Internet & Democracy Blog

Berkman just rolled out one of its newest and most innovative projects: Media Cloud. The idea is that by scouring massive data sets with content analysis, it can quantitatively study the flow of news. Now, what the hell does that mean? In layman’s terms, Media Cloud crunches statistics on how different media outlets, both large and small, report on a given story over time. It can chart, for instance, which keywords are most frequently associated with a specified keyword (say “Katrina” or “Obama”) in articles by a specific source like The New York Times.

Josh Benton, over at the Nieman Journalism Lab recently interviewed Berkman guru Ethan Zuckerman about the project. I thought this conclusion was particularly striking:

As Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman put it, it’s an attempt to move media criticism and media analysis beyond the realm of the anecdote — to gather concrete data to back or contradict our suspicions.

This, as I have recently suggested in my coverage of fact checking and the Santelli conspiracy, is a problem of the highest order. Each side of the political spectrum has a corresponding media boogeyman, whose conclusions are suspect or misleadingly framed. For the right, it’s The New York Times ; for the left, FoxNews. These distinctions continue down the row of lesser blogs and publications.

Media Cloud might be able to cut through the fog of this anecdotal reasoning by using the churning engine of keyword analysis. Although the frequency of keywords cannot tell us everything about context, intent or possible slant, it might give us broad-based statistics and clues as to which ideas were emphasized in connection with a story. Thus, Media Cloud represents a more neutral standpoint from which to digest news coverage and, it strikes me, to discuss the larger questions of bias or framing (see also the current bloglemic about Obama’s Wikipedia page).

Though still in development, it would be wonderful to see Media Cloud expand to include as many blogs and blogospheres as possible. The richer the data dump, the less rough-hewn subsequent analysis can be, even if it means including less established blogs. For the Santelli story, a Playboy.com investigative piece (now removed) sparked a wildfire in liberal circles, backlash in conservative one, and was then picked up again by the NYT. The lower rungs of the blogosphere are thus becoming more vocal and influential. Media Cloud, I hope, will inject a little (dispassionate) social science into discussions and cries of media bias. Check it out.

Noted technologist and MIT professor Carl Malamud is campaigning hard to be appointed the Public Printer of the United States, a little know position with immense resources, both print and digital. A tireless advocate of the public domain and greater data transparency in a technocrat-driven bureaucracy, Malamud has earned my personal endorsement. Follow the campaign here and his twitter feed here.

As Justice Brandeis is to have said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Malamud gets this and has the technological know-how and gutsy boldness to open the mysterious sausage factory of our government’s innards. Godspeed.

(Image Credit: webchick from Point.B Studio, CC License)

À la my recent post, Randall Stross at the NYT explores the evolving landscape of user attitudes to internet privacy. Money quote:

When the distinction blurs between one’s few close friends and the many who are not, it seems pointless to distinguish between private and public.

How will laxer attitudes to privacy impact political participation? I can imagine political hack work dredging up embarrassing Facebook material or damaging associations. But I can also imagine people more open about their politics and causes and in a sense more open to discuss and defend their ideas in an exposed public forum, be it on Facebook or not.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s entrepreneurial founder, says the social networking site will be dramatically changing this week. In a unique, even theoretical blog post, Zuckerberg laid out his plans to beef up Facebook’s stream of information. Facebook will more intelligently parse the “social graph” of its users:

In 2007, we popularized the term Social Graph to describe how Facebook maps out people’s connections. The idea is that these connections—whether friendships, affiliations or interests—exist already in the real world, and all we’re trying to do is map them out. We believe that connecting people to their friends is just the beginning, and we’re working hard on making Facebook a place for people to connect with and keep track of all the interests in their lives.

It’s a fascinating idea, if a bit frightening in its futurism. Every individual’s private interests collected in a massive voluntary database. Almost Orwellian, no? Of course, privacy groups have always felt a bit squeamish about the near 200 million-user-strong social networking site.

I don’t completely understand what the new changes are, but it feels like the new reforms are a way of “twitterizing” Facebook. The site’s rich Web 2.0 personalization will now be (hyper-)actively broad cast in a continuous (and interminable) stream of information. Another interesting development is the increased emphasis on integrating institutional “pages”. Major and minor companies, politicians and rock bands will all build profiles that can be integrated into a user’s stream.

Whether this runs the obvious risk of turning Facebook into an flashy Yellow Pages-esque turf war, I’m not sure. At the same time, the idea of integrating Facebook and political participation to a greater degree strikes me as a promising and viable direction to renew our civic institutions. Facebook has long been the repository of everything banal and private in a public forum (red cup parties, vacation photos, cryptic wall posts, etc). The idea of instead making it an electronic agora could herald deep changes in our current understanding of “representative” or “republican” government.

Well, open the floodgates. I’m ready.

(Mark Zuckerberg, Image Credit: AP)

Remember Jayson Blair, the New York Times “reporter” who fabricated tens of articles by gliding through a loop hole in the reporter’s code of honor? Some established magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic can afford to pay fact checkers, but even the Times — whether for reasons of deadline or budget — must rely on reporters to fact-check themselves, taking any heat from the public if they misquote or misrepresent.

Obviously, there is even less impetus or resources to fact-check blogs. In blogging, commentary is so instantaneous that a moment of reflective delay costs its writer timely influence on the cacophonous dialogue of interested voices. Toss in the patina of ideology, opinion, and just plain gossip, which can characterize the blogosphere both left and right, and you have a recipe for old fashioned, low and dirty rumor-mongering.

One need look no farther back than the “Barack Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy on the right (see here) and, these days, the “Rick Santelli is part of massive libertarian astroturf conspiracy” on the left (for background, see here). The blogospheric rumor mill can churn at an alarming pace. But in important ways, it’s not the initial debut of a pernicious internet rumor which poisons national discourse; false claims are often immediately disputed and hashed out in a sort of crowd-sourced wiki factchecker operation.

Rather, the problem is such crowd-led efforts are operationally diffuse. It may take several bloggers from all over the spectrum writing and revising a received idea/rumor/possibility to approximate a verifiable fact. Scouring a host of different blogs, including those ideologically opposed to one’s own position, in the uneven aftermath of some scandalous new piece of blogger cant is sometimes, I fear, too much attention to expect from information technologies already stuffed to the gills with competing headlines.

Falsehoods, rumors, half-stated truths, then, have a tendency to linger in all but the most consistently interested and open minded blogs. Even if Playboy removed the Santelli conspiracy theory article, its ripple effect through the left-of-center echo chamber has likely yet to cease (though Yglesias at least recognized in an update that Playboy’s retraction was problematic), and those who protest the article’s characterization (a group that includes Playboy evidently) seem slow in catching up with the monstrous wave of accusation. As one conservative blogger opined:

Happily facts have won over Playboy forcing the mag to pull down the fallacious story, which is all well and good. But the problem is we now have hundreds perhaps thousands of left-wing DailyKosers and such all imagining they know the real story, the one that corresponds to the fake Playboy tale.

I suppose one could say the same for newspaper corrections, which are not dramatically featured either; still, I wonder whether the web’s increased decentralization of media authority, in many ways a good and important development, will weaken our ability to fact-check even basic news stories. As abstract as that seems, the question is of vital importance, because without stronger sources of factual reliability, the internet will see its share of Jayson Blairs, real astro-turfers, charlatans and fools.

The curious tale of Rick’s Santelli’s magical rant continues. As the major news organizations lumbered to report on a quickly-pulled Playboy blog piece which accused Rick Santelli of being the mouthpiece of a massive libertarian astro-turf conspiracy (read the back story here), reporters were able to confirm and deny many of the article’s details. Notice how the MSM is now responding to and investigating a phenomenon which originated exclusively in the blogosphere. One wonders how much the tide of influence will continue to shift.

No, CNBC correspondent Santelli is not affiliated (in his own words here) in any way with the myriad “Tea Party” planning websites which sprang to being within a day of his now infamous outburst. Yes, several prominent libertarian organizations, such as FreedomWorks (which has old, but no longer functioning ties to the Koch family) have been sponsoring and encouraging the protests.

Does this vindicate the authors of the Playboy piece? Not exactly, though its authors sure seem to think so. They just put up a long post launching a counter-attack on Megan McArdle, the Atlantic blogger who questioned their investigation. Unfortunately, the substance of their rebuttal, that McArdle lives with a FreedomWorks employee and so is therefore either a hypocrite or, worse, part of the conspiracy, is typically hysteric.

What seems so hilarious to me is how uncontroversial the alleged “astro-turfing” turns out to be. Santelli, invoking a familiar libertarian allusion to the Boston Tea Party, unwittingly spark a broad-based internet and protest campaign, whose initial grassroots efforts were quickly helped by big libertarian thinktanks as a means of policy activism. How is this any different from Campus Progress, funded by the Center for American Progress, or PACs in general? It’s the bread and butter of civic association that folks band together to advocate their causes, including institutional organizations.

Of course, maybe some of the sites appear folksy or populist in a ingenuous way, but I’m not sure that qualifies as true “astro-turfing” so much as democratic politics. The “tea party” organizers capitalized brilliantly on Santelli’s clip, making it much larger than it probably ever intended to be. In that sense, they perhaps unfaily appropriated Santelli as their folk hero, but again, that doesn’t to my mind constitute technological malfeasance.

What distressed the left-of-center blogosphere was the apparent velocity which Santelli’s symbolic “tea party” imparted to stimulus opposition. But that, it seems to me, is less the product of a right-wing (nut-wing?) conspiracy than the fact that the internet and Web 2.0 media in general are remarkable means of rallying citizens for public causes (see Instapundit’s take here). Barack Obama supporters, of all people, should understand that perfectly well.

Defamation suits for Internet-related speech, particularly the free-wheeling and now sprawling content of Web 2.0 sites, is on the rise. Sites like Craigslist, Yelp and Facebook, as well as less known entities such as the controversial Juicy Campus are worrying some that the internet is rapidly becoming a zone of murky facts, biased and hurtful reviews, flaming and generally irresponsible speech. According to the SF Chronicle (by way of Mother Berkman; also see the Citizen Media Law Project’s legal guide here), many of the purported victims are striking back:

The number of people getting sued over online speech, although small, is rising sharply, according to statistics from the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Civil lawsuits nearly doubled in 2006 and rose again in 2007 by another 68 percent.

No doubt eager plaintiffs (some of whom are legitimately aggrieved; others not) will continue to test the limits of holding networks responsible for hosted content, despite the generous protection currently enumerated by the Communications Decency Act.

I worry about tinkering with that bill, if only because it is really an antiquated (passed 1996) regulatory scheme intended to control pornography. Prematurely lumping contested Web 2.0 speech into the formula seems hasty, and potentially represents a chilling effect on legitimate web speech.

Moreover, holding site-owners strictly responsible (like Turkey does in holding YouTube hostage over undesirable political content) would almost certainly attenuate the power of Web 2.0 technology itself by punishing the networks which host user input, harmless or defamatory. Far wiser a solution is a more robust self-policing of privacy violations, facilitated by the flagging of inappropriate materials which are then reviewed against the terms of service, the private agreement pre-existing between networks and users, which may be as stringent with regards to speech as they like.

Interesting reports coming from the New York Times earlier last week that there are some indications that the Chinese government has been stepping up efforts to aggressively filter and censor content online. As they report:

Since early January, the government has been waging a decency campaign that has closed more than 1,500 Web sites found to contain sex, violence or “vulgarity.” Numerous other sites, including Google, have responded by removing any pages that might offend puritanical sensibilities.

But indecency is often in the eye of the beholder. Last month, Bullog, a popular bastion for freewheeling bloggers, was shut down for what the authorities said were its “large amounts of harmful information on current events,” according to a notice posted by the site’s founder, Luo Yonghao. When Mr. Luo briefly resuscitated the site on Sunday using an overseas server, it was blocked again.

Many people here believe that Bullog may have crossed a line by posting information about Charter 08, an online petition calling for democratic reforms. Organizers say the manifesto has garnered thousands of signatures since its introduction in December. Within the Chinese Internet firewall, it is now nearly impossible to find a copy.

It’ll be interesting to see how this back-and-forth game between China’s online public (which, at 300 million, is the largest in the world) and the government evolve, particularly as the worldwide economic downturn sparks increased dissent and anger against the ruling Communist party online.

The Times ran this somewhat disturbing piece on the fallout from the passage of Prop 8 in California, and how one website, eightmaps.com, is (mis)using voter disclosure information to potentially target and intimidate voters who supported the measure.

The “disinfectant of sunlight,” which open disclosure laws were intended to produce, have ironically generated a spate of anonymous hate mail, targeted at proponents of the gay marriage ban through the EightMaps Google overlay. Some of the harassment has evidently been serious, including death threats and anthrax scares.

I think regardless of how you feel about Prop 8 (I have doubts about it), I think this crosses the line. Voter intimidation is what sectarian ethnic groups in Iraq do. What saddens me is how the internet, a mass medium capable of much healthy democratic discourse, is being twisted to allow for instant access to private information. There’s a reason ballot boxes are secret.

According to the New York Times, the bipartisan coalition of senators currently trying to trim the massive stimulus bill have a cut a provision allocating 1.5 billion dollars for the extension of broadband service in rural areas. At this time, I’m not completely sure where the Times got the 1.5 figure, but I have isolated the section of the Senate draft (available at ReadTheStimulus.org; itself an interesting experiment in democratic transparency, but I digress).

The proposed section would extend large grants to projects which provide broadband access to more remote rural areas, where investment by private business seems unlikely. Barack Obama has several times mentioned this laudable goal (obliquely in the Inaugural address; but also see my coverage here and the Bits blog for a dissent), expressing his hopes that building internet infrastructure will engage those currently excluded by the largely urban digital class.

In some sense, I can see why these senators see this program as just another pork earmark, and indeed the mega-stimulus bill is chock full of government waste. On the other hand, I think a case can be made that greater connectivity in rural areas could positively impact commerce and development, and hence actually stimulate regional economies. As I’ve said many times before, broadband networks should be considered parallel to highway spending. It is informational infrastructure, and though its less visible that overpasses, it is no less important.

The grants would put people to work building the network, and internet companies could expand into rural areas without the expensive outlay of new wires, thus tapping a new consumer base of houses and businesses eager to connect with each other and the world. The potential for human development through distance learning courses on the internet could help lift rural communities from isolation and low productivity. In fact, maybe this is better than endless concrete pouring, if anything I hear about Japan’s near 3 trillion dollar infrastructure stimulus in the 90’s is true.