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Quarantining online hate speech: technical and ethical perspectives
Abstract: In this paper we explore quarantining as a more ethical method for delimiting the spread of Hate Speech via online social media platforms. Currently, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally respond reactively to such material: offensive messages that have already been posted are reviewed by human moderators if complaints from users are received. The offensive posts are only subsequently removed if the complaints are upheld; therefore, they still cause the recipients psychological harm. In addition, this approach has frequently been criticised for delimiting freedom of expression, since it requires the service providers to elaborate and implement censorship regimes. In the last few years, an emerging generation of automatic Hate Speech detection systems has started to offer new strategies for dealing with this particular kind of offensive online material. Anticipating the future efficacy of such systems, the present article advocates an approach to online Hate Speech detection that is analogous to the quarantining of malicious computer software. If a given post is automatically classified as being harmful in a reliable manner, then it can be temporarily quarantined, and the direct recipients can receive an alert, which protects them from the harmful content in the first instance. The quarantining framework is an example of more ethical online safety technology that can be extended to the handling of Hate Speech. Crucially, it provides flexible options for obtaining a more justifiable balance between freedom of expression and appropriate censorship
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion
382 p.Libro ElectrĂłnicoEach of us has been in the computing field for more than 40 years. The book is the product of a lifetime of observing and participating in the changes it has brought. Each of us has been both a teacher and a learner in the field.
This book emerged from a general education course we have taught at Harvard, but it is not a textbook. We wrote this book to share what wisdom we have with as many people as we can reach. We try to paint a big picture,
with dozens of illuminating anecdotes as the brushstrokes. We aim to entertain you at the same time as we provoke your thinking.Preface
Chapter 1 Digital Explosion
Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?
The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else
The Koans of Bits
Good and Ill, Promise and Peril
Chapter 2 Naked in the Sunlight
Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned
1984 Is Here, and We Like It
Footprints and Fingerprints
Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away
Little Brother Is Watching
Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S.
Technology Change and Lifestyle Change
Beyond Privacy
Chapter 3 Ghosts in the Machine
Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents
What You See Is Not What the Computer Knows
Representation, Reality, and Illusion
Hiding Information in Images
The Scary Secrets of Old Disks
Chapter 4 Needles in the Haystack
Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar
Found After Seventy Years
The Library and the Bazaar
The Fall of Hierarchy
It Matters How It Works
Who Pays, and for What?
Search Is Power
You Searched for WHAT? Tracking Searches
Regulating or Replacing the Brokers
Chapter 5 Secret Bits
How Codes Became Unbreakable
Encryption in the Hands of Terrorists, and Everyone Else
Historical Cryptography
Lessons for the Internet Age
Secrecy Changes Forever
Cryptography for Everyone
Cryptography Unsettled
Chapter 6 Balance Toppled
Who Owns the Bits?
Automated CrimesâAutomated Justice
NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime
The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval
Sharing Goes Decentralized
Authorized Use Only
Forbidden Technology
Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
The Limits of Property
Chapter 7 You Canât Say That on the Internet
Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression
Do You Know Where Your Child Is on the Web Tonight?
Metaphors for Something Unlike Anything Else
Publisher or Distributor?
Neither Liberty nor Security
The Nastiest Place on Earth
The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech
Protecting Good Samaritansâand a Few Bad Ones
Laws of Unintended Consequences
Can the Internet Be Like a Magazine Store?
Let Your Fingers Do the Stalking
Like an Annoying Telephone Call?
Digital Protection, Digital Censorshipâand Self-Censorship
Chapter 8 Bits in the Air
Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech
Censoring the President
How Broadcasting Became Regulated
The Path to Spectrum Deregulation
What Does the Future Hold for Radio?
Conclusion After the Explosion
Bits Lighting Up the World
A Few Bits in Conclusion
Appendix The Internet as System and Spirit
The Internet as a Communication System
The Internet Spirit
Endnotes
Inde
Understanding Google: Search Engines and the Changing Nature of Access, Thought and Knowledge within a Global Context
This thesis explores the impact of search engines within contemporary digital culture and, in particular, focuses on the social, cultural, and philosophical influence of Google. Search engines are deeply enmeshed with other recent developments in digital culture; therefore, in addressing their impact these intersections must be recognised, while highlighting the technological and social specificity of search engines. Also important is acknowledging the way that certain institutions, in particular Google, have shaped the web and wider culture around a particular set of economic incentives that have far-reaching consequences for contemporary digital culture. This thesis argues that to understand search engines requires a recognition of its contemporary context, while also acknowledging that Googleâs quest to âorganize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usefulâ is part of a much older and broader discourse. Balancing these two viewpoints is important; Google is shaping public discourse on a global scale with unprecedentedly extensive consequences. However, many of the issues addressed by this thesis would remain centrally important even if Google declared bankruptcy or if search engines were abandoned for a different technology. Search engines are a specific technological response to a particular cultural environment; however, their social function and technical operation are embedded within a historical relationship to enquiry and inscription that stretches back to antiquity.
This thesis addresses the following broad research questions, while at each stage specifically addressing the role and influence of search engines: how do individuals interrogate and navigate the world around them? How do technologies and social institutions facilitate how we think and remember? How culturally situated is knowledge; are there epistemological truths that transcend social environments? How does technological expansion fit within wider questions of globalisation? How do technological discourses shape the global flows of information and capital? These five questions map directly onto the five chapters of this thesis.
Much of the existing study of search engines has been focused on small-scale evaluation, which either addresses Googleâs day-by-day algorithmic changes or poses relatively isolated disciplinary questions. Therefore, not only is the number of academics, technicians, and journalists attending to search engines relatively small, given the centrality of search engines to digital culture, but much of the knowledge that is produced becomes outdated with algorithmic changes or the shifting strategies of companies. This thesis ties these focused concerns to wider issues, with a view to encourage and facilitate further enquiry.This thesis explores the impact of Googleâs search engine within contemporary digital culture. Search engines have been studied in various disciplines, for example information retrieval, computer science, law, and new media, yet much of this work remains fixed within disciplinary boundaries. The approach of this thesis is to draw on work from a number of areas in order to link a technical understanding of how search engines function with a wider cultural and philosophical context. In particular, this thesis draws on critical theory in order to attend to the convergence of language, programming, and culture on a global scale.
The chapter outline is as follows. Chapter one compares search engine queries to traditional questions. The chapter draws from information retrieval research to provide a technical framework that is brought into contact with philosophy and critical theory, including Plato and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chapter two investigates search engines as memory aids, deploying a history of memory and exploring practices within oral cultures and mnemonic techniques such as the Ars Memoria. This places search engines within a longer historical context, while drawing on contemporary insights from the philosophy and science of cognition. Chapter three addresses Googleâs Autocomplete functionality and chapter four explores the contextual nature of results in order to highlight how different characteristics of users are used to personalise access to the web. These chapters address Googleâs role within a global context and the implications for identity and community online. Finally, chapter five explores how Googleâs method of generating revenue, through advertising, has a social impact on the web as a whole, particularly when considered through the lens of contemporary Post-Fordist accounts of capitalism. Throughout, this thesis develops a framework for attending to algorithmic cultures and outlines the specific influence that Google has had on the web and continues to have at a global scale.Arts and Humanities Research Counci