The Partnership Press: Lessons for Platform-Publisher Collaborations as Facebook and News Outlets Team to Fight Misinformation

In December 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Motivated by a variety of concerns and values, relying on different understandings of misinformation, and with a diverse set of stakeholders in mind, they created a collaboration designed to leverage the partners’ different forms of cultural power, technological skill, and notions of public service. Concretely, the partnership centers around managing a flow of stories that may be considered false. Here’s how it works: through a proprietary process that mixes algorithmic and human intervention, Facebook identifies candidate stories; these stories are then served to the five news and fact-checking partners through a partners-only dashboard that ranks stories according to popularity. Partners independently choose stories from the dashboard, do their usual fact-checking work, and append their fact-checks to the stories’ entries in the dashboards. Facebook uses these fact-checks to adjust whether and how it shows potentially false stories to its users. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration. This report contextualizes the partnership, traces its dynamics through a series of interviews, and uses it to motivate a general set of questions that future platform press partnerships might ask themselves before collaborating

Probably Speech, Maybe Free: Toward a Probabilistic Understanding of Online Expression and Platform Governance

Considering the cost of applying a probablistic statistical framework to First Amendment questions on digital platform

Controlling the Conversation: The Ethics of Social Platforms and Content Moderation

With social platforms’ prevailing dominance, there are numerous debates around who owns information, content, and the audience itself: the publisher, or the platform where the content is discovered—or not discovered, as the case may be. Platforms rely heavily on algorithms to decide what to surface to their users across the globe, and they also rely on algorithms to decide what content is taken down. Meanwhile, publishers are making similar decisions on a significantly smaller scale, and not necessarily algorithmically or quite as generically. But how are any of these decisions made? And what are the various factors taken into account to ensure that the decision-making is fair and ethical? On February 23, 2018, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism hosted a Policy Exchange Forum followed by a conference on the topic of “Controlling the Conversation: The Ethics of Social Platforms and Content.” The Policy Exchange Forum was a closed-group discussion that followed the Chatham House Rule. The discussion broadly focused on three topics: “Ethics of Moderation”, “Moderation Tools”, and “Technological Challenges.

Making Sense of Blockchain Applications:A Typology for HCI

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies

Bureaucracy as a Lens for Analyzing and Designing Algorithmic Systems

Scholarship on algorithms has drawn on the analogy between algorithmic systems and bureaucracies to diagnose shortcomings in algorithmic decision-making. We extend the analogy further by drawing on Michel Crozier’s theory of bureaucratic organizations to analyze the relationship between algorithmic and human decision-making power. We present algorithms as analogous to impartial bureaucratic rules for controlling action, and argue that discretionary decision-making power in algorithmic systems accumulates at locations where uncertainty about the operation of algorithms persists. This key point of our essay connects with Alkhatib and Bernstein’s theory of ’street-level algorithms’, and highlights that the role of human discretion in algorithmic systems is to accommodate uncertain situations which inflexible algorithms cannot handle. We conclude by discussing how the analysis and design of algorithmic systems could seek to identify and cultivate important sources of uncertainty, to enable the human discretionary work that enhances systemic resilience in the face of algorithmic errors.Peer reviewe

Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI

Why is it so hard for chatbots to talk about race? This work explores how the biased contents of databases, the syntactic focus of natural language processing, and the opaque nature of deep learning algorithms cause chatbots difficulty in handling race-talk. In each of these areas, the tensions between race and chatbots create new opportunities for people and machines. By making the abstract and disparate qualities of this problem space tangible, we can develop chatbots that are more capable of handling race-talk in its many forms. Our goal is to provide the HCI community with ways to begin addressing the question, how can chatbots handle race-talk in new and improved ways

From Noxious to Public? Tracing Ethical Dynamics of Social Media Platform Conversions

Sometimes, some social media marketplaces turn from noxious to public. Why do such conversions happen, what do they reveal about a platform’s definition of “public,” and when should they happen? Drawing on contemporary examples, this article examines some of the empirical and normative dimensions of platform conversions

Making up Political People: How Social Media Create the Ideals, Definitions, and Probabilities of Political Speech

An examination of the principles and techniques that social media platforms use to define and regulate political speech. Uses concepts from Communication, Media Studies, and Science and Technology Studies to investigate how platforms define ideals of citizenship, the politics of the categories they use to define speech, and the role that algorithms and probability play in governing platform speech