Our Computer Overlords

Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the collection of phone records deemed “relevant” to a national security case, cannot be interpreted to mean that it authorizes the collection of all Americans’ phone records, a three-judge appeals court has unanimously ruled, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman report for the New York Times. It remains to be seen how this ruling will affect the ongoing debate in Congress about reauthorizing the act.

National insecurity blogger Marcy Wheeler catches Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr sharing the previously undisclosed fact that the bulk data collection program doesn’t only capture phone numbers, it also vacuums up IP addresses.

Big news from Facebookistan: Data scientists Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing and Lada Adamic have published a new peer-reviewed paper in Science that studied how 10.1 million adult US Facebook users interact with socially shared news, finding that self-identified liberals and conservatives do tend to cluster together and mostly share ideologically-consistent content, but that both groups also frequently encounter cross-cutting content. Bakshy et al. also find that while the News Feed algorithm definitely reduces the amount of cross-cutting content such users see, their own individual choices about what to click on has a somewhat larger role. In other words, the authors admit the “filter bubble” exists, but people’s bubbles overlap and to the degree partisan polarization is happening on Facebook, it’s more the fault of users than it is of the algorithm.

In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo does an admirable job of summarizing the study and the debate that it has sparked, considering that he is writing for the Business section of the New York Times. (Most of America’s mainstream media walks very gingerly around critical reporting of Facebook and News Feed, given that the social network giant sits like a jovial overweight mob boss on their jugular vein, able to choke their online traffic at whim, or even by accident. “Nice news business you have there…it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”)

Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy and the author of the book The Filter Bubble, comments on Medium that Facebook’s effort to downplay its algorithm’s sorting power is “an overstatement.” He adds, “Certainly, who your friends are matters a lot in social media. But the fact that the algorithm’s narrowing effect is nearly as strong as our own avoidance of views we disagree with suggests that it’s actually a pretty big deal.”

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci says the most important finding in the study is “buried in an appendix” that shows that the News Feed algorithm has tremendous power in affecting what users will actually click on. “The higher the link, more (a lot more) likely it will be clicked on. You live and die by placement, determined by the newsfeed algorithm,” she writes. (And Facebook continues to deny that it exercises editorial power, as Jay Rosen reminds us.) Tufecki also attacks Bakshy et al. for in effect trying to hide a new finding, that the News Feed algorithm reduces ideological diversity, behind an old, well-established finding, that people have a tendency to avoid content that challenges their beliefs.

University of Michigan information studies professor Christian Sandvig sums all this criticism up well, saying that the framing of the researchers’ findings suggest this should be referred to as Facebook’s “It’s not our fault” study. Plus, he (like Pariser and Tufekci) adds several important qualifiers—most important being that this is not a random study of all Facebook users, but ones of heavy users who self-report their political views on Facebook, something only 4 percent do in a way the researchers found “interpretable.”

In Crooked Timber, Eszter Hargittai rips the editors of Science for letting the Facebook researchers make broad and conclusive claims about such an unrepresentative sample.”

Sandvig also notes the larger context:

Facebook is a private corporation with a terrible public relations problem. It is periodically rated one of the least popular companies in existence. It is currently facing serious government investigations into illegal practices in many countries, some of which stem from the manipulation of its news feed algorithm. In this context, I have to say that it doesn’t seem wise for these Facebook researchers to have spun these data so hard in this direction, which I would summarize as: the algorithm is less selective and less polarizing. Particularly when the research finding in their own study is actually that the Facebook algorithm is modestly more selective and more polarizing than living your life without it.

Why this matters: University of Maryland media theorist and Snapchat researcher Nathan Jurgenson adds: “Power and control are most efficiently maintained when they are made invisible. Facebook’s ideological push to dismiss the very real ways they structure what users see and do is the company attempting to simultaneously embrace control and evade responsibility. Their news team doesn’t need to be competent in journalism because they don’t see themselves as doing journalism. But Facebook is doing journalism, and the way they code their algorithms and the rest of the site is structuring and shaping personal, social, and civic life. Like it or not, we’ve collectively handed very important civic roles to social media companies, the one I work for included, and a real danger is that we can’t hope for them to be competent at these jobs when they wont even admit to doing them.”

A footnote: Two of the authors of this study, Solomon Messing and Eytan Bakshy, are also responsible for Facebook’s still unreleased study of the impact of changing the News Feed content for close to 2 million adult American users in the ten weeks leading up to the 2012 election (putting more hard news at the top of their feeds), increasing their interest in government and self-reported tendency to vote by 3 percent. Here’s the story I did for Mother Jones last October on that. When I started asking Messing and Bakshy about two public talks their third colleague Lada Adamic had given about this fascinating intervention in the 2012 election, they moved quickly to have a video of one of Adamic’s talks removed from YouTube (I kept a copy here). According to Adamic, in that experiment, Messing “tweaked” the feeds of those users so that “instead of seeing your regular news feed, if any of your friends had shared a news story, [Messing] would boost that news story so that it was up top [on your page] and you were much more likely to see it.” A Facebook spokesman, Michael Buckley, told me that this study helped influence decisions inside Facebook to increase the “hard news” content of users’ News Feeds. Now that we have further confirmation from Facebook itself that the placement of items in News Feed is a powerful signal, plus the evidence that it can demonstrably increase voter participation, it’s time that Facebook opened itself up to independent engineering audits to ensure that its “tweaking” of the News Feed algorithm is actually random, blind, and politically neutral.

City Paper reporter Emily Guendelsberger went undercover as an UberX driver in Philadelphia and discovered that she made about $9.34 an hour, meaning that working ten hours a day, six days a week she’d net almost $30,000 a year before taxes. Some life!

Why do today’s tech oligarchs repeatedly cite those “fishermen off the coast of Africa who use their mobile phones to find the market with the best price to sell their catch” as proof that high-tech isn’t mainly helping a new class of super-rich get richer? That quote could have been from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s defense earlier this week of Internet.org, but actually is from Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and his Google Ideas sidekick Jared Cohen, writing in the Huffington Post about how data science and machine learning will enable computers to “move beyond their current role as our assistants, and become our advisors.” It’s the kind of “exciting vision” one can only have from the vantage point that sees “the coast of Africa” as some kind of unitary place.

A note to First Post email subscribers: If all goes well, starting Monday you will receive First Post from Civic Hall <info@civichall.org> rather than Personal Democracy Plus <info@personaldemocracy.com>. Check your spam folder and if necessary tell your email program to accept email from <info@civichall.org>. Thanks and have a great weekend!