Closing the Loop: Testing ChatGPT to Generate Model Explanations to Improve Human Labelling of Sponsored Content on Social Media

Regulatory bodies worldwide are intensifying their efforts to ensure transparency in influencer marketing on social media through instruments like the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) in the European Union, or Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Yet enforcing these obligations has proven to be highly problematic due to the sheer scale of the influencer market. The task of automatically detecting sponsored content aims to enable the monitoring and enforcement of such regulations at scale. Current research in this field primarily frames this problem as a machine learning task, focusing on developing models that achieve high classification performance in detecting ads. These machine learning tasks rely on human data annotation to provide ground truth information. However, agreement between annotators is often low, leading to inconsistent labels that hinder the reliability of models. To improve annotation accuracy and, thus, the detection of sponsored content, we propose using chatGPT to augment the annotation process with phrases identified as relevant features and brief explanations. Our experiments show that this approach consistently improves inter-annotator agreement and annotation accuracy. Additionally, our survey of user experience in the annotation task indicates that the explanations improve the annotators' confidence and streamline the process. Our proposed methods can ultimately lead to more transparency and alignment with regulatory requirements in sponsored content detection.Comment: Accepted to The World Conference on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence, Lisbon, Portugal, July 202

Adversarial behaviours knowledge area

The technological advancements witnessed by our society in recent decades have brought improvements in our quality of life, but they have also created a number of opportunities for attackers to cause harm. Before the Internet revolution, most crime and malicious activity generally required a victim and a perpetrator to come into physical contact, and this limited the reach that malicious parties had. Technology has removed the need for physical contact to perform many types of crime, and now attackers can reach victims anywhere in the world, as long as they are connected to the Internet. This has revolutionised the characteristics of crime and warfare, allowing operations that would not have been possible before. In this document, we provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. We first provide a taxonomy of malicious activities based on the attacker’s motivations and capabilities, and then move on to the technological and human elements that adversaries require to run a successful operation. We then discuss a number of frameworks that have been proposed to model malicious operations. Since adversarial behaviours are not a purely technical topic, we draw from research in a number of fields (computer science, criminology, war studies). While doing this, we discuss how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.Published versio

The Digital Transformation of the News Media Business – Paid Content and Entrepreneurship in Digital Journalism

The digital transformation of the news business continues to agitate publishers. Concerned about declining sales in the print segment, legacy outlets, local news companies and freelance journalists alike search for ways to monetize digital journalism properly. At first glance, digital journalism and its monetisation as paid content seem a promising effort. The digitisation of the news business enabled distribution at a marginal cost of almost zero while giving journalists access to new research technologies and lowering the cost of entry for smaller companies. However, while digital journalism enjoys broad popularity and use, online news are gaining few paying customers. Furthermore, online news compete within a larger digital media complex, comprising movies, games, and social media. After 25 years of experimentation, the digital future of journalism is still heavily debated in media management. Concerning the reconstitution as a digital medium, this research examines conditions of success and obstacles for the digital news media business to be successful as a business venture. Therefore, the research question reads What factors enable the viability and entrepreneurial success of the news media business in light of the consequences of digital transformation? The overarching research question is considered from two angles: The first angle concerns the demand side by looking at the antecedents of the audience's willingness to pay for paid content. The second angle focuses on the supply side and therefore examines antecedents of success in the context of digital journalistic start-ups and founders. In four studies, this thesis develops an analysis of the online news business with a local focus on the German news market. For this purpose, a variety of methods ranging from qualitative work and literature review to empirical research employing path analysis and predictive analytics are applied. Theoretically, digital transformation, free mentality and other peculiarities of information goods inform the frame of this work. Thus, this research aims at contributing to a financially sustainable news media business

Online Personal Data Processing and EU Data Protection Reform. CEPS Task Force Report, April 2013

This report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such

Web 2.5 as a safe shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 : a definition of Web 2.5 in informatological approach

The blockchain ecosystem has undergone three distinct periods of exponential growth — the ICO boom of 2017, the Defi summer of 2020, and most recently the NFT wave of 2021.However, it was not yet seen a "web3-native" approach towards NFTs from any major brand. By that, we mean that no brand has upended its Web 2.0 architecture and replaced it entirely with a web3 stack. Instead, brands have taken a more measured approach, exploring NFT drops, integrations, and community growth developed separately from their core offerings. In short, brands have realized that Web 3.0 isn’t an ultimatum. They can explore emerging technologies like NFTs to both their benefit and that of their consumers without requiring immediate, all-in adoption. This phase can be described as Web 2.5. In this article, the author attempts to define what Web 2.5 is concerning informatology, along with identifying the potential future challenges of information management in this area and the new iteration of digital development, namely Web 3.0 or web3

Technology, autonomy, and manipulation

Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of “online manipulation”. While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers — first, by defining “online manipulation”, thus enabling identification of manipulative practices; and second, by drawing attention to the specific harms online manipulation threatens. We argue that online manipulation is the use of information technology to covertly influence another person’s decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities. Engaging in such practices can harm individuals by diminishing their economic interests, but its deeper, more insidious harm is its challenge to individual autonomy. We explore this autonomy harm, emphasising its implications for both individuals and society, and we briefly outline some strategies for combating online manipulation and strengthening autonomy in an increasingly digital world

Biopolitical Marketing and Technologies of Enclosure

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about consumer empowerment through new information and communication technologies. Corporate captains of marketing, Wired Magazine’s neo-libertarian techno-utopians, marketing consultants of the digital economy and many marketing academics agree that we all have more choices, more information, more entertainment, more transparency, and lower prices thanks to Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and all the rest. We are liberated from the burdens of material ownership, free to access digital objects and services in ways that satisfy our needs in highly targeted and efficient ways. The empowerment through technology chorus is so loud and cohesive that we generally take the message for granted. And in some limited respect, consumers may feel empowered when shopping on Amazon.com or in the malls with their iPhones on hand. But let us be very clear about the idea of empowerment that is promoted by the cheerleaders of what Jodi Dean (2005) calls communicative capitalism. Real empowerment, so much should be clear, will never be “granted” to consumers by those in economic (and thus political) power. In the final analysis – and putting aside for a moment the fact that even empowered consumers are still interpellated first and foremost as subjects of consumption – the ideal of the empowered consumer (rational, enlightened, informed, restrained, un-manipulable) is completely antithetical to the needs of capital and the marketing regime within consumer capitalism. Therefore, any call for actual consumer empowerment would automatically be a radical demand and an insurgent claim aimed at undermining and replacing capital’s power to dominate the consumer totally. In the end, it is important to recognize that any technology employed by marketing today becomes a technology of enclosure (even if never completely successful), which permits empowerment only in a version sanction by capital. That is why marketing (and capital more generally [see Lazzarato, 2004]) today is biopolitical. It wants to govern life completely while appearing to not govern at all. In this chapter we argue that new technologies in contemporary marketing management are best thought of as technologies of enclosure. On the one hand, marketing encloses the subject as individualized and individuated consumer. On the other, marketing aims to enclose (ie., capture, make proprietary, appropriate) what is common or collectively produced or cherished by individuals as inalienable expressions of personal identity and agency. At the same time that marketing encloses, it operates ideologically, although not in the classical Marxist sense of creating a false consciousness. Rather, the challenge for marketers is to enclose and capture the subject and the common while appearing not to do any of these things. By accepting as non-ideological terms such as choice, identity, fulfillment, empowerment, enrichment, collaboration, creativity and so on, marketers and consumers alike choose to believe, just as anyone sensible would believe, that new techniques and technologies of enclosure are really just good marketing practice aimed at value creation and delivery, not customer domination and exploitation. We should remember that an atmosphere of distrust has accompanied the development of marketing from the beginning and marketers have long been suspected of being professional manipulators, devising salacious techniques and technologies with which to incite, manipulate and exploit consumer desire and anxiety. As Packard put it fifty years ago, “[T]hese depth manipulators are in their operations beneath the surface of conscious life, starting to acquire a power of persuasion that is becoming a matter of justifiable public scrutiny and concern” (1957, pp. 9-10). More recent popular indictments of marketing include Adam Curtis’s documentaries on The Century of the Self, Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2000), and the BBC series The Men Who Makes Us Spend (presented by Jacques Peretti). Criticism of marketers is compounded by widespread consumer cynicism regarding the genuineness of marketing messages (see Gabriel and Lang, 1995). Interestingly, the emerging generation of online marketers– typically referred to as digital or social media marketers – see marketing’s crisis of legitimacy directly tied to what it considers the corporate, top-down marketing methods devised in the 1970s and 1980s and designed to discipline and control consumers. For a new generation of tech-savvy marketers, imbued with a solid dose of techno-libertarian ideals of independence and a frontier mentality that rejects top-down authority and bureaucracy in favor of self-organizing systems, radical autonomy and freely collaborative networks, a dramatic shift in mindset was needed in the age of participatory media and Big Data. In a radical turn propagated, for example, by prominent social media marketing experts like Solis (2010) and Stratten (2010), marketing has to be ‘un’-done. The term ‘un-marketing’ rises to prominence in the consulting literature and offers a reframing of marketing that rejects corporate-controlled top-down techniques, and favours horizontal, collaborative, and participatory customer engagement (Kutcher, 2010, Stratten, 2010, 2014). In this context, the idea of online customer communities gains popularity because it provides a fantasy of restructuring marketplace relations according to principles of co-creation, sovereignty, equality, and sharing. More recently, what we call Big Data marketing is framed according to similar registers where data magnetizes consumers and marketers to a shared ethos of the “opt-in” economy (Godin, 1999). Big Data marketers – at least in the version propagated by Google’s Hal Varian, for example – pose innocuously enough as personal recommendation and consulting agents for consumers who in return for giving up personal information receive ever more relevant, valuable, and desired information, goods and services (Zuboff, 2015). Who would not like such a deal that appears to be based on liberal ideals of good intentions on all sides and the equal distribution of costs and benefits, even as companies manage communities and customer data not on behalf of consumers but on behalf of corporate profit. In sum, new marketing technologies – from blogs to communities to surveillance-based collaborative filtering and recommender systems – no matter how invasive, ever-present and insidious, have been framed by technology-driven marketers as democratizing and equalizing forces reshaping the contemporary marketplace in favor of the consumer. Customer and brand communities are happy places of collaboration and collective value creation governed by an ethos of mutual respect, sharing and dispersed control. Big Data Marketing, which aspires to intensifying consumer surveillance and control (Zuboff, 2015), is often presented as part of the contemporary ethos of collaborative ‘in-this-together-ness’ and collective support structures between companies and consumers. Marketers are asked to employ Big Data to better understand, assist, support and connect with customers; the technology magnetizing both exchange parties to a fantasy of better products, better choices, better experiences, better prices, better service and generally happier lives. To live in a world where companies strain to innovate and please consumers, all we need to do in return is give companies complete access to our personal information. Such a request makes sense to a generation of marketing professionals and consumers that have grown up with Google, Facebook and Amazon tracking its every move. In the next section we explore critically new marketing technologies such as online customer communities and Big Data, and possession of digital objects as consumer lock in. .We suggest that these technologies are technologies of Biopolitical Marketing. They aspire to enclose all forms of life for profit. We suggest that marketing innovation is now structured according to the imperative of biopolitical marketing: the making, valorizing and enclosing of all forms and expressions of life

News devices : how digital objects participate in news work and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online

This open access book explores the multiple forms of curatorial agencies that develop when museum collection digitisations, narratives and new research findings circulate online. Focusing on Viking Age objects, it tracks the effects of antagonistic debates on discussion forums and the consequences of search engines, personalisation, and machine learning on American-based online platforms. Furthermore, it considers eco-systemic processes comprising computation, rare-earth minerals, electrical currents and data centres and cables as novel forms of curatorial actions. Thus, it explores curatorial agency as social constructivist, semiotic, algorithmic, and material. This book is of interest to scholars and students in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage and media studies. It also appeals to museum practitioners concerned with curatorial innovation at the intersection of humanist interpretations and new materialist and more-than-human frameworks