured in a post-election roundup by Yale and the Knight Foundation.
“Tools like ‘Spot the Troll’ and information literacy campaigns designed to evaluate the credibility of a source or the sender are important steps in helping users identify false information, but we need more resources that help users construct good questions and find resources to begin with.” Francesca Tripodi offered a prediction for NiemanLab’s Journalism 2021 roundup.
"...in English, only one widely understood word captures what Donald Trump is trying to do, even though his acts do not meet its technical definition. Trump is attempting to stage some kind of coup, one that is embedded in a broader and ongoing power grab.” Zeynep Tufekci wrote about the absence of American cultural mechanisms to recognize the makings of a coup.
Dr. Tufekci also recommended holiday precautions against COVID-19 for The Atlantic and coauthored a piece for The New York Times discussing potential ways to maximize the potential of vaccination efforts in the U.S.
“Black women’s bodies should be a reliable ballast for white women’s fears about being thin or not thin enough—moral or immoral—as they traverse the cultural terrain of beauty and size that constrains them, as they would constrain Lizzo.“ Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about Lizzo, the body positivity movement, and its implied expectations of how Black women’s bodies should be for Harper’s Bazaar.
"All these people have accounts on Twitter because that's where journalists are and that's where the press is... If they actually left Twitter, they would be less newsworthy." Shannon McGregor was quoted by The Hill in an article about fake accounts posing as GOP leaders on Parler.