Mistrust, efficacy and the new civics: understanding the deep roots of the crisis of faith in journalism

Current fears over mistrust in journalism have deep roots. Not only has trust in news media been declining since a high point just after Watergate, but American trust in institutions of all sorts is at historic lows. This phenomenon is present to differing degrees in many advanced nations, suggesting that mistrust in institutions is a phenomenon we need to consider as a new reality, not a momentary disruption of existing patterns. Furthermore, it suggests that mistrust in media is less a product of recent technological and political developments, but part of a decades-long pattern that many advanced democracies are experiencing. Addressing mistrust in media requires that we examine why mistrust in institutions as a whole is rising. One possible explanation is that our existing institutions aren’t working well for many citizens. Citizens who feel they can’t influence the governments that represent them are less likely to participate in civics. Some evidence exists that the shape of civic participation in the US is changing shape, with young people more focused on influencing institutions through markets(boycotts, buycotts and socially responsible businesses), code (technologies that make new behaviors possible, like solar panels or electric cars) and norms (influencing public attitudes) than through law. By understanding and reporting on this new, emergent civics, journalists may be able to increase their relevance to contemporary audiences alienated from traditional civics. One critical shift that social media has helped accelerate, though not cause, is the fragmentation of a single, coherent public sphere. While scholars have been aware of this problem for decades, we seem to have shifted to a more dramatic divide, in which people who read different media outlets may have entirely different agendas of what’s worth paying attention to. It is unlikely that a single, authoritative entity– whether it is mainstream media or the presidency – will emerge to fill this agenda-setting function. Instead, we face the personal challenge of understanding what issues are important for people from different backgrounds or ideologies. Addressing the current state of mistrust in journalism will require addressing the broader crisis of trust in institutions. Given the timeline of this crisis, which is unfolding over decades, it is unlikely that digital technologies are the primary actor responsible for the surprises of the past year. While digital technologies may help us address issues, like a disappearing sense of common ground, the underlying issues of mistrust likely require close examination of the changing nature of civics and public attitudes to democracy

Our Tools and Our Values, text

The text of Ethan\u27s talk on Our Tools and Our Value

Online Security in the Middle East and North Africa: A Survey of Perceptions, Knowledge, and Practice

Digital communication has become a more perilous activity, particularly for activists, political dissidents, and independent media. The recent surge in digital activism that has helped to shape the Arab spring has been met with stiff resistance by governments in the region intent on reducing the impact of digital organizing and independent media. No longer content with Internet filtering, many governments in the Middle East and around the world are using a variety of technological and offline strategies to go after online media and digital activists. In Tunisia, before and during the January 2011 protest movement that led to a change in government there, Internet service providers were apparently logging usernames and passwords to hack into and dismantle online organizing and information sharing among protesters. In early June 2011, Google reported a phishing attack targeted at military and human rights activists to gain access to their Gmail accounts. In Syria, a well organized effort known as the Syrian Electronic Army has been carrying out attacks to disable and compromise web sites that are critical of the Syrian regime. These stories are only a few selected from the set that have become public, and an unknown number of attacks go unnoticed and unreported. Many of these attacks are impossible to attribute to specific actors and may involve a mix of private sector and governmental actors, blurring the lines between cyber attacks and government surveillance. In such an environment, maintaining online security is a growing challenge.In this report we describe the results of a survey of 98 bloggers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) carried out in May 2011 in order to study bloggers' perceptions of online risk and the actions they take to address digital communications security, including both Internet and cell phone use. The survey was implemented in the wake of the Arab spring and documents a proliferation of online security problems among the respondents. In the survey, we address the respondents' perceptions of online risk, their knowledge of digital security practices, and their reported online security practices. The survey results indicate that there is much room for improving online security practices, even among this sample of respondents who are likely to have relatively high technical knowledge and experience

The Evolving Landscape of Internet Control

Over the past two years, we have undertaken several studies at the Berkman Center designed to better understand the control of the Internet in less open societies. During the years we've been engaged in this research, we have seen many incidents that have highlighted the continuing role of the Internet as a battleground for political control, including partial or total Internet shutdowns in China, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria; many hundreds of documented DDoS, hacking, and other cyber attacks against political sites; continued growth in the number of countries that filter the Internet; and dozens of well documented cases of on- and offline persecution of online dissidents. The energy dedicated to these battles for control of the Internet on both the government and dissident sides indicated, if nothing else, that both sides think that the Internet is a critical space for political action. In this paper, we offer an overview of our research in the context of these changes in the methods used to control online speech, and some thoughts on the challenges to online speech in the immediate future

From Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-Examining Pre-Web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy

As online platforms grow, they find themselves increasingly trying to balance two competing priorities: individual rights and public health. This has coincided with the professionalization of platforms’ trust and safety operations—what we call the “customer service” model of online governance. As professional trust and safety teams attempt to balance individual rights and public health, platforms face a crisis of legitimacy, with decisions in the name of individual rights or public health scrutinized and criticized as corrupt, arbitrary, and irresponsible by stakeholders of all stripes. We review early accounts of online governance to consider whether the customer service model has obscured a promising earlier model where members of the affected community were significant, if not always primary, decision-makers. This community governance approach has deep roots in the academic computing community and has re-emerged in spaces like Reddit and special purpose social networks and in novel platform initiatives such as the Oversight Board and Community Notes. We argue that community governance could address persistent challenges of online governance, particularly online platforms’ crisis of legitimacy. In addition, we think community governance may offer valuable training in democratic participation for users

How social media could teach us to be better citizens

In 1995, social scientist Robert Putnam proposed a broad and wide-ranging critique of American civic life. (Putnam, 1995) Further developed in his influential book Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000), Putnam argued that America was experiencing a sustained decline in civic life, one that might spread to advanced democracies around the world. His argument was multifaceted: not only were Americans voting less, they were also participating less in voluntary organizations, in churches and religious organizations, in labor unions and work organizations..

2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools

As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried to control the network by filtering out content objectionable to the countries for any of a number of reasons. A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent this filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered content. In this report, we describe the mechanisms of filtering and circumvention and evaluate ten projects that develop tools that can be used to circumvent filtering: Anonymizer, Ultrareach, DynaWeb Freegate, Circumventor/CGIProxy, Psiphon, Tor, JAP, Coral, and Hamachi. We evaluated these tools in 2007 -- using both tests from within filtered countries and tests within a lab environment -- for their utility, usability, security, promotion, sustainability, and openness. We find that all of the tools use the same basic mechanisms of proxying and encryption but that they differ in their models of hosting proxies. Some tools use proxies that are centrally hosted, others use proxies that are peer hosted, and others use re-routing methods that use a combination of the two. We find that, in general, the tools work in the sense that they allow users to access pages that are otherwise blocked by filtering countries but that performance of the tools is generally poor and that many tools have significant, unreported security vulnerabilities. The report was completed in 2007 and released to a group of private sponsors. Many of the findings of the report are now out of date, but we present them now, as is, because we think that the broad conclusions of the report about these tools remain valid and because we hope that other researchers will benefit from access to the methods used to test the tools. Responses from developers of the tools in question are included in the report

The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure

"The introduction of new media technologies invariably brings about potent social and economic shifts. We are well into one of those shifts as the advent of the consumer internet has destabilized existing models of news production and distribution and enabled new hegemons to establish massive and powerful businesses. Two decades into this shift, societies are asking difficult questions about whether internet technologies and the business models that accompany them are dangerous for our citizens and our democracies. At these moments of technological shift, it’s easy to assume that the business models adopted by technological innovators are inevitable and singular. They are not. As Paul Starr established in his magisterial ""The Creation of the Media,"" the paths taken by different nations in their adoption of new communication technologies (movable type, postal mail, telegraph, radio) depend on the politics and economics of the nation as a whole and vary widely from country to country. This variance continues with the internet, even though the dominance of the United States – and Silicon Valley in particular – creates the illusion that a single economic and legal system governs our online spaces. This illusion obscures possible solutions to the challenges arising around the socially corrosive effects of new media technologies. Because we see the dominance of the internet by Google, Facebook, and others as inevitable, the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism is overly constrained. Our solutions cannot be limited to asking these platforms to do a better job of meeting their civic obligations – we need to consider what technologies we want and need for digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies. At this moment, it’s worth considering the historical introduction of new technologies – radio and television in particular – and examining the different models societies chose to regulate these technologies. In particular, it’s worth reconsidering the history of public service broadcasting, an intervention pioneered in Britain in the 1920s that redefined the relationship between governments, media producers, and citizens and influenced policies around the world. While the spirit of public service media may have its roots in Britain, the specific interventions appropriate for the internet – already a mature and influential technology – may need to be modeled on the rollout of public service broadcasting in the United States half a century later. In that situation regulators acted many years after the advent of a new technology to correct market failures. The goal of this essay is not to propose a specific plan to implement public service digital media in the United States or elsewhere but to introduce the question of what we might want such media to do – it’s a possible strategy, not a discussion of the specific tactics needed to achieve it. Our responses to the challenges of the contemporary media ecosystem are marked by failures of imagination. So long as we are wedded to the idea that a few large companies will set the rules for speech and discussion online, we will constrain the solution space of possible interventions. My goal is neither to eliminate the powerful internet platforms nor to cede the future to them – it is to imagine possible futures where surveillant advertising delivered by monopoly providers isn’t the only available option to build a thriving future of democratic communications.

The International Affiliation Network of YouTube Trends

Online video, a ubiquitous, visual, and highly shareable medium, is well-suited to crossing geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Trending videos in particular, by virtue of reaching a large number of viewers in a short span of time, are powerful as both influencers and indicators of international communication flows. In this work, we study a large set of videos trending across 57 nations, collected from YouTube over a 7-month period. We consider the set as a network of content flowing between nations, then develop conditional co-affiliation, a nation-nation co-affiliation index that enables a meaningful interpretation of network path length and the application of betweenness centrality. We observe a highly-interlinked network with remarkably similar co-affiliation levels between very different nations. However, Arabic-speaking nations appear more isolated, with the U.A.E. emerging as a key bridge. By analyzing video trend lifespans, we show that nations having many globally-popular video trends are reliably not the nation where those trends are strongest: we see no evidence to support the widely discussed idea of cultural exporter or trendsetter nations. We model correlations between co-affiliation and a selection of contextual factors. We note a surprisingly complex interaction between migration and shared video trends. Consistent with existing work on video popularity, we find that long trending times within one nation do not necessarily translate to reaching a wide global audience. This work expands on previous studies of the geographic popularity of videos by incorporating trending data and extending our analysis from video-nation affiliations to nation-nation co-affiliations. Characterizing these relationships is key to understanding the international cultural impact and potential of online video

Creating Public Spaces : Centering Public Values in Digital Infrastructures

Institutions like public broadcasters and universities face conflicts of values when using surveillant digital tools: organizations bound to protect the privacy and respect their autonomy of their constituents - which we term "values-led organizations" - find those values undermined by tools they must use to conduct business online. A Dutch nonprofit, Public Spaces, has developed a self-audit method for documenting dependencies on such tools and working to find values-consistent alternatives. The Public Spaces Digital Power Wash is a method applicable to other tensions between organizational values and values embedded in digital tools. We expand from this specific case study to consider the larger challenge of tensions between organizational values and the behavior of digital tools and examine the possibility that values-led organizations could take the lead in building digital public infrastructures that value the autonomy and privacy of citizens