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We sat down with Nina Jankowicz, an American researcher and writer, currently working as the Vice President at the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, to talk about fight against disinformation and online harassment, the role of different actors in this area and the differences between EU and USA in this field.

Nina is the author of How to Lose the Information War, on Russian use of disinformation as geopolitical strategy, and How to Be a Woman Online, a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women.

She briefly served as executive director of the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Disinformation Governance Board, resigning from the position amid the dissolution of the board by DHS in May 2022.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D

OK, welcome everybody. It’s the 12th of April 2024, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D Podcast on the 15th of May 2024. With us today is Nina Jankowicz, an American researcher and writer currently working as the vice president at the UK Based Center for Information Resilience.

She’s the author of how to lose an information war on Russian use of this information as geopolitical strategy and how to be a woman online, a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women. She briefly served as an executive director for the newly created United States Department of Homeland Security disinformation Governance board resigning from the position amid the dissolution of the board in May 2020.

Welcome, Nina. First of all, thank you for joining us. It’s really a pleasure.

00:00:56 Nina Jankowicz

Thanks for having me on Citizen D, yeah, I’m excited to be here.

00:01:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Excellent. First let’s start at the beginning, right. This information government board, your brief tenure, the critique which you wrote for Foreign Policy where you highlighted the issue of political say squabbles that are limiting the fight against this information.

Uh, it seems that no matter where you go in the US, in the UK, it’s always the same, right? Every time somebody tries to do something in terms of regulating the disinformation, fake news, propaganda and other issues, the backlash, it’s always, you know, they’re going to take our freedoms, we have to defend democracy, free speech and everything else.

Would you say that this is something that just needs to be taken into the account or is there a correct approach to these types of regulatory bodies where people actually feel that the body will have an actual benefit on the entire of society, not just the political parties or sides or whatever.

00:02:08 Nina Jankowicz

Sure. So let me start with kind of a little description of what the board actually was and what people say it was. For the listeners that may not be familiar, so prior to joining DHS, I’ll say a little bit about myself too.

I had been an expert on disinformation and analyst, focusing particularly on Russia and Eastern Europe, but increasingly especially during the pandemic in the lead up to the January 6th insurrection, looking at some of the domestic disinformation that we had seen so that’s my background.

I had testified before Congress for both Republicans and Democrats. I had worked with members of Congress across the aisle as I was a fellow at the Wilson Center and I had done a lot of work kind of supporting policymakers all around the world and trying to put forward solutions to disinformation that upheld democracy right that made sure that our democratic freedoms were protected.

I came to the job optimistic because I didn’t really expect to get a political appointment from the Biden administration, and so when they came and said, you know, will you serve your country? I said, of course, this is in my area of expertise. It seems like there’s actually room to do something here, so let’s get something done. And I’m bringing with me everything I’ve learned in my research, including a lot of policy analysis of the things that had been tried in Central and Eastern Europe that that may or may not have worked right, which is what I write about in my first book.

The Disinformation Governance Board was meant to be an internal coordination body bringing together all of the different components as we call them of the Department of Homeland Security, which have very disparate missions. It’s a huge organization, and in some ways of Frankenstein, right?

It includes everything from our emergency and disaster management agency, FEMA, to our Customs and Border protection to TSA, the guys that make you take your shoes off at the airport to our cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency, SISA, which actually dealt with election security and kind of beefing up local and state election partners ahead of elections and potential incursions by the Russians or the Chinese, so a lot of different missions and the idea was to bring everybody together, make sure that we had a shared definition of disinformation, make sure that in the work that each agency or component was doing, that it was upholding civil rights, civil liberties and the right to privacy which Americans of course hold dear.

That was the brief that I was given that I was going to bring these people together. I was going to assess what was going on in the agency and make recommendations for the board to adopt or not adopt. And we would go forward and make policy as a policy making body. How was to in the policy part of DHS, right, the policy shop, as we say.

When the board was announced, I had been working at DHS for about 8 weeks at that point, at the very beginning of my tenure, I said to my bosses, I think it’s important that we announced this and that we announced it transparently. There had been incidents for similar agents announced that they there were I wouldn’t even call it backlash, there were rumors there were lies about them.

I’m thinking in particular of the Czech Center against terrorism and hybrid threats when they were announced, there was a lot of excitement among disinformation researchers and, you know, people in the national security space. And then people on kind of who were skeptical of the government in in the Czech Republic really didn’t like the idea of this center against terrorism and hybrid threats, which in part was dealing with disinformation. And that was because they communicated poorly about it.

They weren’t going to be doing any fact checking, they were very narrowly focused on the mission of the Ministry of Interior and, you know, threats related to terrorism. But they didn’t communicate that very, very well and I write about that in my book. So I said to my bosses we need to make sure we communicate well, that did not happen.

You know, I wasn’t actually a very high-ranking person within DHS, I wasn’t confirmed by the Senate. There were, you know, a lot of people who outranked me there. And my job is to give them advice. And I gave lots of advice about different approaches to communication that I thought we should take. And they were all kind of rejected in favor of an approach that was announced to the board but didn’t give a lot of detail about it and the problem with that was that we left a vacuum for the adversaries, both political adversaries.

But I will also say Russia wrote about this to fill in the blank and what they filled in the blank with was wise. They said that this information governance Board was going to govern what was true and false on the Internet, which was not true. They said that I was going to have the power to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom I disagreed – also not true. I was not a law enforcement official. I had no budget. I had no operational authority.

That operational authority lied with all lay with all the components, but even they were not going to send men with guns to the homes of Americans with whom they disagree. That was just preposterous. And also, in that vacuum, because there was so little information about the board it was ironic, of course, having written about online abuse and studied online abuse that I would then be subjected to a very widespread hate and harassment campaign that looked it.

I mean, my family was doxxed, our personal information was released on the Internet at the time I was pregnant, people were saying horrible things about my reproductive status, my baby, my husband, whatever.

There other members of my family were targeted. There was wide skepticism about my personal life, I got death threats and all sorts of other nasty, unsavory, violent threats. And also, it’s not the same, like the violent stuff is worse, of course, but people just lied about me, they lied about all sorts things they said that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation operation.

I actually never said anything like that. I urged people to be skeptical about the laptop given when it was released and who was shopping it around. Rudy Giuliani. He does not exactly have a very good track record of telling the truth. Right. And I said, listen, we don’t know what this is. It can’t be independently verified right now, treated as a Trump campaign product, and somehow that has been construed to say that I believe that it’s Russian disinformation that’s been repeated over and over. They said that I believed in the Russia gate conspiracy theories, if you read my book I kind of say we don’t really have the evidence that says that Russia, Russia was colluding with Trump, but we do have evidence that Russia tried to interfere in our election, right, that’s open-source evidence, we know about that.

So, my opinions, my thoughts were totally misconstrued. I was painted as a young woke liberal woman who was coming away to take your coming into governments, take your rights. And so, to this day, people believe that I committed treason against the United States because I was attempting to violate the 1st amendment and take that away from my fellow citizens.

And I’m sure my grandfather is rolling over in his grave. So, my grandfather was 10 years old when he was deported to a gulag by the Soviet Union, made his way through Central Asia and ended up in the UK in the early 50s and immigrated to the United States. Kind of looking for the American dream.

So that is very much an experience that I carry with me and that is in my DNA, and for somebody to say that I wanted to take away Americans fundamental rights and freedoms is just so anathema to me.

And of course, what happened with this in the end I was pregnant at the time I decided to resign because the department really didn’t have my back. They were not pushing back vociferously on these lies. They thought that strategic silence was the right thing to do, that like this would blow over.

I kept being told that it would blow over the next weekend or the weekend after and as we waited and time grew and, you know, issued a fact sheet that wasn’t very good. They had, you know, people give various statements to the media. But I wasn’t allowed to speak for myself. And it was my record and my family that was being disparaged and endangered. So I decided to leave. They had asked me to stay on as a policy advisor and I just decided it wasn’t worth it, then they disbanded the board after I left later that summer.

And you know, I was at home with my baby trying not to think about anything.

This is a really frustrating and sad moment for me, and I think it’s one that’s important for your audience to understand as well as much as there has been political backlash against some of the counter disinformation in attempts in Europe, there’s never been anything like what we’re seeing in the States right now.

And it’s not just about me, it has now expanded from the disinformation Governance Board and me in 2022 where kind of the Democrats presented the board as a fait accompli to the Republicans and said, OK, you win. We’re not going to fight you at all and that’s kind of an admission of guilt, right?

It looks like one, even though nothing there was no wrongdoing and then.

Having had that proof of concept, the Republicans went further and said look at all the rest of this censorship happening, and they basically redefined the term of censorship as any person studying the information environment. They’re a censor.

Any cooperation or communication between an academic or somebody at a think tank and a social media platform or the government that’s also censorship, right? That’s the claim right now. And I think that that is a completely false definition of censorship.

Censorship has a clear definition of what that looks in the American context. But B, it is it is doing the opposite effect of what it says it is. It’s not defending people’s fundamental rights and freedoms, it is having a chilling effect.

I’m the researchers who are doing this work and just trying to stand up for democracy. So that’s where we are right now in the states. It’s not a not a pretty picture and to me, it represents the most fundamental threat to academic integrity and freedom of expression since the McCarthy era.

00:12:01 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Why do you think looking back on your involvement with the DHS, the backlash, the response because it sounds like the arguments you wrote about in your op-eds and everything everywhere else.

They sound like there is a little black book on how to discredit people, right? And anybody can rent it out in a library, read the paragraphs, and then use it in in different contexts in the US and EU all around the world, right? So why do you think this is such a transferable procedure?

So why do you think the same things people are using to you know, media assassinate type person or gather up gather up like reasoning for personal attacks. Why do you think this works like literally anywhere in the world?

0:13:05 Nina Jankowicz

A good question. I mean, I think ultimately, whether it’s online or in a newspaper, or just gossiping with coworkers around the water cooler, right, people are interested in personal stories, and the more salacious, the better.

And so, you know, claiming that I’m this crazy woke, you know, feminazi, working in the DHS, that’s a good narrative, and it makes money for people. It makes money for people.

I know because it’s been repeated over and over and over again. Whenever anybody has a chance to just mention me, that’s how they describe me. Right? So, it clearly is resonating with people. And I think also there’s been a normalization, at least in the United States and our politics of these sorts of personal attacks since Donald Trump’s presidency.

We have seen that sort of personalization not just happen within him and his office, but also being normalized in the Republican Party to some extent. I wouldn’t say all Republicans do this, but people there are certainly people within the party who have enormous influence who act this way.

And it’s interesting because they do it bombastically in public, but when you get them behind closed doors, they don’t act that way and so you know that it is – it is something that is done for show. It is something that is an act and it’s really depressing to me.

And I have actually said directly to members of Congress who have attacked me in this extremely personalized way and put me and my family in danger that I thought they were engaging in a dereliction of duty as elected officials. They have an important role to play in setting the tone of discourse in our country and by acting the way that they do, they are telegraphing to their constituents that that is OK and generally some of the constituents, not all, but some will go farther.

They will say worse things they will, you know, send violent threats. They might show up to people’s houses. They might engage in violence like, that’s not beyond the pale. We’ve seen that already in the United States over the past four years. And so I really think we need to call that out and make sure that people recognize how strange that is.

I remember there was a conversation with a governor and I forget which governor; it was a state governor here in the States and he was asked about the gendered and misogynistic attacks on Nikki Haley, who was running for president for the Republican Party nomination at the time.

He said that’s just politics and actually if you look at other countries, other developed democracies, it’s not as accepted in other places, it still happens. Yeah, there are still misogynistic comments, but they are not the norm. And I think we really need to get back to that. And of course, the Internet getting back to the global nature of all of this.

Internet really supercharges that ability to be mean and personalized, and downright violent, right? There’s no consequences for any of this stuff.

00:16:25 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, so would you say, you know looking at potential, I’m not going to say remedies because that would be too optimistic, but the right way to sort of address these issues, right? So we’ve had like spanning from let’s say the first election of Donald Trump, the Golden Age of, this information writing and fact checking and active citizenship we’ve had nothing but failures up to up to today, right?

Nothing that we’ve advised on in 2015, worked. In fact, if you compare, the first notes about, you know, the media is lying to you, you have to check everything, everything is disinformation and propaganda. I think it’s sort of… like to me, it seemed that the biggest blowback came during the pandemic crisis, right? I usually joke in a very sarcastic way about this and say that the best fact checkers or the best people that really took fact checking to heart were the antivaxx community during pandemic, because they said nothing is true, everything is a lie, we have to figure out everything on our own, right?

So moving forward, are there some lessons, not to be learned, but are there some lessons we can take as a basis to sort of reformat the discussion the framework in which we are addressing the fight against this information, a fight against propaganda.

00:18:03 Nina Jankowicz

Yeah, I’ve always been. I don’t want to say skeptical of fact checking. I think it has a time and a place and serves useful purposes, but I think we need to be very clear about its limits, so a fact check, a reactive fact check of a piece of disinformation or misinformation is not going to necessarily reach the people who already believe the mistruth, right.

In fact, it often causes them to double down on that mistruth and so I am much more in favor of investing in information literacy and people react poorly, especially in the states.

That’s beginning to be another kind of divining or lightning rod issue here because they think that means that people are gonna be told, OK, this media outlet is trustworthy and this one is biased, this one just publishes false news.

And that’s actually not what media literacy is. It’s giving people the tools that they need to navigate today’s information environment and while I don’t want to put all of the emphasis on people, right, I think there needs to be other parts of the solution. I do think that if people understand how social media platforms work, why they’re being shown certain content, if I’m looking for a new pair of shoes and then suddenly I’m getting Instagram ads about different pairs of shoes that are, you know, that have the characteristics of the ones that I’ve been looking for, like there’s a reason it might not be the best shoe for me, it’s just that they’ve got a very good online advertising team and similarly, you know, knowing that the platforms are targeting you based on your interests and the things that you’ve engaged.

Before I wrote a piece in 2020, about how it’s so easy to go from in our context, we had a big movement to reopen businesses in about, let’s say, April or May of 2020. And even if you just have that as a purely economic argument, if you knew like, if you didn’t believe in any COVID misinformation, you didn’t think vaccines, you know had 5G we didn’t have vaccines back then but you know all these crazy conspiracy theories?

Yeah if you didn’t believe in all of that, but you just wanted to reopen your business, it was a couple of steps removed from joining a a reopening Facebook Group to going into like crazy conspiracy theories about heavy metals and like the vaccine was a conspiracy to get people to become sheep.

And it was just a few steps removed and that’s the sort of thing that I think people need to be… they need to understand.

So I’ve always advocated that governments, in addition to taking kind of the national security precautions that they all should take in addition to making sure that they’ve got like one belly button of policy coordination within their government so that that can all go out to different ministries or agencies that they that they need to be investing in information literacy as well.

And it wouldn’t be prescriptive… it wouldn’t say Fox News bad, New York Times good, it would say you know today’s information environment is very polluted and we all need to kind of recognize that navigating it is difficult and here are some tools to do that.

So that’s part of it. I think the other thing that we have seen from the countries that have actually been successful at this is that they have publicly prioritized that disinformation is a problem, like they’ve publicly declared that.

So if you look at Sweden and Finland and the psychological defense that they do with their populations or Ukraine, obviously Ukraine is in war, so it’s an extraordinary situation. But, you know, people recognize that this information is being used to undermine them and undermine their efforts as they try to resist this enemy.

And so that’s part of it. And then also, and this is something that governments struggle a little bit more with, again creating that policy center somewhere at the heart of government with full political buy in from the very top of an administration and something that’s going to stay from administration to administration that can’t quickly be undone by political upheavals, is incredibly important and no president since 2016, while Trump didn’t prioritize it and Biden didn’t figure out a way to do it right.

I think DHS what I was supposed to do was a smaller version of this within the department itself, and it failed miserably.

And now, as a result, a lot of the counter disinformation work that the US government is doing has been rolled back. So, it’s difficult and you have to telegraph it the right way, you have to be very transparent about what you’re doing and say we’re not doing any fact checking.

You know, we’re going to be putting good information out there. We’re looking at what’s happening online, and we’re going to provide Americans with information about how to get to the polls, how to vote, where to find their voting place. You know, we see a lot of misinformation and disinformation about that sort of stuff that that might be all it means, but you need to be transparent about it and for some reason the US government couldn’t figure out how to do that.

I will say one final thought, which is that when the Salisbury poisoning happened in the UK in 2018, that was, in my opinion, a very good example of how to be transparent, how to declassify information quickly?

How to work across government from very different parts of government, from the police to the foreign and Commonwealth Office to the people who dealt with chemical weapons to get information out to the public quickly and I think we could all learn a lot from that.

I know there are probably still people who believe the Salisbury operation was a conspiracy or a plant by MI5 or whatever, but I think the majority of the world and certainly the majority of Brits believe the truth, which is that Russia did this on purpose as retribution against Scripal.

00:23:47 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, my next question would be like the difference or looking at the different, let’s say sources of this information, right. So, you have these let’s say let’s call them like homegrown disinformation outlets that are operating within a certain interior politics or party politics, within a specific geographical area like a country or a region and then you have these, you already mentioned them, foreign ops, influencing or trying to lower the attention of the enemy, of the foreign countries.

Would you say that dealing with these different types, so to say of disinformation could be the same or is there like a huge difference between addressing these two issues. Because we’ve been, like the pandemic was sort of like a highlight of everything mashed together, from local disinformation outlets that were basically just monetizing the pandemics informational black hole, then you had the Russian foreign operations that were trying to sort of, yeah, dissolve or inject sort of incoherence and stuff.

00:25:03 Nina Jankowicz

Yeah, it’s difficult to draw the line right. I think everyone wants there to be a very clear line between what our foreign adversaries are doing and what’s going on at home, and this is something that’s been incredibly misunderstood by almost everyone from the press to policymakers since the very beginning of the kind of current era of interest in disinformation and I talk about in my book how the most successful disinformation is the disinformation that manipulates pre-existing grievances in society.

So, if you have again to use a US example, if you’ve got people who believe Texas should secede from the rest of the United States, that’s a really easy grievance to identify and manipulate. If you are Russia and you might identify some local actors who believe that, like you know, local civil society groups or a local media outlet that that takes that kind of position for themselves as an editorial position and you can work with them. And that’s when you get information laundering.

Right, so we see narratives or pieces of, quote UN quote, intelligence introduced to local actors and then they are able to spread it without kind of the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, showing their hands that aha, this is a foreign actor and it’s so it gives them a layer of insulation, plausible deniability.

And it also makes it harder for at least in the American context because of our free speech laws, which I agree with, just to put that out there so no one can slice this and say that I didn’t say that it makes it much harder to respond, because if you’ve got somebody who fervently believes something, they have a right to say it right.

So how do you respond to it then? And that’s where you get into kind of the idea of counter speech. You know, somebody putting out that information and hoping that the story that they tell is more compelling than the lie.

So, it’s really difficult and I guess the other thing that I would say is that the nations that have been good at this and I think the UK is another good example again and also probably the Nords and the Balts.

They have an actor agnostic approach, right? It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from Russia or coming from inside the house. It means that you know they’re going to respond to disinformation that affects public safety, public health or democracy in the same way, but and I think that’s the right approach, I don’t think that in any of these cases, well if it’s a, it’s if if it’s a fake Russian account, by all means take it off, take it off of Twitter.

But we need to be sure of that or Facebook or TikTok or whatever. I don’t think that you know, I have in fact if you go back to my very first New York Times op-ed in 2017, September 2017, I say that playing whack a troll is not the right approach to countering disinformation, we need to do better strategic communications.

We need to tell better stories. We need to, you know, prioritize this as a policy area and talk about it transparently, not playing whack control, not removing those accounts. And unfortunately, you know, I think as you and I have talked about, that’s where we’ve ended up that people still think that the response to disinformation is censorship, that the response to disinformation is removing stuff online. And that is just not true.

00:28:21 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And how would you compare like the current, let’s say regulatory uptick in in the EU that is sort of, you know, I mean they’re on the way out. You know, elections are coming in two months, but they’re still trying to sort of push out a lot of regulatory frameworks that address, you know, financing of the media transparency of the operations, the role of digital intermediaries…

They’ve had some success in terms of addressing or highlighting these issues, California and other states in the US started, you know, writing their own versions of, let’s say, the same regulatory frameworks. Do you think this is part of the solution or is it just like a PR stunt for the politicians to sort of show off and say yes, we’re doing something?

00:29:17 Nina Jankowicz

DSA and related pieces of legislation are good. I don’t know if they’re gonna work. I think we have to wait and see to, you know, see if the implementation is as good as the idea. But I think we need to start somewhere and particularly with the transparency and oversight question that one, I think is the most critical.

So, when people ask me what I would do to regulate social media, I tell them that we can’t even have a conversation until we’re all using the same set of facts and right now, that’s true, right?

And researchers, I don’t have to tell your audience, I’m sure, but researchers access to data on social media platforms has been almost entirely cut off or monetized to the point where they can’t get access to it.

So, what we’re dealing with now is basically hearsay. It’s like when Elon Musk decides he wants to release snippets of conversations without their full context to pre-selected journalists. That’s part of what we get or whistleblowers or stuff that’s been gotten through. You know, these congressional investigations that are going on here again released in a retaliatory or untransparent manner. And what I think the DSA can solve and other regulatory regimes, including the E Safety Commissioner in Australia, who has the power to essentially, ask questions of social media platforms based on safety related issues that allows us a shared set of facts.

It means that we will know how the platforms are dealing with content moderation questions. We will know how they’re dealing with foreign interference questions. We will know in in issues where people feel aggrieved that their content was removed or demoted or they have their account shut down. We will know why that happened.

And until this point we’ve not had anything that has allowed us to do that. We could make inferences even when we had access to more data, but we would. We would only have kind of what the data showed and the inferences that we could make and then what the platform said.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, right? So, I’m excited about that part of it. I think there’s still a lot of work to be done thinking about the way that our information environment today has effects on public safety and the online safety bill in the UK makes some attempts to square that circle, but it also has a couple of concerning elements to it, including the requirement to break encryption, things like Signal, who have been really pushing back on that and I think rightly, but on the other hand, it also, you know, I think makes it legal deep fake porn and other types of harassment that are based on protected characteristic.

So, it’s a difficult dance to do, but I think that that is going to be the longer term harm that we have to kind of iterate on and see as things are developing, what’s going on the transparency issue. And if we solve that and we make sure that there is a non-partisan intermediary body overseeing that data and distributing it to researchers and journalists, frankly, then then we’ll have a conversation. We’ll have the basis on which we can have that conversation and make it more productive.

00:32:32 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And what would be the result of this conversation? You often hear about transparency that is the cornerstone against fight against disinformation, but then they never mention the next steps, in terms of, OK, we have transparency, we know what’s going on behind the curtain. What’s next?

00:32:59 Nina Jankowicz

Yeah. I mean, I think then we have some sort of intermediary regulator who can respond to exigent threats on the platforms and either give guidance or set regulations for what they must do if a certain thing happens. So, I like to compare it to the airline industry. I like to actualize what goes on the Internet, because I think a lot of people still believe that there is a firm line between the online and the offline worlds and that just isn’t true anymore.

So, Boeing obviously has been having a lot of problems over the past couple of years recently here in the States ad door blew off an airplane and immediately we had an investigation by the FAA into Boeing and what was going on there.

I think we need regulation similarly for technology platforms that have such an immense influence on our lives and have so much of our personal data as well, right? We need to make sure that they’re safeguarding that appropriately, and that if they are not safeguarding it appropriately, if they are not, you know, investing enough in making sure that child sexual abuse material or terrorist content, or if we ever get there, you know, other online harms that deal with adults and everyday people.

Deep fake pornography is one example, right? If they’re not doing their due diligence and expending a certain level of effort, then they get fined or then they have some sort of penalty. That’s what happens in every under every other industry, from finance to cars to airplanes to food. And to think that we are giving over so much again of our personal information to these companies for access to something that we use in our daily lives to connect with people, to do business, to, to stay in touch with families, and there is nobody, nobody who’s watching what they’re doing.

I mean, it’s shocking. It’s shocking. So, I think that would be the logical next step. But again, we need that shared set of facts to start from a common ground there, because otherwise we’re just going to get hoodwinked by political actors and private companies who are trying to make a buck.

00:35:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D

It seems to me like this is the perfect topic or this subject of regulating, let’s say intermediaries or online platforms. It’s like the perfect storm situation where everybody can or anybody can add to its own two cents. The political actors are trying to sort of lessen the encryption, as you’ve mentioned, and trying to sort of convince us that you know, terrorism will be gone if they just have access to everything.

Then you have the private sector that is just “No, no, no. Just leave us alone. We will handle this perfectly on our own because we are the only ones who know what to do.”

So, who do you think of all these actors should, let’s say, start the conversation about transparency and about next steps like you’ve mentioned political actors, you know, we’ve talked about the market forces… who should be the like the instigator of this conversation?

00:36:05 Nina Jankowicz

I think it’s got to be researchers. I don’t. I don’t think either. Nobody, nobody is unbiased enough of the political actors and the and the private companies to really drive the conversation, and it’s the researchers who have worked with the data. It’s the researchers who have uncovered some of the harms online, and it’s the researchers who want to be able to continue to do some so without this exorbitant cost?

And I think they they’re starting to do that. The problem is that with due respect to my beloved colleagues in academia, academia moves very slowly. It’s really difficult to get consensus on things because everybody has very strongly held opinions based in their own research and their own experiences and they don’t communicate very well.

So, I think most academics would agree with that, so you know, I think there’s a lot of work to be done to make those points to the public as well. And I’m doing some work with some academics to start to do that in the future.

But it is difficult. It’s a really difficult battle because everyone turns off their brains as soon as you start thinking about something technical, but I think again, that’s where the analogy to the airline or the food industry or whatever comes in very handy, because I think everyone hopefully agrees now that what happens online does not stay online and that means that it needs to be regulated.

00:37:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah. And speaking about regulation, just one more topic before we wrap up… your latest book talks about online harassment, it describes your experience, it talks about other women’s and other types of harassment online.

What’s your take on the current, let’s say regulatory situation in that area? Is this similar to this information or fight against this information? Is it something completely different? I’m guessing harassment is as old as this information operations if not older so?

How do we address this issue moving forward, especially now that we are, you know, walking, maybe even sleepwalking in in the era of generative AI, deep fakes, and everything else that just you know, turns the volume up to 11 in terms of harassing.

00:38:23 Nina Jankowicz

I mean, I could have spent an entire hour on that question alone, but I’ll try to be quick. I mean, I think the state of online harassment and online harms online safety, especially in the United States, but really, most places around the world is primitive at best, the state of regulation and in most cases, I think really discounts the harm, particularly that women and minorities face when they encounter online harassment, right?

The intent of this harassment, whether we’re talking about just, you know, trolling someone or deep fake pornography or violent threats, is to silence them. So, it is a speech issue.

And yet, when people turn 18, especially when women turn 18, right, we have a lot of conversation in, in the online harm space about girls and I had a student at Oxford asked me once, why is it that when girls turn 18, we no longer care about them and I think that’s a really, really good and trenchant question.

They’re not minors anymore. Sure, but are we asking just by raising our voices to receive rape threats, to be targeted in this way, to have to fear for our lives when we’re walking around, you know, outside? I mean, I have a cyber stalker who I had to get a protective order against, I had a bad experience with law enforcement when I did that.

The detective who handled my case basically said, well, he lives in New York. Why do you think he’s gonna show up here in your home in Virginia? And I’m like, because he has my address and he has a habit of showing up at people’s homes and places of employment and events that they’re at. And I have a baby, and I don’t want him to, you know or see my baby or be in proximity to him.

There are many law enforcement agencies that react similarly. So, I think I think we need much more help there. The fact that deep tech pornography has not been criminalized or even civil penalty instituted at the federal level in the United States is shocking to me. When the harm is so, so, so clear. And it has become so easy to create stuff like this and you asked if this is a similar question to disinformation or not.

I mean, I think the response that I hear from skeptics is that this is just, you know, you should have to deal with it. You should just buck up and deal with it. Often, that’s white men who say that. They just don’t get the same sorts of harassment that their female counterparts do. There’s a lot of data on that. And so, what do I think needs to happen? I mean it’s tricky, right? Because it runs into speech questions. But I think in regulating the platforms we might be able to find a happy medium there.

Obviously like these, these platforms have terms of service that they are meant to implement that already say that you’re not allowed to harass somebody based on protected characteristics like gender, age, religion, ethnicity. The problem is they don’t enforce them, so perhaps there’s an enforcement mechanism that says if you don’t enforce your own terms of service, you are not upholding your duty of care to your users and that’s a market problem, right? That’s kind of a consumer protection problem.

There’s a lot of different ways to do it, but I think until people recognize the harm that online harms do cause that it’s not just sticks and stones, but there is a real physical threat that that comes from a lot of this stuff, then we’re going to be going around in circles.

But I am hopeful. Danielle Citron, who’s a privacy scholar, a former MacArthur fellow, she has two great books. One of them is hate crimes in cyberspace and the other is her newer one is called the fight for privacy, and she mentions how in the 70s, of course, it was legal, perfectly legal and normal to get sexually harassed at work.

And women came together and we banned it against that, and now it is very much not legal. Right. And you can you can have harassment claims against your bosses, your coworkers, for creating an unsafe work environment. We just need to bring America, bring the world up to speed. That that’s not OK online either because it is a speech issue, like I said, coming back around to it, it means that people, women, marginalized communities are silencing themselves because they are afraid of these horrible things that might happen to them online if they do speak out, so that’s where we are. I’m hopeful that we can change it for right now, situation is not very good.

00:42:51 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And just one more question before we wrap up. Like there is a, there is a ton of political movement in the US and the European Union, EU, US election is coming up the EU election is coming up. Do you see this these topics well addressed or during the election cycle? I sometimes think it’s a generational issue, like the older people, let’s say above 50, they just don’t have, as you said, the same experience or it almost looks like they don’t live in in the same world.

So, is this a generational issue? Do you see like working in this field working with younger or young people? Do you see a change of narrative and perceptions of these issues as people go, you know, are younger and are more involved in these types of situations?

00:43:59 Nina Jankowicz

Yeah, I think so. I think younger people understand the harms that the Internet can cause more, more acutely than people, a couple of generations ahead of them. But I’ve also had some really enlightening and encouraging conversations with people who are many years my senior, so I wouldn’t entirely write them off, though I do think we’ll see more and more legislation coming from kind of younger MP’s, younger members of Congress as we start to address these issues.

00:44:33 Domen Savič / Citizen D

1. Thanks so much Nina, for dropping by. This has been really informative and really great. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors. And yes, fingers crossed me move, you know upwards, not yeah, downwards.

00:44:48 Nina Jankowicz

Yes, I agree. I’ll be watching the elections in the EU and I wish you all the same as well. Bye bye.

Citizen D advice:* Rethink the connection between disinformation and political parties * Develop new approaches to financial ties of disinformation research * Empower disinformation researchers with political support

More information:* New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online – article * How disinformation fuels violence — and makes our politics worse – article * ‘A surreal experience’: Former Biden ‘disinfo’ chief details harassment – article

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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We sat down with Mark Dempsey, a Senior EU Advocacy Officer for global free speech organization ARTICLE 19.

Prior to ARTICLE 19, Mark consulted for the European Commission on a project focused on data protection laws in non-EU countries. ARTICLE 19’S work in Brussels is driven by the goal of ensuring that the European information environment is free, fair, accessible, inclusive and decentralized.

During our conversation we touched on the current regulatory frameworks within the EU, digital activism fatigue, the role of the end-user and the omni-present role of digital technologies and services that need to be put in check by regulation.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen DWelcome everybody. It’s the 5th of April 2024, but you’re listening to this Citizen D podcast episode on the 15th of April same year with us today is Mark Dempsy, Senior EU advocacy officer for Global Free Speech organization, Article 19.

Prior to Article 19, Mark consulted for the European Commission on the project focused on data protection laws and in non-EU countries, and even before that, Mark, you’ve worked in the financial sector. Is that right?

00:00:39 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah, correct. Correct. Yeah.

00:00:41 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we start our conversation, I just want to know what made you switch from the financial sector to digital rights, which one is worse?

00:00:53 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Which one is worse is a funny way of putting it. So, I worked for a long time in development, finance, and then regulatory finance. And I was an EU policy advisor for the Financial Conduct Authority in London, where I would go to Brussels, and I’d sit in Council working groups discussing nascent proposed legislative proposals from the Commission and I think really what made me make the move is an awareness of the growing encroachment of big tech on our lives and the controlling of the narratives.

Not just in the sort of public space perspective, but also commercially and the reliance of so many businesses like Amazon, Google, etcetera controlled the various data flows and the commercial relationship?

So it was, it was the encroachment of big tech in our lives. But it was also the realization that there was there was an extent of regulatory capture in finance, which was never going to change.

And I think coming from Ireland, seeing the financial crisis and the way taxpayers have basically footed the whole bill, no one in the US went to jail, there is still this aura of invincibility around finance and I just became, I think, quite disillusioned really and it was very hard to see the tangible effects of regulation to people on the street, and I felt that digital rights was more of an area where I could make more of a difference, so I took the time out to go to Hertie and to do a masters.

And I was lucky to work closely with Joanna Bryson, who has this unique view as a technologist, where she looks at society and the human rights impact and the digital rights that come attached to it. So, I think though she was a bit of an inspiration.

I’m sure she’d like it; she’d be heartened to hear that. And then, of course, there was such a huge avalanche, as you say, of regulation in the EU and it felt like a very good moment to be involved, even if I did come in a little bit late. When I came into the DMA/DSA in terms in terms of their negotiations were being finalized as I joined Article 19, but the GDPR, of course was a good experience with them. The Commission was a good learning experience and set me up nicely for the Article 19 role.

And where of course I came straight into the European Media Freedom Act, which was in the middle of negotiations, which in itself is a is a fascinating piece of legislation which we can talk about later.

00:03:32 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Sure. Because my next question would be exactly that, right. So, the EU Commission mandate is wrapping up, they’ve done a ton of work in terms of regulatory proposals or regulatory laws in terms of digital rights.

You’ve mentioned in the DSA the DMA, the European Media Freedom Act previously the GDPR. Is this the right way or are we heading in the right direction with these proposals or with these laws that are that are, as you’ve mentioned, focusing on big tech on, on intermediaries, on everything that’s happening in, in the, in the digital world right now?

00:04:12 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

I mean, I don’t know whether I’m the right person to ask. That question is is in itself questionable. I think the EU can be commended for making the first move and I know that they sometimes get criticized as being mainly regulatory cage, so to speak, and that they seem to specialize more in regulation. But that’s because they do have this immense capacity of civil servants within the Commission.

If we’re going in the right direction, it’s too early to tell. I mean what is disappointing is that the process of agreeing proposals ultimately at the end of the trilogue is still very non-transparent, and I think with the EMFA, with the DSA probably less so the DMA, there were agreements made, or at least there were. There were positions for justice by the Council at the end, which undermines the initial legislative proposals, so I think that process is simply, it shouldn’t be tenable anymore, but I think it probably will be because I don’t see any changes happening.

So we are dependent very much on a strong Parliament, and you’re very dependent on having your champions in Parliament to push the civil rights aspects of any legislation. But if you don’t have those people, they go into the rapporteur, for example, I, the person who oversees the file, if they go into final negotiations and they’re not particularly, how do you say, favorable towards civil civil rights, then our position is severely weakened.

So I think the proof will be in the pudding in terms of enforcement, I mean again, and I know for some they’ve heard this ad nauseam, but this all lies in the enforcement and particularly with these new legislative pieces that have come in.

There are mechanisms which gives the EU a strong regulatory position, so they are going to be regulators for DSA/DMA, AI act and we just have to see how that plays out.

I mean, the GDPR has been a lesson for the EU, I think they realized that. So, let’s see if they put the right resources work closely with civil society actors and that look, that will all happen in the next couple of years. And then it’s a case of understanding how all these pieces of legislation interact with each other.

I mean there could be unintended consequences, they’ll have to work very closely. The different units, like the G Connect to GG comp. The new AI office. They’ll have to work very closely together and coordinate and in a non-siloed fashion and I think the EU is not known for our coordinating well amongst different units. Things tend to be quite silent, so iit’s really up in the air as to whether as to where all this goes.

But I do go back to commending the EU for at least taking the step because, I mean the US, you don’t even have a federal privacy law, so I think certain states as we know like California, they’ve learned from the GDPR and they’ve created their own strong privacy laws, but I think the EU is really being the first mover here, but I think they tend to love saying that and praise themselves. But we’re beyond that now, now it’s about whether they can actually enforce.

00:07:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

OK, I’m going to, I’m going to flip the question and ask you a little bit differently, so, is there a a phenomena or is there a, let’s say a mistake in the field that should be corrected by these EU legislative regulatory frameworks?

And if they don’t do it, then it it will sort of signal that the regulatory framework has I guess I could say failed in in in its attempt?

00:08:20 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Well, something that Article 19 is looking at is the concentration of market power, so if the DMA doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do then I think we will have an issue. You could say that that particular piece of legislation will have failed.

I mean the whole point of it is to create fair and contestable markets and that means ultimately as well opening up these platforms, and I think there are avenues within the legislation to do that.

But the Commission hasn’t mandated that so far yet.For example, if they were to open up recommender systems, for example, and allow third party recommended systems into your social media feeds, I think that would be something that would certainly disrupt the business models and provide the choice which the DMA proposes to do.

So, I think that there are ways for them to decide that something is not working and therefore we will have to make some fundamental changes to the business models to make sure that these markets are fairer, more open and more contestable.

But again, this all goes down to a certain level of political will and the second level of courageous leadership. Because if you look at the, if you look at the parallels of finance, those steps weren’t taken, I mean that there wasn’t political courage to say.

You have these large institutions which are deemed too big to fail, but post financial crisis, there has to be ways of breaking them up so they don’t have a dominant position in the market. And if you look at your Goldman Sachs and you look at the the large American banks, they’re still making remarkable profits and their share prices have held and gone up and the level of pay compensation that executives get is just absurd when you compare the ratios going back over the decades.

00:10:22 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Would you say that’s something that compares or that’s something that is similar between the financial and the big tech industry or area in terms of big players positions that do not change no matter what because politicians that are afraid of them?

I used to say that politicians are in love with intermediaries, with big tech giants and they don’t want to hurt their lovers in a way, so they dance around them and sort of not face enough pressure from the public. They know they usually do something small and say OK we’ve done our job and now the rest is on the end users.

00:11:11 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah, I think there’s actually absolutely an element of that. I mean, unfortunately it seems to be sort of human nature that there is this admiration for the ability to make money, so when an executive from a big tech firm walks in, there’s fawning over that person, and that is definitely a parallel that exists for the banking sector.

I mean, we need legislators and regulators to think about how are these companies improving society and I think it’s quite clear they’ve been doing the opposite for some time on so many different levels, not least when it comes to undermine democracy.

But still, when we you’re not getting that forceful language by regulators to change this, yeah, the regulation is the regulatory proposals to the DMA they say are a step, but really that’s all they are and I think the DSA is probably more limited in what it can do than the DMA. But there is a huge cultural shift that needs to happen, and it’s admittedly difficult because they’re entrenched monopolies at this point and it’s hard to change that.

It means that to change that, you have to disrupt business models and that take that will take a certain amount of strong leadership and willingness to push against the grain of the usual argument of, you know, innovation is being stymied by regulation. I mean, none of this is proven and when you have… I mean there are so many incidents that have happened as a result of big tech and then of course you’ve got AI and AI adds a whole new component because they’ve already started reinforcing their dominant positions by forging partnerships, which are basically acquisitions and taking over all the all, all the staff of the company that they’re going to partnership with and I know then that there’s investigations into this.

But yeah, does it bode well for the future? I think it’s hard to say that it does at the moment given how how quickly generative AI seems to have become something that’s again completely been taken over by big tech.

00:13:23 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Speaking about the big tech and you’ve mentioned GDPR in in the beginning, so yeah, another interesting party, so to say in this fight is the end user right? So you’ve had the GDPR put complete control over our own data into our own hands and you know, that proved a bit of a challenge for people not being used to be in the driving seat. So on the other side, you have these big tech giants, you already mentioned these firms that are that are that’s basically a a monopoly, if we’re lucky… So how do you see the role of the individual user moving forward?

Should we as activists sort of try to move away from this logic that we have to empower the people and everything else will follow and focus more democratic institutions and more on the systemic players?

00:14:29 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah, I think we absolutely want to focus more on the systemic players because, has GDPR ever worked? I mean has more people understood the value of their personal data… I mean, that’s really the question, right? And I’m not sure that they have, I mean that there’s the whole cookie fatigue, there’s the determined services, there’s the ability for big tech to hover up data in a transaction which no money is transferred.

They’ve managed to to yet again control that sort of transaction and I think the question is always like how do you get people to value their personal data, what needs to be change to have a simpler choice?

I mean cookie fatigue; we all know that a very small proportion of people actually go to each of the cookie options and then decide to reject them all. I mean, as digital activists were still very much a minority when it comes to valuing personal data, yeah, there needs to be systemic changes made beyond the idiosyncrasies of GDPR.

I mean I could flip the question back to you, right? I know you are interviewing me for this podcast, but I’d be kind of curious to hear what you think on that as well.

00:15:59 Domen Savič / Citizen D

I mean… So my first campaign was back in, what was it, 2012? I think we’ve organized the the first anti ACTA protest in in the country and and back then, the field was very, you know diluted, you had you had different lawyers and let’s say tech engineers working on this subject and they came together saying, you know, well, this ACTA thing is really troublesome and we have to pull our weights together.

But then afterwards they sort of drifted off in into their own, you know, spheres and this is something that was to me, a signal that, OK, we need more of a focused pressure on these issues because putting together a coalition just to have it fall apart after the fact, it’s not very effective, right?

You can’t do that every time. And then then it was like from 2015 to 2018, yeah, exactly to the to the GDPR, it was this, I’m going to call it the golden era for activism, where you had small individual fights popping up and you could, you know, hammer them down individually on your own by motivating the crowd every time something came along now.

And moving forward, you said it with with the AI and everything, I don’t see NGOs or activists being the right way to fight, because there’s just too much of everything, it’s happening constantly.

It’s on all the time and at the same time people, you know you, you don’t have the time, the energy, the funds to sort of brief the people in real time about these issues and encourage them to sort of go against the big tech or the bad players in.

And this is something that, that, that was very memorable to me when we met in Brussels recently and you spoke about the digital fatigue right and I love the term, because I was, you know, I am in the process of questioning that that very same question, that this is just untenable moving forward.

Like, are we just, you know, destroying our health and whatever you know, because there’s just too much of everything and at the same time, there’s a very asynchronous feeling to the field that you said before in the trialogue and everything.

You know, it all goes someplace you don’t want it to go right and you have no influence over the…

00:19:04 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah… And I mean, you’re absolutely right. I mean, digital fatigue is… things have changed so quickly, the results in terms of flops, civil society is looking for are relatively minimal, so of course there’s a level of cynicism, skepticism that creeps into the conversation, that brings to the question like, how do you mobilize civil society to be as effective as possible? Like why are we choosing our battles wrong? Are we, are we choosing too many battles?

I think we must fight on. I mean I think we have to… there has been success successes, they have and there’s definitely a growing awareness of what civil society can bring to the table, at least within this EU bubble, but it is a challenge to bring about a culture where fundamental rights and everything that encompasses become a serious part of the conversation. And if you look at the DSA, we have been pushing the Commission to create a sort of more formal structure or a forum for CSOs to have a regular dialogue with the Commission, and we’ve had one or two workshops, but nothing has been formalized yet. But.

I think they realize that, one, they don’t really have all the capacity that they need and that the CSO community, along with the academic community and all the various researchers attached to it, bring a huge amount of expertise, and I think with the DSA, a lot of this hinges on the provision which allows for data access.

If that process happens properly, which is obviously not at all guaranteed, because I mean there will be ways which Facebook and Google use this process as a means of further controlling access to data. Yes, they give access to data, but it will be a long, laborious process till they get to that point where you can access it. And I think this is why the Commission really has to come in quite strongly and make sure that this access happens relatively seamlessly and to a wide number of people, so the right research can be done.

So I think there are elements of hope there which should make our job easier, but ultimately, as long as they’re considering their bottom line, I the platforms they will be doing their best to make sure that that isn’t the case, but there’s the twin goal of making sure that people beyond our community understand what their fundamental rights are when it comes to the platforms.

Then there’s the bringing in the culture and the common and the digital services can either reflect fundamental rights, how they need to be respected and how they can do that as quasi regulatory gatekeepers.

But I mean, I think the digital fatigue also comes comes purely from the fact that you have all this change happening extremely quickly in the private sector side along with this huge number of legislative proposals which are very dense and no one still knows how they work with each other.

So that’s where you got to take a step back holistically and understand the consequences of each piece of legislation. But then of course, there’s all the case law that’s going to naturally follow an that case, though, will be very important.

But again, that’s a slow process as well.

00:22:42 Domen Savič / Citizen D

True, yeah…I mean, I wasn’t trying to sound like defeatist, I just realized very, very soon that that in this area, like in the digital rights, you always have to question yourself from time to time just to sort of open up to, to new ideas or to new venues or to new approaches.

00:23:04 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

I keep referring to the EU public and the EU is really a bubble, there is not nearly enough voices being brought into the conversations in the global South, for example, and that’s a whole different discussion.

But as we both know, there is a huge amount of data exploitation happening when it comes to the building of data centers in Kenya, for example, and the lack of frameworks to properly control power, the large platforms are working in local economies such as that of Kenya or in other African countries, there’s a there’s basically no governance framework there whatsoever and that doesn’t get discussed enough.

And then of course the sort of the far-reaching consequences of the EU’s digital proposals, the so-called buses, in fact, but there are negatives negative externalities, which the Commission is is presumably becoming more aware of, but as more players from the global South get brought into the conversation and I think with Article 19, the European work is a very, very small piece because ultimately it’s a global organization which is working and protecting journalists in Mexico, Brazil, where arguably its work is more impactful, because then there’s a much greater need to do something now because of the actions of government, which tend to be more imposing themselves and the people in negative ways, which largely isn’t the case, and bar a few countries in in the EU.

00:24:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Do you think that’s a good aspect of, this is going to sound weird, of areas, of countries that do not have formal regulation in place? So do you think activists can do more in the jungle than in the urban centers where everything is written down and stamped and approved? And yeah, you have all these institutions that are supposedly there to help you, but in practice…

00:25:29 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah, it’s just an interesting question, what I suppose they can learn from the failures of… I mean do they have more opportunities to change things quicker? Possibly. Possibly. I mean, I’d have to think of an example.

00:25:56 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah, I mean just just looking at at everything that’s happened in in the last, 10 years, I remember a couple of instances where you had working in inside the EU or working to change the EU proposals but you’ve often realised that the length of the process, when you have the a very narrow window of impacting the legal frameworks or the regulatory process and then, you know, two years go by, three years go by and this law comes into power and then everybody’s like, wondering, yo, what’s this?

And then you go well, remember, like, three years back when you said it was nothing and we said it was a big thing and you should act on it then. Well, this is it, right?

So, I’m thinking the whole systemic legal, the length of the process sort of you know helps the bad guys to sort of have the upper hand while activists are battling from day-to-day and then realizing that OK, now we have 2 years of nothing before people realize what’s going on in the first place, right?

00:27:26 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Yeah. I mean, are you speaking to the the sort of speed of how things change? And then by the time it becomes law, it’s more or less, I wouldn’t say outdated, but less relevant than it might be?

00:27:36 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So there’s that, and there’s also the whole legal process or the regulatory framework process takes so much time that people lose attention in between or people stop following the issue and then realize after everything’s done that, whoops, this is something we should pay attention to two years ago.

00:28:00 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

I mean, I think it’s very hard to have a fast regulatory or a fast legal process, right? Because whatever one says about democratic deficits, I do think way the Parliament is structured and the various committees and the rapporteurs and the champions, I think it’s actually quite a good process.

I mean I think that the level of detail that one is forced to go into to have a provision the way you want it to be, I think it’s actually not bad. I think it’s just the trialogue process that really can become very deflating and I think again it sort of comes down to strong personalities who care about what we care about being in the position to push back against the Member States. And then of course, as the voting modalities, I mean in Council, it’s generally anonymity and then there’s this horse trading that’s done, for example, when Poland was in, was leaning towards an autocracy, you had it supporting Hungary at different junctures. And then of course when that starts happening that it reminds the initial piece of legislation.

So I think there are real changes that need to be made in voting modalities and how the trial logs operate. But I think as I said before, it’s it’s hard to envisage that happening.

00:29:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we wrap up and you’ve mentioned Poland and Hungary and this perfectly segues into the into the last piece of of the conversation. So, so you’ve mentioned it before the the European Media Freedom Act.

How’s that going? Yeah, in terms of, when will we or can we actually already see some movements in in this area regarding the effectiveness, the usefulness of this proposal or is this something that is again ruined, so to say, by the trilogue, by exemptions, by doing everything and nothing at the same time?

00:30:14 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

I think it’s the the eventual outcome certainly wasn’t what we as a civil society activists would have liked. I think for some, it’s a bit late. I think it will be interesting to see how the Commission reacts to what’s happening in Slovakia, because arguably it’s already acting against the spirit of the regulation, which is on the statute book, so it’s effectively… they need to be acting with the letter of the law, or at least the spirit of the regulation and they’re not.

So I think the Commission has to come down quite hard and fast to stop Slovakia going down the route of Hungary. I think it’s a piece of legislation, it was always going to be very difficult because you’re bringing together a huge number of actors and you’re regulating media in ways that you didn’t do before from a European level.

I think the juries out. I mean again… you have this new European Board of Media services, you’ve got a lot of responsibility on the national regulators, the Commission has to make sure that there’s a proper effective, well resourced secretariat in place to service the board and my understanding is that none of these are European level. There’s still a lot of institutional building to be done to make sure that all these are properly in place.

I honestly it’s difficult for me to say how this is going to work out, but I think it… on a very on a basic level, it’s good that it’s there, that the law is now is now in place and there are there are elements of law, like the Merger Assessment test, to retain plurality and make sure the media freedom stays in place and that mergers don’t just happen without other economic avenues being sought to make sure that this an independent media outlet can exist independently.

Uh, I think it’s great that they’re there, but it’s going to be interesting to see how such a complicated regulation can be properly enforced and again, the Commission has put itself in a position where it’s sort of in the eye of the storm.

That if these regulations which largely… they are there to protect democracy, particularly the Media Freedom Act, don’t work as intended, I think they’ll really end up undermining themselves in a big way. So again, if we have, with the impending elections and you’ve got a right leaning Parliame, at least these legislative pieces are there, but have you still got a right leaning Parliament and not strong leadership in the Commission, these won’t be particularly effective.

00:33:08 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah, this was actually going to be my wrap up question to this debate and it’s all very interesting so we’re coming into this, pre election or pre pre election cycle for the European Parliament and I was wondering to hear your thoughts on how should we, let’s say, as NGOs, but also maybe as as journalists or as media, as public opinion shapers, how should we frame the the issue of of digital rights?

What is the difference, talking about digital rights now compared to, let’s say, the last the last pre election pre election cycle that happened 2018, 2019?

So what should we change to sort of bring more impact to these topics and not just brush them away as “these are kids on TikTok topics”?

00:34:07 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

So I’m going to like, I feel quite strongly that the way over the last five years, digital has become even more… it’s become a much an even stronger part of our daily lives. It’s everywhere. I mean it’s remarkable how it’s intertwined in everything we do, and arguably it already was in 2019, but even more so now.

So for me, digital rights cannot be something that is apolitical, I think digital rights has to be has to become explicitly political and what do I mean by that?

I mean that if we look at what is happening in Gaza, if we look at the +972 media outlet article the other day about the use of AI when it comes to targeting civilians in Gaza, much of that AI was designed by platforms like Google.

There is a complete lack of accountability when it comes to the interaction of geopolitics and the platforms role in it. So I think that as digital rights activists, we have to start embracing the political implications of this and calling out the platforms for involving themselves in conflict, for example.

Because in conflict you’re taking sides, so these are not neutral actors and I think as digital rights activists, this is something we need to become much more involved in.

And yes, it’s more, it’s of course more sensitive and of course it has to be more nuanced, but I think that there’s a leadership role there to be taken by digital rights bodies and communities and at least having that conversation with geopolitical actors.

I think that for me, that’s the major gap that exists and that was for me that was very much highlighted when it came to what’s happening in Gaza.

00:36:07 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah, that sounds perfect, thank you Mark for the pleasure, this was this was really interesting, lovely to to talk to you. Best of luck going forward and hope to see you again sometime in person.

00:36:23 Mark Dempsey / Article 19

Thank you very much and pleasure. I really enjoyed this. And yeah, there’s lots we could talk about even further, of course. But yeah, see you next in Brussels.

Citizen D advice:* Politicize technology and digital services * Connect the individual active user with systemic safe-guards and authorities * Rethink the role of digital activists

More information:* Joanna Bryson: The Past Decade and Future of AI’s Impact on Society – pdf * Article19: Watching the Watchmen – pdf * Taming Big Tech: a pro-competitive solution to protect freedom of expression – pdf * When bodies become data: Biometric technologies and free expression – pdf

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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Alja Isakovič, razvijalka programske opreme in uporabniških procesov, se v zadnjem času posveča izzivom etičnega razvoja informacijske tehnologije in tehnološkemu okoljskemu odtisu ter poudarja aktivacijo posameznika in povezovanju v skupine za doseganje družbeno relevantnih ciljev.

V pogovoru se dotakneva tem vključevanja žensk v razvoj informacijske družbe, problemu tehnoloških revolucij, ki jedo svoje otroke, načneva pa tudi probleme gradnikov umetne inteligence, o pomanjkanju volje in moči posameznika ter lokalni aktivaciji ter razlogih za optimizem na temu področju.

Premišljujeva tudi o prihodnosti, evropskih volitvah ter politični komponenti tehnoloških tem, ki bi morale priti na tapeto novih odločevalcev.

Državljan D svetuje:* Potrebujemo več razprave o politični komponenti razvoja informacijske družbe * Pomembno vlogo igrajo razvijalci in programerji, ki lahko spremenijo dejanske poslovne prakse * Vedno bolj pomembno je povezovanje večih različnih panog

Dodatne informacije:* The Cult of AI: razmislek o kultu umetne inteligence in povezano Can Myth Teach Us Anything About the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence? With Josh Schrei o skoraj religioznih motivih tistih, ki zagovarjajo razvoj umetne inteligence za vsako ceno * These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI: o raziskovalkah, ki že leta opozarjajo o negativnih vplivih umetne inteligence in ceni, ki jo za to plačujejo v svoji karieri * AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think: pregled trenutnih negativnih vplivov umetne inteligence, z okoljskim vidikom na čelu * A polar bear cub is harmed every time you use ChatGPT: moj uvod v problematiko okoljskega vpliva umetne inteligence * AI Countergovernance: primeri, kako se lahko s skupnimi močmi upremo Black Mirror vizijam prihodnosti * Pathfinders Newmoonsletter: Tethix mesečnik, ki vsak mlaj posaja navdih za drugačne tehnološke prihodnosti

O podcastu:Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

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So človekove pravice zadnje orodje revnih proti finančno premožnejšimi elitami ali gre za vrednostni sistem, ki ga sprejemamo vsi udeleženci družbenega okolja?

Z direktorico Pravnega centra za varstvo človekovih pravic in okolja ter eno od pobudnic Pravne mreže za varstvo demokracije, Katarino Bervar Sternad smo se pogovarjali o logiki človekovih pravic, vlogi nevladnih organizacij, problemom delovanja v prid človekovim pravicam in poti v svetlo prihodnost.

Kakšna je situacija na področju človekovih pravic v Sloveniji in kakšne so razlike v primerjavi s tujino, kako so v Sloveniji pozicionirane nevladne organizacije in kaj je političen problem človekovih pravic?

Državljan D svetuje:* Človekove pravice morajo postati politični standard * Nevladne organizacije so tu zato, da držijo ogledalo odločevalcem in ne, da jih podpirajo * Preizpraševati je potrebno model financiranja nevladnih organizacij na področju zagovorništva

Dodatne informacije: PRIPOROČILO KOMISIJE (EU) 2023/2836 z dne 12. decembra 2023 o spodbujanju udejstvovanja in učinkovite udeležbe državljanov in organizacij civilne družbe v procesih oblikovanja javnih politik – povezava * Mnenje Evrospkega socialno-ekonomskega odbroa o podpori in financiranju civilne družbe na področju temeljnih pravic, pravne države in demokracije – povezava * Koalicijska pogodba 15. Vlade RS – dokument * Monitoring zavez vlade, Glas Ljudstva – povezava * Strateški svet za preprečevanje sovražnega govora izdal 57 priporočil vladi – članek * Evropski parlament nagradil slovensko Pravno mrežo za varstvo demokracije – članek*

O podcastu:Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

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Za začetek leta se z Urško Henigman, novinarko uredništva izobraževalnega, otroškega in mladinskega ter dokumentarno-feljtonskega programa na prvem programu nacionalnega radija pogovarjamo o medijski reprezentaciji spolnih praks v Sloveniji, ujetosti spolnosti med politiko, mediji in družbo ter o uredniških premislekih pri oblikovanju s spolnostjo povezanih medijskih vsebin.

Pogovor teče o zgodovini medijske reprezentacije spolnosti v Sloveniji, težavah z iz tujine plačanih aktivistov, ki spolnost spreminjajo v temo strankarske politike, o vsebinskih premislekih in potrebah občinstva na tem področju.

Kaj vse je spolnost, kako nastajajo s spolnostjo povezane medijske vsebine, kako pomemben je senzibiliziran novinar in zakaj je takih vsebin še vedno premalo?

Državljan D svetuje:* Spolnost je politična tema, o kateri je potrebno govoriti tudi skozi medije * Politično uokvirjanje spolnosti je delo interesnih skupin * Človekove pravice niso predmet večine, ki bi rada omejevala manjšino

Dodatne informacije: Evolucija užitka – podcast * Slovar spolne vzgoje – serija * Na pravi strani – podcast * Glasovi svetov – oddaja * Prvič – nova serija*

O podcastu:Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

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Claudio Agosti is a fellow researcher at the University of Amsterdam. He has a hacker background and security professional. He researches, implements, and promotes technology in the public interest. In the last decade, he addressed issues such as communication protection for whistleblowers, analysis of the web-tracking phenomenon, and algorithm analysis.

In 2019 he started to work with the ETUI Foresight Unit on research and training courses aimed at understanding the ‘technicalities’ behind Artificial Intelligence. Five years later, the ETUI is releasing a technical report which meticulously outlines the techniques used by researchers to observe the internal logic of the app used by riders in Italy and documents its actual behavior in terms of harvesting their personal data.

We sat down with Claudio to discuss his investigation, the consequences of unchecked share economy and the way forward.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:23 Domen Savič / Citizen D

OK, so welcome everybody. It’s the 8th of November 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of December 2023. With us today is Claudio Agosti, algorithms explorer and digital rights evangelist at the AI forensics NGO and the topic of today’s discussion is worker rights in the digital economy. So first of all, hello.

00:00:52 Claudio Agosti

Hello and thank you people of the future.

00:00:56 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Let’s start with the quick recap of the report. It’s titled “Exercising workers rights in algorithmic management system”. What does that mean? What was the topic of the report? What did you investigate and what were some of the findings?

00:01:15 Claudio Agosti

Thank you. The report, it talks about a story, an investigation that began in 2019. I founded a project Tracking exposed. That was a project meant to do algorithm analysis, and we were analyzing platforms of social media or of Amazon and other web platforms. But I get in touch with the Aida of the European Trade Union Institute because I met her at the privacy camp, the event organized every year in in Brussel to put together privacy folks and other people considered on this right. And she was fascinated about our approach to analyze algorithms because it’s a black box analysis.

And it was in 2019 we met. I started to collaborate with that institution to teach a bit to trade unions how they should be skeptical of the apps that run on the, let’s say, on the riders phones, to organize their work, because those apps may violate certain kind of privacy rights or also some kind of labour rights.

Initially it was just an insight, an intuition, but only in 2020 or let’s say around the time we start to try to make some investigation. And through that we approach it in two ways. The first was making a survey, a set of questions that were meant for riders, to understand if they felt that the techniques that the technology that organize their work was discriminating on them, that’s because if you want to use some, if you want to bring it to court a company, you need to have evidence that this company did something bad, and the evidence of the violations.

In the other path instead, we were doing analysis that was only technical. So, try to do the best engineering of an app, but to do a reverse-engineering of a rider app you need to have a login and password of a rider because the app starts to execute and do all the potential privacy leakage or the surveillance of the worker only if you log in properly and we needed to find a rider willing to share and a login and password, and that was particularly difficult. We also tried to subscribe ourselves to be rider, but we did not get accepted. I don’t know if it was because of the place we were living.

But after 18 months and that’s this huge amount of time… So one of the important cost of this investigation that could have been reduced and will be reduced in the future, but after 18 months, we found a person willing to share those logins and passwords. So we set up a mechanism and this methodology that initially was some static analysis by Exodus privacy, which is an online service. I suggest you consult because it shows by doing static analysis how many known trackers are present in every mobile app.

Then we meet them, a proxy is a software that allow you to intercept the traffic that the app is performing to the outside, and then with the freedom is a system that allows to run the application on a sort of special environment, where the calls made to the system can be intercepted and recorded or modified and in that way we can observe when the app was actually accessing to the GPS or to other peripherical. So, with these three methods we start to observe how the app was behaving and we start to realize that.

As first was revealing, the location of the worker, even outside of the working shift. The second is that inside of the communication, about the profiles, so we were intercepting traffic and inside of this communication between the app and the global infrastructure you were seeing that some requests were made by the app to understand who’s the rider that is using the app, and so you are seeing the profile and the information tied to this profile. And then there were other requests more focused on getting new orders.

Inside of the profile of the rider, there was a present. A score. That’s it. I mean, it was not the number you could have expected in the sense that official League Global acknowledged the existence of an excellent score. And we realized that the excellent score was a different score. So therefore, there was a hit then scoring mechanism present or let’s say present in this communication, then how it was used by the app.

But infrastructure, we don’t know. But that’s was an evidence that even if it’s not that surprising for a Labor Unionist, it’s very important to have this evidence because Labor unionists in the past hugged, they requested that the worker should not be subjected to, let’s say, the vote or it can be subject to the vote, but the voting that they get from the customer should not impact their ability to win.

And that is part of the labour right. It’s not that your worker can stop because someone starts to vote you poorly, even if this seems to be a standard in the online market, because it’s normal for me when I buy something I don’t know on eBay to check the task worthless.

The seller is not OK that uh, if uh, your life and your work depend on a system.

Someone can game this system and start to downvote you and make you suffer a loss of business. And last but not least, we saw that there were also third parties not declared in the contracts or in the privacy policy that we’re getting all this information about the user profile and their location and everything that we’re doing in the app. So, you click it here and you move this panel where you were when this happened.

How much you are moving in that moment, all those kinds of detailed information were given to third parties, that’s, is another problem. But I don’t want to keep reassuming it, there is the report that is a 60 page long and there is also a video of 50 minutes around with me and Joanna that talks about it and you can find it on the website https://www.reversing.works because tracking exposed the project that I mentioned before closed this year and it became two different projects, one is AI forensics. The one you mentioned that carry on the algorithm analysis toward the influential algorithm.

So we look at TikTok and being chart and the language model. So some part of the algorithm analysis is carried on by forensics, reversing works focus more on the impact of algorithm and surveillance capitalism in worker rights. So this kind of effort is captured by this different group and the website reversing works contain also more reference about this report.

00:10:08 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So in your investigation you’ve investigated one app and one company basically on one market, right? So how fair would be the assumption that other providers of these types of services and the same providers in different markets? Are they using the same, let’s say, tactic, social scoring, hidden grades and so forward. Do you think it’s this? Is this limited to 1 market or is it present everywhere?

00:10:43 Claudio Agosti

I believe there are insights that make us assume this is a frequent condition because one sided analytics third parties are in between offering analytic service to them. So showing how the app is actually used, but they’re also tied to the marketing campaign, so they use the data collected this way to resell them in the advertisement or don’t know customers certification or brand analysis market…

This is still part of surveillance capitalism in the sense that for me, if you install a third party that monitors my behavior and uses this information to make a product out of it, that is the exact definition of surveillance capitalism.

And those companies, let’s say user the offering of analytics or other analysis services as a reason to be in the device. And that’s, I believe, a phenomenon that is present in many apps. The exodus privacy website that I was mentioning can allow you to inspect which trackers are present on the app and then this tracker in all the apps is present and that can give you an idea on how this phenomenon is very widespread.

This phenomenon is wide spread in the market and the problem for me is when this also has an impact on an app that you have to use to do your work because you are not a user but you are a worker. So worker rights apply to you and not just to the service. So because those apps are born under the surveillance capitalist Internet is fair to assume that this behavior is quite spread.

Then not all the apps have the same amount of trackers, all of them, or let’s say all the one I checked have a heavy presence of Google services, so there is some Google infrastructure that run together with the company infrastructure and the Google infrastructure also receives a large amount of personal data. Now we can talk about Google and the current EU US privacy agreement. But that is a different topic.

Other kind of behavior like secret scoring or other kind of discrimination are all part of the business optimization that made the economy effective and now is the time for the worker and for the labor union. And also for the regulators to be updated on how this problem is affecting the population and perhaps make better regulation because we cannot expect someone that start to make a tool that to optimize and the delivery and use this tool on different continents of the world. Only if it’s force, we start to implement a different policy, a different regulation and perhaps something more protective for riders rights.

In a specific country only if it’s forced, at the moment they are not yet forced. That’s why I assume what happen in a market also happen in all the market where this app is present.

00:14:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we move on to the topic of workers’ rights. I just want to ask a follow-up question. So, this app is workers or writer specific, right? So, it’s not the same app as it is when you know consumers are using it, I’m guessing, right?

00:14:45 Claudio Agosti

Correct, this is a different app and it requires login and password.

00:14:51 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So my question is, would you say the consumer app is using similar, let’s say strategy and approaches to getting more information about their users than it says on the label, so to speak?

00:15:08 Claudio Agosti

I believe that, uh, in the consumer app this is granted and that is also written in the fine print.

Because in excuse privacy, you realize how the, UM, analytics, uh and a marketing campaign is the same that is present in the Courier app. So, it’s really a third party that is collecting data from couriers and from consumer in the consumer you have this term of service when you create your account. Let’s say we’re going to use your location because they must deliver food to you and therefore when you have the app open, it’s normal that they know your location and they’re going to study what you consume. So let’s say it’s not surprising that this is happening. This is, let’s say, more justified as a way to give you a service is that for the for the rider that your location is surveyed outside of the working shift, that is not justified.

00:16:11 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Mm-hmm… and what was the reaction of the unions. You’ve mentioned you’ve cooperated with workers unions on this on these issues. What are they worried about this? Are they paying attention? Is this a topic that they are, let’s say, actively pursuing?

00:16:34 Claudio Agosti

Partially, in the sense that I tried to work with the Union and explain how that was a potential problem, but they don’t have those kinds of technical skills. That’s why we started to make analysis independently to show that there was evidence and potential then because you have also to think how your finding can have an impact and we went to that protection authority.

In 2021, we start to collaborate with a lawyer, but this lawyer took two years to present a complaint and this complaint initially was rejected by the Italian authority because the data were too old and we show that the version of the app was changing nearly every week. They initially rejected this application.

This summer, after this rejection, we made a test and instead of making a legal filing that was articulating potential violation. We just submitted a technical analysis and that allowed us to make the analysis and report in one week. This has been accepted. So now there is an investigation open in the election authority in Italy. Why is important because in 2021 are related from our investigation, the authority already fined global for 2,000,000€ as they did not have our insights, but they had other kind of insights because they were running an investigation, they proceeded as official, which is the authority can investigate on what they want because they feel it’s important and because in 2019 the Italian Government, the Labour Ministry, was making some high-level agreements with the rider company, then that artists are to make some investigation to verify how much they were compliant and in 2021 that investigation was concluded and the fault global faulty of many different reasons.

Interestingly, Glovo appealed and in 2022 and the judge said to Glovo, you don’t have to pay the fine because it’s too high, but the authority not only issued the fine, but also requested many remedies.

The solution is that the app stopped to be abusive that the true solution and the global apparently ignored all this remediation because we were doing our technical analysis in this time and we were seeing that the problem was still present.

Now I know after we submit our technical evidence this July, at the end of September, the Constitutional Court comment on the appeal and revert it and say the “No, no Glovo, you have to pay the fine.” So now after two years they use the global how to pay the fine, how to implement remediation 2 years ago and that there is an investigation in progress that showed that they did not implement this remediation and there were more problems than before. So we tried to use GDPR to enforce labor rights, and that’s even if for us price activist seems to be a linear behavior for labor union.

It’s not because normally a labor union protects collective rights and they go to defend the rider in a different strategy. They want to have their contract be fair, and then the company can do the business they want as long as the work is stated fairly. What we want to argue is that if you want to talk about power dynamics in the modern work environment, you need to understand how the technology works because it’s in the technology that the power will be exerted. So it’s not just enough to protect the contractual obligation and the agreements.

And so it’s a new thing for the labor law labor union thing that GDPR or privacy right can be used in in this collective frame and that’s why it has been a bit complex initially to engage with them. At the moment we don’t have any kind of active projects with unions yet. We are trying to show that they need to be trained to learn about this and show that this problem is present in every European country. So now is the replication and scalability of this experiment. That is our goal at harvesting works.

00:21:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D

You’ve mentioned GDPR. Do you think the current European legal frameworks in this area, the Digital Service Act, the Digital Markets Act, all this that is coming up or has come up in, the past few years. Do you think these are effective legal tools to pursue these types of privacy abuses.

00:22:07 Claudio Agosti

I will relay only in GDPR. The Digital Service act or also the currently debated platform worker directive, they may offer additional tools, but the digital service act is not meant for those that kindplication and services and also I don’t know yet I did not make a full assessment on what are the new legal tool that we have in our ability to speculate how we can use them for worker rights.

At the moment GDPR is already giving to us a lot of tools and there are many parts that can be explored. One of the experiments that we made was also to use data subject access request because if you start to get data about you, you can start to understand what is preserved and based on what you get about.

Based on what you get some service offered or not, and those form of transparency, they should be more enforced by the Platform Worker Directive, but this directive needed to be as first need to be completed in this cycle.

And at the moment the trialogue is stuck between the contract or obligation so should be there either be a full-time employee with some contractual agreement that protects them or not. That is where the focus of the trialogue is. There are some articles that talk about algorithmic transparency and possibility of oversights, and those articles need to be translated in national law.

I believe there will be some potential of lobbying in that phase because algorithmic transparency is something that nobody ever saw. If you look at what Instagram does, for example, is making a blog post, let’s say algorithm works in this way but but for me algorithm transparency means that every time I get something assigned, I know based on what and even if I get excluded by something, I need to know why.

When I’m doing some activity I should be aware if this has an impact or not on my ability to work in the close future. So transparency means full accountability, full control and the constant feedback between what the app record about you and how this will impact your life and you see this spectrum is not defined in the regulation need to become part of the demands at work. Also, perhaps the labor union, should also promote those kinds of demands because they can be part of the collective bargain. At the moment it’s not, that is why the fight for algorithmic transparency, if not for more control, is still to be thought, and the current regulation help enough, and really, even without new regulation, we have to explore many paths that GDPR gives us.

And uh, more than having privacy activists exploring those regulation, these matters we have a strategy that is with the labor union is with other representative of the gig economy workers is with the worker itself.

00:25:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Hmm, I’m asking because the election year is coming up in the in the European Union or in the Europen parliament and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the, let’s say, the media representation of these types of issue. Is this a topic that is being discussed in the media reporting? The reason I’m asking is at least in Slovenia, the political decision-making processes and the media reporting go hand in hand, right? The politicians are usually picking up topics they want to represent or they want to address in, let’s say the Parliament or in their work based on the amount of media reporting.

So if an issue isn’t reported enough or isn’t reported regularly, then the politicians are saying, OK, I’m not going to get any brownie points for addressing this issue so they just don’t, and I’d like to hear your thoughts or your analysis of situation in Italy in this field.

00:27:12 Claudio Agosti

Well, it’s quite weak in the sense that we had some coverage when we raised the report and section of the GGL, which is one of the important labor unions, talk about it and organized a strike in Milan where the riders were asking for algorithmic transparency.

So that was the cyberpunk moment when the actual last layer of the pyramid demanded algorithmic transparency. But besides that, that event, this topic is not touched, not discussed, maybe because privacy or general data processing is abstract and it’s not that compelling. It’s not that seen as a as a problem and the media did not catch up.

It’s different in Spain. In Spain there is El Diario, a media outlet that is dedicated to cover a lot of the rider issues. But that’s also because Glovo is there and there are other companies that developed the gig economy based in Madrid or somewhere else in Spain.

And then there is the layer rider, so theydedicated the law that protects more labor rights in the economy. So let’s say Spain was a bit more advanced in the public debate, and that has also converted these demands into a better regulation. So what you say is, is correct. Perhaps if there is more coverage that will be also more progress in in labor rights, but at the moment in Italy we don’t have a government that care too much about this topic, yeah. Other countries I’m not that aware of special movements.

00:29:16 Domen Savič / Citizen D

The reason I’m asking is exactly because we’re slowly wrapping up and I’m trying to wrap up these discussions in, in a sort of looking into the future, right? So what would be an effective way to to address these issues going forward? We need more cooperations between privacy, digital activists and trade unions. Do we need better journalistic training in this regard, to sort of, you know, hone the journalistic sensibilities around this issue so they’ll be able to write about them, to investigate them?

Do we need better regulators so that, you know, activists and other players in this field from a non-government sector will basically stop worrying about the atomic bomb because it will be regulated well enough. Is it all of the above?

00:30:13 Claudio Agosti

Yeah, a bit all of the above especially have to say also in the privacy activism sector, despite in theory, those problem have been looked they were not considered different from any other privacy. Instead, they can give to us more tools, because if surveillance, privacy evaluation, sorry, affects regulation, a law that protects riders, that’s sorry workers and this law is stronger than others, then is a legal tool that you can use for social privacy improvement.

So this path has not been that explored and also when I try to advocate for it or pitching to some to some grantor, let’s say very few are keen on this idea, especially grantor that came from the US, never saw the labour rights as something important and most of their accountability effort is focused toward this information or other form of platform accountability

Labour has not been a compelling keyword, even in our sector of activism now, I hope it will be how we can help that I believe improving the amount of evidence is through that we made an analysis by involving one rider in one app in one nation, but that can be easily replicated.

We understood what were this low point like finding a rider and to give to us login and password and the legal filing instead of filing a legal analysis, we can just provide the technical assessment to the authority and then they have the legal expert that will make a case out of it.

So now that we identify the two slow points, we can train other technologists to do this kind of reverse engineering trainer, union unionist or rather advocate to do at least superficial analysis and understand what’s potentially problematic and talk more to the workers. But I mean it’s clear that a worker that has already the problem of working for an app perhaps is not that interested in the technical analysis of that app? Is a kind of reporting and analysis that requires a lot of technical information or a lot of abstract thinking on how this affects society, how these affects your ability and your autonomy, and be a worker. Now at the end, the algorithmic influence is not a problem that is compelling as other physical problems. It is a quite abstract problem and we’re still there. That’s why, for example, there is a documentary that I forget the name now, but I will offer you the link.

It’s a documentary produced by some colleague in Herman Center. They are part of Europe media initiative in Italy that investigates the gig economy, and they made a documentary that, for example, interview a a worker, and they asked her, so what do you feel about the algorithm? And she honestly answers, what is the algorithm?

I mean at the end they should just get order in an app, and explaining what there is behind the scenes which impact, which power has that is not that granted for us. That’s why the privacy advocate I believe are the community that more easily can start to catch up and eventually give us some thought and effort in this domain. But thelarge-scalee communication has a lot of complexity.

00:34:33 Domen Savič / Citizen D

That’s true. And just one more, one more question, since you brought it up several times during the discussion. It’s basically… we always try to question the idea of this empowered user, because this what’s basically is sold to us by the, you know, app providers, by the tech industry that says. you know, we provide, or they provide all the information and the user must decide for himself or herself, what does she want and what she doesn’t, or he doesn’t want, right?

It’s also in the GDPR. So, the GDPR is focusing on the personal capabilities of a user to be responsible for his or her data. And, you know to worry about it and to have tools that help her or him, you know, use the data, delete the data, remove the data, check the data and so forward.

But on the other hand, as you mentioned, the users, they’re not all super users, right? They’re not going to be very invested in this investigative work, reverse algorithm, type of dealings. So, do you think we need more emphasis on collective protection?

So, you’ve mentioned privacy activists as a possible solution, also an establishment of, let’s say a government body like the Information Commissioner or the Data Protection Authority to focus particularly or specifically on the algorithms on the decision-making systems that are running, you know, behind the behind the curtains to sort of, you know, speed up the process of addressing these issues in real time.

00:36:22 Claudio Agosti

You talk about workers or every algorithm?

00:36:24 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Generally, but yeah, we can focus on workers, yes.

00:36:28 Claudio Agosti

Because for workers, in theory the body that protects the situation that protects workers, interest and rights should be the trade union and the problems that they are not updated on the new challenges perhaps?

That shows if you want the institution that were established when Internet arrive have not caught up and this, we know it because we saw how certain kind of privacy regulation arrived 15 years after the beginning of the surveillance capitalism. But uh, but some institutions are even, uh, tougher to change and to update themselves and the Labour Union seems to be one of the most traditional ones.

And I would hope that these algorithms or these logics should be transparently communicated to the worker and to the Union so they can oversee and agree on what is in their best interest for everybody. We are far from it and regulation may go in this direction, but it needs to be mostly a cultural shift. You need to have a worker asking for it, and you need to also to understand what is better for you.

Because I think this example, if I just made a delivery and I have to bike for 30 minutes, would be fairer for me if I stopped for 5 minutes to take breath or because I’m on my working shift I should optimize and do as much as delivery I can?

So what is the logic? The algorithm implementation is also something that is thinking how to better optimize the time of the worker and how to better offer the services. But what is better for the rider? Does the rider have ever had the opportunity to ask for it, or do the rider have a special interface that say, OK, today I’m working, but I don’t feel that well, so please, slow pace or today I’m working and I want to make as much money as possible, so please give me all the difficult deliveries. So those are not the options that have been ever discussed but that’s if happen is a sign of our society that actually understands the new power dynamics, understands how they’re implemented and has all the actors that equally speak and ask their demands.

We are far from it, but that is what I hope to see.

00:39:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Fingers crossed. Thank you, Claudio or I guess the final call to action would be to update the trade unions that that would be. That would be a good start. Thank you so much, Claudio, for sitting down with us. Best of luck with your future endeavors. This was a Citizen D podcast episode, we publish an episode every month, so we’ll see you next time.

Citizen D advice:* Workers rights need an update related to the information society * Privacy is not a commodity * The globality of surveillance capitalism needs to be tackled locally

More information: Exercising workers rights in algorithmic management systems – Lessons learned from the Glovo-Foodinho digital labour platform case – report * AI talks @ ETUI: Algorithmic management – event * AlgorithmWatch in Italy – reports*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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We sat down with Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law with a Master’s Degree in Library Science and Legal Information Management.

Professor Lamdan works with immigration groups on government surveillance issues, with library advocacy organizations on open access and researcher privacy projects, and with open government advocates on federal records preservation and access initiatives.

She recently wrote a book called Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information that is focusing on the issues of internet feudalism, data monopolies and solutions to these issues. You guessed it – this will be the topic of our conversation.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody. It is the 25th of September 2023, but you are listening to this podcast of Citizen D on the 15th of November 2023. With us today is Sarah Lamdan, professor of law with a master’s degree in library science and legal information management.

Professor Lamdan works with immigration groups on government surveillance issues, library advocacy organizations on Open Access and research and privacy projects, and with open government advocates on federal records preservation and access initiatives.

She recently authored a book called Data Cartels, the companies that control and monopolize our information and you guessed it, this will be the topic of our conversation, Professor lent and welcome. Welcome to the show.

00:00:56 Sarah Lamdan

Hi, it’s great to be here.

00:00:59 Domen Savič / Citizen D

It’s such an interesting read and it’s such a great topic to discuss because you start with the issue of open data, of data cartels, of companies that control and monopolize our information from a very, I should even say, personal experience. So I would like to know, to get us going, what was the reason you developed an interest in this topic and how did you go about how did you go about researching it.

00:01:28 Sarah Lamdan

Those are two really good questions. So to answer the first question, I kind of fell into this topic by chance. In a way, I’m kind of the ideal person to write about it, cause I didn’t come in with any sort of agenda. I was a law professor and also I’m a librarian, so I deal a lot with information access and informational resources.

And I actually saw in the news that a lot of our research providers in the United States were vying to work with our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, so ICE. And I’m not sure how it’s viewed across the world, but in the United States, especially in 2017, when I first started digging into this issue, ICE was problematic.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in the United States was known as committing human rights abuses. Basically, separating families at the border, putting children in cage like enclosures and just doing all sorts of really icky gross things. So working with ICE wasn’t positive, right? It wasn’t about helping immigration agency reunite families or help people ascertain citizenship, it was really about human rights issues.

So I became very interested in why our research providers were working with ICE and what they were giving ICE and I started asking, you know, I started asking our research vendors at the school that I worked what is your company doing with ice? And I asked in my professional organization, the American Association of Law Libraries what exactly is Lexus, our main research provider and Westlaw, our main research provider. How exactly are their companies working with ICE?

And instead of getting the answers, I got kind of censored, the American Association of Law Libraries wouldn’t allow me to ask that question on their web pages and at my law school, my vendors became very agitated when I asked them about about their work with ICE.

I wasn’t getting answers and that’s really what started the research process behind data cartels and kind of all the research I’ve uncovered then. And really what came after that even-though I’m an academic, the research process for digging up those connections that I described in the book, it was almost journalistic. It was almost more of an investigative reporting type of research where I was trying to look at corporate filings and advertising and what work that other journalists had done to connect the dots between our research products and government data brokering and surveillance, which is what I uncovered ultimately.

00:04:44 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Do you have any reasons… you mentioned in the book and you just mentioned the journalistic way of researching the topic, it seems that on one side there’s let’s say a fair amount of information on these systems in the public, you just have to find a way to get it, at the same time or on the opposite side people, as you’ve mentioned just now, are very are being very obtuse about it in terms of, you know, they’re not giving you answers and stuff. How do you reason those two extremes? Why do you think there’s such a such a code of silence related to to these systems in, in, in academia and in a broader society?

00:05:31 Sarah Lamdan

That’s a good question. So I think most of it is obtuse for kind of public relations reasons. I don’t think that Reed Elsevier, Lexus Nexis or Thomson Reuters or any of the other entities that are doing government surveillance… I don’t think… let me turn the negative into a positive. I do think that these companies recognize that the public generally doesn’t like to be surveilled by the government and that the work it’s doing with government agencies probably doesn’t have a good public relations base. It doesn’t look good.

So the companies themselves are purposely obtuse about the work that they’re doing with the government, in fact. I work with a bunch of organizations that do legal work around these issues, and they’ve actually in the United States found that American agencies actually have non-disclosure provisions in their contracts with Lexis Nexis that prohibit government agencies from discussing their contracts so they recognize it.

They they know that the public doesn’t think it’s great that they’re working with ICE or that they’re sharing information with the FBI or the, you know, or other government agencies. It doesn’t look good and I think one of the reasons in academia that we feel a lot of discomfort around this topic… I think there are two reasons. I think the first is that we recognize how much we depend on Elsevier in science, direct and you know all of the other products that these companies provide us, we need them, right?

We need to have good working relationships with Elsevier in order to get contracts in order to make sure that our academics get their work in the right journals, right? So it’s important for us and for all librarians and for our administrative staff and to work with these.

And also the other reason. The other reason is that we don’t know a lot about what is going on in these companies, right. And more information about that is starting is to come out. And when it does, people like me or brands or everybody else who kind of does work in this area, we tend to get a lot of push-back from the companies. We get nasty letters from them in the mail. They call our deans and our and people in our academic institutions to to tell them that we are spreading rumors or false information.

So it can be kind of scary for an academic who stand up to these companies without a lot of backing from their institutions or their professional groups.

00:08:37 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So in your book and in the debate around data cartels.. you have, let’s call them two sides, right? You have government agencies, government institutions, public institutions that are buying or that are using these data sets that are working with these private companies, essentially, that are putting together these data sets. So who do you think started this, should we say the ball rolling?

Is it the government coming to individual or independent companies, saying OK, we need that. Can you provide that or was it the other way around? Was it the public private companies putting together these data sets and asking or, you know, pitching this to the government saying “I’m sure you could find a way to use this?”

00:09:32 Sarah Lamdan

That’s also a good question. I’m going to say that after every question cause they’re all good questions, but the that question just got an entire book answering it, so one of my favorite journalists who writes about data analytics companies, his name is Mackenzie Funk, his book is coming out, I think in the next few weeks. It’s called the Hank Show and it’s actually about the man who created these data analytics systems and it’s it’s a really fascinating story, I urge everybody to go out and get The Hank show, it is from Saint Martin’s press, it’s coming out I believe at the end of this month or maybe next month, so keep your eye out for it.

But in the book he describes how the data analytics systems were created actually in the private sector. They were created in Florida by this man, jh created a company called Citizen and Citizen became Matrix and after September 11th, the man who created these systems, named Hank Asher, actually decided to market terrorism prediction products or products that would predict who is more likely of committing a “terrorist act”, he took that product to the White House, to the government and sold it to them so I think that that is kind of the system that these companies have been working on ever since.

They create these predictive policing systems, these predictive fraud systems, these predictive you know, they predict all sorts of different things, who might default on a loan, who might be a bad tenant, who might be a good employee, right, who might be an insurance risk. So they they create all these systems and then they market them to health insurance providers, to auto insurance providers, to ICE, to the FBI, to, you know, any government agency, Social Security, Administration, IRS.

All of these are examples of agencies that use predictive systems that that companies like these built. So I think that these systems are created in the private sector and then marketed to the public sector as easy solutions, and then they’re very appetizing to a public sector that can use algorithmic solutions and hiring more investigators and hiring more people, which is more expensive, more time, you know, it takes more time for a human to do investigatory work than for an IRS agent to just press a button and pull up a hot list of, you know, the 10 most likely fraudsters or what have you.

Fraudsters is an adjective that Lexis/Nexis uses, so I like to use because I think it’s just like… they they find fraudsters. But the government finds it appealing to use these, you know, easy algorithmic digital seemingly miraculous solutions instead of hiring more agents and, you know, doing more expensive things and more time consuming things.

00:12:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D

If we go step back and we leave the issue of the government buying these systems, how will the government effectually regulate them? That’s that’s a spoiler for later on but let’s start at the beginning. So why are data cartels bad for consumers or in citizens cause cause usually when you ask the government or you ask these companies, they go exactly the way you went.

So they’re talking about, you know, effectiveness improving the work process, the finding, you know, a needle in a haystack. So they don’t talk about about the negative things while your book is basically just, you know negative and I would like to know why. Why is there such a discrepancy and what are some of the bad consequences that that derive from from the these these data cartels that are that are all over the place.

00:13:53 Sarah Lamdan

Right. Yeah. It’s funny. People assume that I’m, you know, a Luddite or that I hate technology based on the things I describe in Data cartels. But I don’t. I I wish that these products were as efficient and miraculous as they reported. Unfortunately in their current form they are not and that’s kind of that’s what I described in my book.

So a lot of the problems are problems around, you know, algorithmic bias and biased data sets, but I’m not an algorithm expert. I’m not a technologist. I’m a librarian, so I always direct people to other authors and other books about algorithmic integrity and algorithmic biases. You could read any work by Ruha Benjamin, by Safiya Umoja Noble, Kathy O’Neill… there’s a lot of really great work out there and research out there that describes why it is problematic for government entities to rely on algorithmic solutions for ranking people and sorting how risky people are, right?

And there are also a lot of books out there about the problems with our data sets, you know, like Victoria Eubanks wrote a book called, I think it’s called Algorithms of inequality… I’m looking back at my bookshelf trying to find it, but about you know how law enforcement data sets tend to disproportionately have certain types of demographic data in them and certain communities are over-represented in in law enforcement data sets, right? So both algorithms and data sets tend to be biased.

What my book focuses on and what I feel safe discussing as a librarian without falling into unknown territory for myself is the fact that there are a few companies that have swallowed up and now control a lot of our informational resources right? So what I focus on is why it is harmful that Lexis/Nexis for example which is part of the company, Reed Elsevier, Lexis/Nexis. Why this one company or how this one company came to dominate so many of our informational markets and why that’s a problem.

And I use Reed Elsevier, Lexis/Nexis, as my example not to pick on the company, but because they are so uniquely massive. So usually if I’m doing a presentation I have this slide where I show that Reed Elsevier Lexis/Nexis in the United States dominates the legal information market, right?

In the United States if you want to do legal information research, research or you want to look at legal information you have to subscribe to either Thompson orders Westlaw or Lexis/Nexis Lexus research platform. Those are the only two really only two competitive games in town. Those are the gold standard of legal research in the United States.

If you’re an academic and you either want to publish or do research, you have to have access to Elsevier and you have to have access to Elsevier Science direct platform, right? And if you want to assess how you’re doing as a researcher, how impactful you are as a researcher, you have to use Elsevier Scopus or you know your data somehow has to feed through Elsevier academic data analytics systems or you have to use Clarivate, which is the really the only major competitor to Elsevier in the academic data analytics sector, Lexis/Nexis, boasts the one of the largest news archives in the world, so media and news information is another market where Lexis/Nexis Reed dominates.

Financial information, so information called for from public sector like SEC fillings, financial fillings that companies are required to submit to the government and also news about financial institutions… Lexis/Nexis has kind of a…is part of an oligopoly of companies that that control that information.

And I feel like I’m forgetting one of the markets here…oh, and also this is the most creepy one, right? It turns out that Lexis/Nexis is also one of the biggest personal information providers, one of the biggest personal information holders and personal information data brokers in the world.

Right, so they have all of our personal data too, and what the company does is it doesn’t just stay in those unique sectors. Academic information, legal information, financial information, personal data. Lexis/Nexis has found a way in multiple ways to use all of those different datasets and combine them to make new informational assets, to make new “data analytics products” that mix and match those types of data – our personal data with data about our academic success, our personal data with news information, our personal data with legal information and all of that data is kind of mixed and mashed and “crunched”. It’s put through data analytics systems, machine learning systems, you know various algorithms to create new unique information types that then Lexis/Nexis can sell for even more money, right?

That’s where our predictive policing products come, our predictive insurance products, our legal analytics and academic analytics products come from.

00:19:51 Domen Savič / Citizen D,

Hmm. But, you know, speaking as a devil’s advocate, I would go and say, you know, if you did nothing wrong, if you have nothing to hide, then these data sets that are then brought up by ICE, by police, by other other agencies, they don’t concern you, right? So what’s wrong with police having all of this data at their fingertips to sort of, you know, fight crime and other illegal activities?

00:20:23 Sarah Lamdan

Absolutely. That’s a really good question, right? And I think in an ideal world where there is no algorithmic or data error or bias, I think that that’s a really good question to ask. Like how how amazing would it be to have a digital data fueled product that would make policing perfect, and that would maybe eliminate bias in academia by really using proven data to to determine which types of research are the most important and which types of research should be funded, and then in a perfect world, these products might really be miraculous, right? In fact, one of the things that Mackenzie Funk heard about in the beginning of the Hank Show is how Hank Ashers matrix product actually identified 5 of the people who planned the September 11th attacks before law enforcement even knew who they were. That’s miraculous, that is amazing in a moment where there has been some sort of horrible crime committed, to know immediately who committed the crime.

Fantastic. The problem, unfortunately, is in our current system, we still have the problems that that the algorithmic bias problems and the data bias problems that Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Umoja Noble and Ruhab Benjamin and all of the other kind of critics of our current AI systems have unearthed those problems. Whether we want to acknowledge them or not, they are present, right now, our algorithms are imperfect. We don’t exactly know how they work and we do know that they tend to be biased and we actually… one of the things that my book focuses on a lot because although I’m not, like I said, I’m not an algorithmic expert, I do know a lot about, you know, information assets and information.

A lot of the information that Lexis/Nexis and companies like Lexis/Nexis use, are erroneous right now, right. One of the articles that I point to a lot, is an expose in Newsweek called, I think it’s something about how Lexis/Nexis, how, when Lexis/Nexis makes a mistake, it hurts you … and the article is basically a bunch of interviews with people who have been harmed because Lexis/Nexis has incorrect data about them in their systems.

There is an example of a woman who gets locked out of her own bank account because her sister is having credit problems, but in Lexis/Nexis’s data set her sister’s data is combined with her data, and so she gets locked out of her bank account. There’s a story of a man who has the same name as a completely different person, the other person has insurance issues, this man doesn’t, but because this man’s data is conflated with that other man’s in Lexis/Nexis, he can’t get auto insurance.

So you run into problems like this again and again and again, and the more when an insurance company uses the wrong data about your or it has erroneous data about you. That’s annoying, right? You can’t get the insurance you want.

But when your landlord, when your when your landlords tenant screening product, this is Lexis/Nexis, you might not be able to get housing, right. There’s a whole expose in the I think it’s the Texas Observer about how people get blacklisted getting apartment from getting a roof over their head because Lexis/Nexis has erroneous data about them, right?

And then that becomes even more harmful when law enforcement uses that data, right, you can get arrested because your name is the same as somebody else’s name, right? Or because Lexis/Nexis another person drivers license conflated with yours in their system and that becomes really problematic so until we can ensure that the data about us is correct in these systems and that the algorithms aren’t biased in these systems I still have a lot of concern about us using these systems.

00:24:47 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah, and do you see that happening in the future? Like when you usually debate around these topics and you have like representatives from an industry or decision makers, they usually go “Well yeah you know, no system is perfect. These are glitches. We’re ironing them out.” Do you see that happening or do you see us as a species, to be a bit dramatic, coming into a situation where we have, you know, the perfect data set, the perfect algorithm, the perfect automated decision making system and the perfect result in the end?

00:25:23 Sarah Lamdan

That’s a good question and I mean, I will… I wanna before I even answer that hypothetical, I will also point out, like humans are innately biased, right?

The reason that there’s so much data bias in law enforcement data is because for you know, for over a century, our law enforcement agency has been doing things that are are racist and otherwise, you know biased and prejudice, right? So humans have their own… I don’t, I don’t want to pretend that like the perfect system is already in place and that is the human system.

There are problems with the human systems as well, so I just wanted to put that in the world, because that’s an important thing to recognize. Our systems are also problematic and I do mean, yes, if we treated data systems with the care that they warrant, with the care that they deserve, I do, I could envision a future where we have these systems in place and they aren’t biased, but I think a couple things that we’re missing right now that we’d have to put into place are… OK, so one of the main things we would have to put into place, it is more transparency.

Right now I can’t see what my data dossier looks like in Lexis/Nexis, even if because I live in New York State. So even if New York State and my local law enforcement agency is using Lexis/Nexis to determine whether I might commit a crime or whether I have committed a crime, I can’t see what data they’re using about me.

I can’t know if it’s correct or if it’s erroneous and I can’t correct it right? Like I can’t say “Ohh I never lived in that address” or “Actually that wasn’t me who was at that place at that night” or “I don’t drive that car”. I can’t say those things, I have no power, so I think in order to move to a place where maybe we could use these systems and we could use them well and we could use them effectively, things would have to be a lot more transparent for consumers and for the public, we’d have to be able to view our own dossiers, and we’d have to be able to correct them, right?

We’d have to be able to ensure and feel comfortable that when NYPD or you know any other law enforcement or other type of agency was using the data. I want to feel comfortable knowing that what they were using about me was information that I feel OK sharing and that I know is correct. I think that would have to happen, and that’s a big undertaking.

I don’t think it’s impossible, and I don’t even necessarily think that it’s a bad idea, but right now, that type of transparency and that type of corrective measure isn’t in place so that I think first and foremost, those are two really basic things that would have to happen.

00:28:28 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Would you say lack of transparency is also one of or maybe the reason that data cartels are so hard to regulate… you can’t even see them or you can’t even see what you’re regulating. And this is something that, yeah, impacts the regulatory frameworks or would you say something else is going on that these data systems are being almost, you know, untouched and free to do what they do?

00:28:59 Sarah Lamdan

Yeah, I think you’re… I think what you’re getting at is absolutely correct. The lack of transparency is a huge problem, right? Lack of transparency to the public to even know that the government is using these types of systems or know that their insurance agent or their landlord or any other entity that’s making decisions about their lives.

Usually the public doesn’t even know that these algorithmic systems are being used behind the scenes, right? You don’t know when you get hired that your job application was run through some sort of employment screening system that was algorithmically powered, right? So that type of transparency is absent.

And on a deeper level, we don’t, let’s say you do know, let’s say you do get. You live in a place where you’re required to get a notice that your job application has been run through one of these systems, you don’t know what the data about you that they ran through the system includes. You know what the data inside the system that your applications being checked against includes and this is key. You don’t know what the algorithm is assessing and you don’t know how the algorithm is working to make that assessment. The major problem with that is these algorithms that are being developed at Lexis/Nexis and at other types of of data analytics firms.

We don’t know how the algorithms work and most of the people who design the algorithms don’t know how they work because the algorithms work so quickly and do so many things with so many data sets that algorithmic transparency is not only unavailable, it might be impossible in the current system, right there are.

There are a lot of entities and advocates that that are trying to demand algorithmic transparency, which is an important and noble aspiration, but a lot of times, even the people who developed the algorithm in like a Lexis/Nexis or an Experian or other system…they don’t know how the algorithm they developed works, so how are we supposed to understand? How it works?

00:31:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D

You mentioned that in in the conclusion of your book and I love it because it’s such a refreshing take that differs very much if you compare it to these calls to, you know, active citizen that that just needs to be educated about certain topics, saying everything will be alright, because we’ll know what’s going on and we’ll know which buttons to push to to get what we want.

And you basically called for the right blend of of governance, oversight and support to resolve the issues of of privatized data collections and treating the essential information as a public resource. So if we take a walk down the memory lane and look at the history of the net.

How feasible do you think it is your call that’s A… and B, where did we go so wrong that we ended up in this privatized two companies in the world type of digital sphere that started off as a part of the expression, like a like a hippie commune, right?

00:32:22 Sarah Lamdan

OK, I’ll admit that I tend to gravitate towards the hippie commune ideal so… Yeah. OK. First and foremost, yeah, I think right now we are in kind of a hyper capitalist system when it comes to tech especially, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s so kind of Silicon Valley based and that’s very like American and we just love our Uber capitalists, you know. I want to call it fantasy, but really we are playing it out in reality so our Uber capitalist tech reality.

And yes, I’ll admit… I do put my ideals, kind of over the other extreme, but really what I… in my ideal… It’s not about choosing between capitalism and like some sort of hippie Co-op for data, but it’s about putting the onus where it belongs. I think the problem with our current hyper capitalist system is that what we’ve let the companies do is make consumers think that it’s their fault and that it’s their problem to solve like “Ohh, I’m sorry, do you feel like data companies are too invasive? You need to change the privacy settings on your phone. Or you need to not use social media.

We put it all on the individual to try to keep their data out of these systems, or even to request their own data dossiers. Right? Like now, our kind of new ideal is passing these laws that allow individuals to get their own data dossiers. Like, what’s the benefit of that? Let’s say I live in California.

Yeah, well, I’m legally entitled to my own data dossier, so I live in California. I request my own data dossier from Lexis/Nexis. Great. Now I have a PDF full of data about myself. Some of it is right. Some of it is wrong. That doesn’t really empower me to do much right. I could try to call all the companies that I think have wrong incorrect data about me and beg them to fix it, but that that would take hundreds of hours that I do not have right.

So right now, even in our current best scenario legal framework, where we can see our own data dossiers, the responsibilities placed on individuals and then individuals have very little power. I am urging us to rethink this system so that instead of the onus being on the individuals that way it is now on the companies, the companies who create these systems should be responsible for making sure the data is correct, giving members of the public easy recourse to correct their data or to erase their data, right?

That should be the responsibility of the companies who are making billions of dollars building these systems. And really those companies are the only entities that have the real power to make our digital lives better.

So what I’m trying to do in a way that I’m not sure anybody could succeed. That is, I’m trying to take that boulder of responsibility and just like, dump it across the ground from individuals back to the powerful companies that could actually make the data world better because like I said, I’m not a complete Luddite. It’s not even a question of whether these companies should have a right to exist. They exist. This is reality. This is the system. Some of the ideas that the companies have are very, very cool how can they execute those ideas in a way that doesn’t harm us or put us at risk.

00:36:23 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we wrap up, I just want to mention something. You apologized sort of in advance several times saying that you don’t hate technology. I have a same same feeling working on issues like like privacy and security and open access… you always have this need of apologizing in advance if you’re not totally on board with you know the complete version of surveillance surveillance capitalism.

And I wonder, do you think the issue starts at just basic language structures around these issues, like saying OK, “I’m not sure this is the best way to go” equals you know, “We need to tear everything down and just, you know, build those to the to the ground”. So. So do you think we’re sort of like cultivated in this this techno solutionistic approach that basically prevents any normal discussion happening… not, you know, not to start with with solutions, but just, you know, have an honest conversations about these issues.

00:37:39 Sarah Lamdan

Absolutely, I think that the discussion around these issues is so polarized that if you say anything less than “Ohh I love you!” or “I love TikTok. It’s favorite thing the whole world!”… If you say anything less than that then you hate technology and you want to throw your computer in the river, right.

And I think we really haven’t been able to have nuanced discussions about practical solutions. I’m not sure why that is, I do know that since my book has been published, people who don’t like what I have to say and people who don’t agree with what I have to say, which is completely fair and I expect like. Yes, please, let’s have these discussions. But people who don’t like it really do paint me as somebody who just hates technology or hates data analytics and it’s a shame, because I think that that really diminishes the ability to have real fruitful discussions, right.

And I do wonder if that’s because of the way it’s being framed commercially and politically because one of the things that happens is whenever the government, any government works to incrementally place responsibilities on the companies that develop these types of tools, whenever, especially you know in the US or in the EU when we look to clamp down on the data collection that, like a Facebook or a, you know, Lexis/Nexis is doing… there are lobbyists who visit the politicians office and say “This would destroy the Internet, we can’t do this!” and now also pundits who come out on the Internet and on talk shows and say you know “These people just wanna ruin the Internet”, or “They don’t care about law enforcement”, right?

But I think it’s possible to care about law enforcement or to not be an absolute, just about law enforcement but to be concerned about law enforcement using, you know facial recognition apps or predictive policing apps.

I feel like sometimes it becomes kind of a scare tactic used by tech companies to make critics look silly, non professional, you know. So it diminishes detractors and critics and it also kind of silences people by making them think that if they critique tech platforms, tech companies, then they might destroy them or ruin something that they like or that they enjoy. Because I do think there’s a way for us to say, buy something on Amazon and get the helpful “More like this” option because I’ll admit… if I read a book and I enjoy it, I want to see more books like that book. That is a really cool tool and that’s a data-driven tool, data-driven by my data, the data of other readers and users.

Yeah, that’s a data-driven tool, but is there a way that we can implement that and also protect my data privacy and be transparent about how those recommendations are being developed right? But I think that that would put a lot more expense and work in Amazon’s products, right. They have to do a lot more work and engage in a lot more transparency and I think that a lot of companies don’t want to pay those extra costs and don’t want to do that extra work.

So it’s a push and pull game where tech companies have a PR advantage and they can make us look like we are foolish or that we’re not real experts or that we don’t really have real solutions.

00:41:56 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And just one more question before we wrap up… Let’s compare notes on the countering tactics or on the tactics countering that narrative, what do you think works in sort of persuading people that, yes, you’re not throwing laptops into the river and smashing light bulbs and yeah, writing your stuff with ink and pen.

00:42:19 Sarah Lamdan

Right. Yeah. No, that’s a good question. One thing that is surprising, like a few months ago, I was asked if I’d be willing to be on a panel at a conference with somebody from Lexis/Nexis. And my answer is yes, absolutely.

I would be really glad and excited for the opportunity to talk about, you know what our concerns are as academics, as consumers and then you know, have that discussion about what are some real solutions like if we sat down and thought of three things that we could work on together. What would those three things be? I think that would be really, really cool. But notice, I’m a willing panelist, it’s not me who’s not willing to show up on that panel. I guess that’s what I’ll say, right?

So I think just to show a continued willingness to have that discussion and also to not be cowed by push-back you get from other companies, cause I’ve got I’ve gotten push-back from representatives at Lexis/Nexis and people who work at other data analytics firms, right? They’ve panned by books, they’ve said really nasty things about my motives, right?

But I’m completely willing to have a discussion about why do you feel that way? And is there a place where we agree, right? Because I do think that there are places where we agree, we just need to find those places together and that that has to be a discussion that both sides are willing to have and everybody I want to say sides but like that, everybody in the community creating this work and then using this work is willing to have.

00:44:20 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Professor Landon, thank you so much for dropping by. This has been Citizen D podcast. We publish an episode every month, so see you next time. Thank you again and best of luck.

00:44:31 Sarah Lamdan

Thank you.

Citizen D advice:* Algorithm and data transparency is the first step towards corporate responsibility * Personal responsiblity will only get you so far * Technosolutionistic language is affecting the debate around the social impact of technology

More information: McKenzie Funk, The Hank Show: How a House Painting, Drug Running DEA Informant Built the Machine that Rules Our Lives – book * Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement – book * Who’s Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportation – analysis [PDF] * Alice Holbrook, When LexisNexis Makes a Mistake, You Pay For It (Newsweek Magazine, 2019) – article*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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We are joined by Callum Voge, Director of Governmental Affairs and Advocacy at Internet Society. In his role he tracks and analyzes incoming legislation to understand how it may positively or negatively impact the Internet and use this information to advocate for change.

Prior to joining the Internet Society, he worked as a senior policy advisor in the UK Civil Service, where I was team lead on Internet safety negotiations under the UK’s G7 presidency.

As a UK civil servant, he additionally conducted research and produced policy recommendations on digital currencies, mobile payments, and government engagement with international big tech.

He also spent five years working for the nonprofit media organization Project Syndicate, where he negotiated grants and media partnerships with leading publications in 55 countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:02 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody. It’s the 10th of October 2023 and you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of October 2023. We’re cutting it really close today, with us is Callum Voge, director of government affairs and advocacy at the Internet Society… and obviously, we’re going to talk about the state of the Internet. So first, hello, Callum.

00:00:26 Callum Voge

Hello, thanks for having me here, Domen.

00:00:29 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Before we dive into the prepared questions, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the intersection between technology and politics. This is sort of a broad umbrella topic we’re going to be addressing today. I know it’s extremely broad, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the issue on what are some of the elements that Internet is turning into a prime political topic worldwide?

00:01:01 Callum Voge

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Thanks for the question, Domen. So you know, for us at the Internet Society… just to explain a little bit… we’re a global nonprofit organization that’s focused on building, promoting and defending the Internet, our kind of slogan is that the Internet should be for, for everyone. And I think what makes our organization kind of unique is that we have a really strong global community. So you know, in addition to the headquarters, which is where I work we have over 100 and 10 chapters around the world, as well as over 100,000 individual members that kind of support our cause and believe in our issue and our kind of vision for the Internet, and I think …to answer your question why that’s compelling not just for us, but for our community of supporters is that the Internet and digital topics are just such a fast moving field. You know things are developing very quickly and the reason that they’re intersecting with politics is that we see every issue, case or political issue being amplified or kind of echoed on the Internet. So when we’re deciding about these issues in real life, there’s always a digital element that also needs to be decided. So I think they’re really interlinked when it comes to you know things like illegal content, legal content, hate speech… You know, health rights. These are all actually being amplified on the Internet as well. So I think that’s why we care about it. That’s why our supporters care about it and probably a little bit of what we’re going to talk about today, I guess.

00:02:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Great, sure. But to sort of further this question or to take a deep dive, so, these issues of hate speech, of privacy, of security of… all these issues have been around, I’m not going to say for centuries but for a while, right, but now it seems that the debate is moving from this fair and coherent battlefield, where you had the good guys on one side and good guys would be, in the past at least, digital intermediaries or big tech companies. And on the bad side, you would have the evil governments. Right now, it seems like the the battlefield is sort of murkier in terms that there’s no good guys here, but at the same time, you know, everybody’s pulling to their side. So, what do you think, how did we come to this situation, where to put it, a bit paranoid, who to trust regarding these issues?

00:03:45 Callum Voge

Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, if you compare it to the past, I think it is a lot murkier, right, because I think there’s a better understanding about the different actors. You mentioned the big tech providers, the government, good guys and bad guys, it’s all kind of twisted in our minds and I think that kind of lack of trust is what is at the heart of this.

I think that pandemic accelerated public awareness of this issue, with us moving so many of our activities online and this process was already happening before, but of course just accelerated so quickly during the pandemic. And I think you know that really is kind of what motiva ted, you know, a lot more scrutiny I guess on the actions of different players and the understanding that there are, of course, business interests behind everything.

So it’s not as simple as good guys, bad guys, someone who might be your enemy in one field might be your partner in another field because you have shared values related to something. So, as you said, it’s not black and white anymore. And I think it makes it interesting.

I really enjoy working in this area, but for sure it makes it very challenging as well. But yeah, I would say the public awareness is a key kind of aspect here, which of course then echoes up to policymakers, you know, who have their own views on big tech and the relationship between them, big tech and the public. So yeah, very, very fast-moving space.

00:05:09 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And speaking of privacy and encryption and public awareness, your organization, the Internet Society is participating in the global encryption day that is planned for the 21st of October this year. And it focuses on the importance of privacy and secure data transfer and security in that regard. And again, you know, we are seeing more and more regulation proposals in US, in the European Union, but also more global to sort of address the issue or try to, not to destroy encryption but to weaken it, right, so again to start us off, why did encryption become such a huge topic, and why is it such an uphill battle to just say, OK, you know, we’re going to encrypt everything end to end permanently and that’s not up for a discussion anymore.

00:06:18 Callum Voge

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I’m, I’m glad you gave a shout out to global encryption day. As I said, it’s on October 21st, so its approaching very quickly. You know that’s an initiative that we at the Internet Society, we care a lot about and something we were involved in from the beginning. So, we’re one of the founding organizations of the Global Encryption Coalition, which is a coalition of 350 organizations around the world from 104 countries, which you know at the heart of it, has its mission to protect encryption when it is under threat, but also to support companies that do offer encryption to their users. So we want to see more encryption everywhere, basically, if you put it simply. But you know why this is a tricky topic? Or why it is getting so much attention?

Now, well, the truth is that this is not a new debate. This is an old debate which has kind of reared its head a few different times. So, in the early days the debate was very focused in the US, especially on terrorist content. Terrorist content, online encryption, could be a tool used to give privacy not only to normal people, but also terrorists… they would say, right? And this is an issue for law enforcement and they need to access data to get and do their prosecutions right. That debate didn’t work. Back in the day, I think one of the main reasons would be that terrorist content actually wants to be public. It wants to be seen by many people to amplify messages.

And so actually the arguments with the justifications were not very convincing at that time. And so, the debate kind of died, but now we see it reemerging and the focus has shifted more to online safety as far as you know, child sexual abuse and some activities that actually do happen more in kind of private for example encrypted environments.

This is something that, of course, law enforcement cares a lot about. And so that really has, as you said, kind of pushed for a lot of these new regulations coming in. As you mentioned, they’re kind of around the world.

I think the interesting thing here is that the leading countries are actually very established democracies, so like two that I would point out would be the UK online safety bill, which was actually passed earlier this month. And now it’s going through the process of royal assent in the UK, where basically the sovereign has to sign it into law.

And then in the EU, we have the proposal on preventing child sexual abuse, which is still much earlier in the process, you know, the trilogue is beginning in a month or couple months. And so it still needs to be negotiated. But here we see the UK and the EU kind of being first movers in this regulation and you know in both of these cases, the regulations are very well-intentioned, right, they’re trying to make the Internet a safer place for everyone, especially children.

But unfortunately the approach is not only misguided, but also quite dangerous with a lot of unintended consequences for other users of the Internet and for the Internet itself. So I think with these proposals as kind of three main points that would make, and so the first would be, you know that these proposals, they do threaten encryption, they threaten to undermine it and that does put the security of both EU and UK residents at risk.

So, you know, the way that these regulations in both cases work is that they’re pressuring providers to either weaken encryption entirely through something called encryption backdoors or undermine it through a process called client-side scanning. Should I explain those concepts really quick?

00:09:49 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Sure, sure, sure. I mean, I have a follow-up question, but sure… go ahead with the explanation and then I’ll follow-up.

00:09:56 Callum Voge

Sure, sure. So with encryption backdoors, that’s creating a key for government authorities to access and decrypt messages and data sent between individuals. So, a point we would always make is that this creates the systemic weakness that is not only used by governments, but could also be exploited by, you know, by criminals and hostile actors to also gain access to private messages. So, the thing we always try to repeat is that there’s no such thing as a back door that only works for government and not for another actor.

People, luckily in Europe, I would say that this kind of solution is becoming less mainstream. Instead, we’re seeing a shift to client-side scanning, which is basically… those are systems that are embedded on a user’s phone or another device that scan message contents or, you know, text, images, files for matches or similarities to a database of objectionable content before that message is sent. So you know governments would say, especially in the EU, that client side scanning it’s not violating encryption.

This is, in my opinion, kind of a disingenuous claim, because really, it’s a technicality because the way client-side scanning works is that the scanning happens before the encryption process starts. So like, yeah, maybe technically the encryption is not being disrupted, but I mean, the whole point is being defeated. If I maybe use a metaphor, if breaking encryption is like ripping open a letter when it’s going through the post sorting office, then client-side scanning is like someone reading your letter as you’re writing it, reading it over your shoulder.

So actually, the result is the same and your privacy of your communications is dead, so that’s the kind of issue with client-side scanning that it’s still very much to the privacy is lost and yeah, and it’s it is a violation in the end. And you know, when it comes to security, one thing I also want to mention is of course with client-side scanning, it also increases the attack surface, so criminals or hostile state actors could potentially without the right safeguards, manipulate these databases of objectionable content, putting new things there, removing things, and basically filtering and content that could be very legitimate. So yeah, just something to mention. But yeah, please go for your next question.

0:12:08 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Following your explanation I find it really, I’m not going to say weird, but it’s so bizarre to hear these political discussions of clients scanning and privacy invasive technologies where it seems that these regulators or people who are proposing these frameworks do not understand the actual fundamentals of privacy, encrypted communication, and I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Why is this still such a misconstrued debate, why haven’t we, in in all these years that we are talking about privacy and security and issues regarding child pornography or other objectionable content, why are we still arguing about the basics, the basic premises of these proceedings, of these problems.

00:13:18 Callum Voge

Well, yeah, I think you know, part of it is definitely, you know, lack of knowledge or lack of understanding from policymakers. I mean, these are very technical issues that if you actually don’t understand the technology well, it’s easy to be, let’s say, influenced by different viewpoints or different information you receive.

So if you can’t actually challenge what you’re being told as a policymaker, you know you can easily, I hate the term but kind of fall for snake oil or, you know, technology offers that you’re told are very safe and compatible with, you know, human rights, fundamental rights, you know, if you’re not informed, it’s very hard to challenge these claims. Then I would say another aspect of this is that there’s always this drum beat of pressure from law enforcement agencies. So, this will always be there in my opinion, you know, for law enforcement agencies, of course, they want access to… this is what would make their jobs they claim much easier and, you know, let them, you know, be very effective. But you know, there’s something actually, I would, mention to you that you’re probably aware, but maybe not all of your listeners I’ve heard about is there was an article from Balkan Insight recently. I’m not sure if you heard about this one, but through Freedom of Information they got, they were informed that Europol sought unlimited data access for future data collected through this proposal to prevent child sexual abuse materials, you know, not just data related to child sexual abuse, but also data not related to that, you know, including innocent images. And they said that they wanted no boundaries for how this data could be used so you know, with law enforcement, I think there is that pressure. And so, it starts with maybe child sexual abuse, but then it can really, really quickly go with the scope creep to include many things. So, I think that that pressure from law enforcement is, is stronger probably than ever.

But that will always be there, and it’s the policymakers job to, you know, work with different stakeholders and understand that this is just one pressure and that there are other concerns that need to be weighed up and maybe, you know, talking about these claims from law enforcement. I could maybe push back on some of them even because there’s a lot of evidence that more data and you know scanning, will actually not be very effective.

And so these law enforcement claims that will help make their job easier, it’s maybe a little bit disingenuous as well when it comes to the client-side scanning technologies because the thing is that these technologies, the scanning, can actually be circumvented pretty easily by criminals. They just would need to add their own encryption themselves to circumvent it. So actually the effectiveness is not clear.

And this is, you know, kind of echoed by a really key institutions within the European Union so, for example, the European Data Protection Board, European Data Protection Service and their joint opinion, they kind of argue that abuse will continue because circumvention is so easy and you know another thing we could point to is that more data does not always mean more arrests.

So, I have an example because I’m also very active in the UK policy area, that in the UK, a watchdog shared that it takes the UK police up to 18 months to make an arrest after they become aware that a child is at risk of online sexual abuse. So, you know, 18 months is a huge amount of time where they actually have the evidence, but they’re not able to act on it cause of lack of capacity and resources, right.

So, this data and more data, the claims from law enforcement, I’m not so convinced, and I think a lot of people are not very convinced by this either.

00:16:59 Domen Savič / Citizen D

I find it particularly trouble some, not just what you just mentioned about the whole, aftermath of finding a problematic content and then reacting to it via, you know, arrests and court proceedings. I find it interesting that even the basic premise of this technology and I think I read the same article on the Balkan Insight that says that basically this technology does not exist yet, so we’re talking about legalizing to, to put it more bluntly, we’re talking about legalizing something that isn’t there in the first place, right? Why do you think this is such a passionate topic for law enforcement agencies around the world, where they don’t, again, don’t understand the basic ingredients of those proposals are not there in practice?

00:18:17 Callum Voge

Yeah. Well, you’re right, Domen. So you know there have been findings from research groups in the UK and other places that these client side sending client side scanning technology, sorry, are just not ready, they’re not accurate enough. You know there’s different types of them, some are, some are scanning for known child sexual abuse, some are scanning for unknown and some are scanning even for grooming messages, right?

And a lot of this, especially the latter two, would rely a lot on artificial intelligence and the accuracy rates are, you know, not good enough, simply put. And even if you have, you know, let’s make up a number 99% accuracy if you’re talking about a billion messages per day like on some of these platform, sorry, but 99% is just not good enough.

Because that’s hundreds of thousands per day that then need to be checked against false positive, false negatives. I mean, this is just not a workable solution. The scale of everything, it just doesn’t work. So you’re right, these technologies are not ready.

But why are we still talking about them? I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about this, there’s been some scandals recently in the EU with some of the companies that are offering this scanning technology and where their funding comes from and kind of, you know, their transparency, I can maybe dig up an article in a little bit to share with you, but yeah, there’s definitely strong interest groups involved here.

I would say, sorry to name names, but one would be organization called Thorn and Ashton Kutcher, right? Ashton Kutcher would speak at parliaments around Europe, talking about child sexual abuse. And so really that star power, that celebrity, you know, it’s a strong pressure. It’s a strong pressure and you know this again relates to that kind of snake oil, right. So, you know offering technologies that are not good enough. Does that answer your question?

00:20:14 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Yeah, I mean, this is this is something that that I’ve been wondering myself and I love the Ashton Kutcher shout-out because it shows how bizarre this whole field is, right? So, you’re looking at it from the position of a digital rights activist who doesn’t have the star power of “Dude, where’s my car” actor.

And at the same time, you see politicians that they’re falling over him, basically because he’s an actor, right? So maybe a follow-up to my follow up to my follow-up, I lost count but unless we try to sort of engage Brad Pitt or Sylvester Stallone into this debate, how are we as citizens, as activists, as maybe even journalists… How should we address this issue and how should we point out to the decision makers that the field of the debate is extremely skewed, that they are not even, I’m not going to say they’re not listening to reason, but they’re not listening to all of the arguments and that they’re going with the they’re basically following the biggest, the biggest pressure point.

00:21:40 Callum Voge

Yeah, you know, this is something we’ve been asking ourselves, Domen. At the Global Encryption Coalition cause, you know, Ashton Kutcher is one, but in the other case in the US there’s also an anti encryption bill called Cosa Kids Online Safety Act and their spokesperson was the pop star Lizzo. So, another superstar kind of, but I mean, luckily in our case, Ashton Kutcher and Lizzo have been involved in some scandal recently, both of them had bad press. So, the problem has a little bit fixed itself for now. Of course, a new endorsement could come in the future from another star, but you know, we can’t attract these same names as easily, right? We don’t have the resources, we don’t have the money, the connections as civil society actors or as regular citizens. So, our approach has been… we need to work with the more kind of how to say targeted intellectual approach.

So, for example, we’ve been talking to journalists in exile, for example, journalists from Russia, Belarus and other places that, because of repression from their governments, have to work abroad and you know them, echoing the importance of encryption to their work. So, I think we need to amplify these different use cases whether it’s, you know, journalist use of encryption, LGBTQ use of encryption, other ones which are important stories to tell also.

So, I think, you know, even if we can’t fight fire with fire, you know, celebrity against celebrity, I think we need to appeal to more of that kind of intellectual base and also those key in the case of the EU, those key EU rights, fundamental rights, but also the values, what does it mean to be European and bring in those voices that really I think define us and define what we care about.

00:23:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And speaking of things we care about, we’re both fellows for the recharging advocacy in EU type of fellowship, that is run by Hertie school from Berlin. And I’d like to hear your thoughts on the NGO landscape or the activist landscape in the EU regarding digital rights. You’ve been involved with the Internet Society for a while, and do you see a change of narrative, of perception, of importance when it comes to digital rights or is this something that basically picks up whenever there’s a grant available and dies down where there’s no grants available?

00:24:25 Callum Voge

Well, yeah, yeah. I’ve been in this landscape for a little bit of time now and as is the nature of civil society, yeah, the grants play a really key role. And yeah, the ability of civil society to take stands on these issues, make their voices heard. I mean, you know, luckily in the EU we’re used to these open consultation periods, right? So civil society actors, individuals, they can make their voices heard, right, but resources are needed to do that in a informed kind of systematic way, right?

So unfortunately, in the last year or so, we have seen bigger strains on grants on funding for civil society in Europe, including, you know, privacy, activists, privacy advocacy groups. So yeah, to answer your question, unfortunately, I think the strain is there but at the same time I’m really, how to say, really inspired or impassioned by how I have seen this really strong, you know, coming together of European privacy organizations, you know, there’s so many people that care really deeply about these issues who want to make their voice heard.

I think the challenge is just that they’re, as you said, there’s so many voices in this debate, it’s a very difficult debate whether it’s encryption or other issues and so it is hard to kind of make our voices heard above the noise.

So yeah, to sum up, I would say, yeah, difficult moment for this society when it comes to funding. But as I said, I’m kind of inspired by how I’ve seen more collaboration while working together and a real effort to stand up against the most harmful parts of these new proposals.

00:26:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And just one follow up before we move on to the last topic of the conversation. So do you see this, this passion, this energy of, let’s say, digital human rights activists, whatever you may call it… Does it trickle into the political debate, into the mainstream political debate in, let’s say, the areas that you’re watching or is this just something that, OK, we have these crazy activists that are doing their thing, but, you know, the real conversation is happening someplace else, sometimes else and there’s no crossover effect, so to say?

00:26:52 Callum Voge

I think I can guess what your opinion is. Uh, I would say, it’s not mainstream enough. I feel when we’re, you know, I’m working a lot at the Brussels EU level. So, there are certain political parties that do work with us a lot and engage with us but unfortunately those parties are kind of sidelined as you know, those are the privacy nuts.

You know, those are the crazy people and they’re like on the fringe. So, I have seen that kind of narrative repeating itself quite often. And so that’s a big challenge for us, it is that, when we’re working in Parliament, they’re those partners that are very reliable that we do work with, but how do we kind of broaden our support or our contacts with other political parties that are, not as sidelined sometimes as some of these other groups.

So, it is a challenge for sure, something that is difficult, but you know for me… To be a little bit positive, maybe I would say because I have a global role, I do policy around the world all the way from UK to Singapore. So at least in Europe we have a voice and there is something to work with and you know that’s something that I experienced doing advocacy on.

You know, we’re talking early about the UK online safety bill versus the EU proposal on preventing child sexual abuse. In the UK, trust in government is super high. You know, it’s one of the most trusting societies in the world. You can see that from the vaccination rate there during the pandemic. You know, people really trust their government. And so, when the government wants to scan, people say, well, the government must have a really good reason to do that, right? Here in Europe, I see that there’s something for us to work with.

You know, there are lots of countries in Europe that went through recent history with government surveillance, you know, real government abuse of power. And so, I think there is a natural skepticism not in all Member States, but in enough of them that the debate in Europe is much stronger and already more fierce than what I saw in the UK.

So yeah, giving from my global perspective, I have a little bit more hope here in Europe. I think you know we really can make a difference but as you said it could be better. It could be a lot better. It could be more mainstream. It could be a more valued voice. So yeah, pushing for improvement, but a good base, I would say, for us to work.

00:29:16 Domen Savič / Citizen D

I’m not trying to be this gloomy duck, but it’s basically just something that bothers me every time we engage in debates, be it on net neutrality, on encryption, on data transfers, on biometric surveillance… We’re constantly, you know, pushed back to the start line in terms of, OK, here are the basics of privacy. Here is something that while in fact, you know, they’re constantly lobbying, like the opposition is constantly lobbying these proposals that are clearly, just not good, you know? And this is what I find tiresome. Because, you know, if you had to explain… like I often compare digital rights and digital rights activists to eco-activists, and in terms of ecology and in terms of environment, we have that baseline in terms of “OK, you know we have to save the environment.” This isn’t an option. There’s no alternative, we just need to do that, or we need to be mindful as we move forward, right?

Here in the digital rights, it’s all back to the drawing board. It’s all every time we go into these debates not just with people, but also with politicians, with journalists, with decision makers, you’re constantly forced to have this same discussion, and this is maybe something I find tiring, right?

I just want, you know, a period when you’d come up to a meeting and you would, you know, you’d have a baseline established and you would maybe hash out some of the details, so this is just something that we can continue our discussion some other time.

And now o wrap this up, a more lighthearted topic. The Internet is falling apart. I saved the best for last.

So, the issue of splinternet, the issue of digital sovereignty, the issues that are that are now cropping up between China, EU and US. Let’s say these are the main actors in this field. So, what’s the… how real is this threat of the Internet falling apart and maybe would it be such a bad thing?

00:32:05 Callum Voge

Oh, no, Domen, it would be a very bad thing, but I can tell you more. So in 2022, you know, last year the Internet Society, we did quite a bit of research on digital sovereignty, which is a term that a lot of policymakers around the world have been using. We wanted to do research on this because we were really concerned by this trend. You know, the main reason being that the Internet is supposed to be a global resource. So, when you start talking about sovereignty, that’s like applying geographic borders to a global resource, right? And with a lot of potential unintended consequences, negative consequences for some countries, you know purposeful consequences.

So, you know, we wanted to dig into this a little bit, you know that kind of high-level finding was that this term digital sovereignty, very trendy and it’s used by different governments to justify so many different policy objectives. When we talk about the EU, there’s not a single definition at all, but we see two main understandings of digital sovereignty.

So, the first one I would say is diversifying the supply chain, right, so reducing reliance on the import of certain technological components. The classic example here would be semiconductors that we import these from East Asia, Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. And this could be a vulnerability for us as Europeans in the future, right? That’s a really classic example. But we’re seeing this concept also being applied to the Internet a lot, right. So, as I said, Internet, Internet infrastructure, it’s global by design and it’s decentralized, which means that it does not operate within national boundaries. It’s across the globe, understandably, this maybe gives policymakers anxiety sometimes.

There’s that feeling that events happening somewhere else in the world could impact Europe. Access to the Internet or the resilience of the Internet in Europe. And I think that these anxieties maybe were always there, but they were really elevated when the war in Ukraine started because if you remember, there were these unsuccessful calls from Ukraine to disconnect Russia from the Internet. So this really kind of brought that moment of tension up that, you know, if a country can be cut off from the Internet, if Russia was cut off, could we be the next country cut off and you know, it really kind of escalated all of these discussions about, you know, reliance on key parts of infrastructure.

So this would be the first understanding of the EU and then the second one that we see quite often, it’s about competition. So, you know that’s about Europe wanting to support the growth of local service providers, that would be legitimate alternatives to large foreign providers. So usually, you know, policymakers will talk for the surface of the Internet, so you know social media, search engines, e-mail all dominated mostly by, let’s say, American, sometimes Chinese providers you know, so what if I want to use a European one, there’s no good option, right?

So that’s where the conversation usually goes. But we also see it going towards the Internet infrastructure there as well. And I think the reason for this is that there’s the perception that if Europe wants to be a really strong player in this field, it needs to somehow play a key role in running infrastructure, you know, including Internet infrastructure. And there’s some sort of view from policymaker’s link that they make that you know which is correct, which is like Internet access, is really key to innovation and prosperity.

But there’s also this kind of unspoken belief from them that if Europe were to control the Internet more and provide it to the world, you know, control the global Internet, that it will somehow generate wealth for Europe. So, there’s this, like, kind of unspoken feeling that, you know, with competition, Europe needs to be more involved in the infrastructure.

So yeah, those are kind of the two main uses we see in the EU, but then outside of the EU, you know, digital sovereignty is also a very common term, right. And so, the kind of classic OG original use of the term was more from authoritarian regimes, which really was about state sovereignty in the digital realm, so this was, you know, controlling the flow of information on the Internet.

And so, in countries that were slightly more democratic, they might justify this same, you know, that the state needs to protect against disinformation to protect people. But then in a more authoritarian context, it might be about filtering content. You know, that threatens the legitimacy of the states or that might mean suppressing a genuine new kind of dissident or opposition messages. So, kind of authoritarian stuff, right.

And just to wrap this up, the fourth kind of and final meaning of digital sovereignty we see is, and unfortunately, it’s quite rare, is a sovereignty of the individuals, so that would be more about empowering Internet users so that they can decide how, when and with who their data is shared and use. So yeah, kind of these four main variations of what the term can mean. And because it’s so flexible, it’s really attractive I think to policymakers to use these terms because it can be used to justify, you know, so many different policy outcomes.

00:37:04 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Here’s a rhetorical question. Do you see that as a big problem? So, in terms that the Chinese and the EU decision makers can maybe even agree on the issue of the sovereignty, but because the term means… it’s basically completely opposite. If you look at the Chinese digital rights political spectrum and the European one, this is basically something that needs to be determined before we have an actual discussion about what to do with it and how to tread these waters.

00:37:46 Callum Voge

Yeah, it’s totally a risk. You know, when the term is not defined and so vague and so flexible it can mean that two parties are agreeing on something that they mean, you know, something totally different and you mentioned… but I mean Domen, even inside the EU, you know, let’s say if I generalize very widely, let’s say that in France, this kind of competition narrative is the main driving force of digital sovereignty.

And so, they really care about where the French providers, where are, where are our French companies. But then they’re talking to the Germans and the Germans and understand digital sovereignty more as diversification of the supply chain. So, France and Germany can come together and agree on digital sovereignty actual meaning, you know, kind of different things.

So yeah, I think there is a big risk and you asked about China. China was the first country to use this term. They’re the ones that came up with this term, right? I think it was around 20 years ago or so and then, you know, a quote from Xi Jinping when he talked about digital sovereignty, he said “This is the right of each nation state to choose its own path of cyber development and own model of regulation and Internet policies without interference from other countries”. So you know, that’s statement alone. It’s really in polar opposite to this global infrastructure that we understand. You know, he really understands it as applying this national boundary to the Internet.

So it is something, you know, very concerning, something we want to watch for in multilateral forums, you know, where China, the EU, the US other key players will probably be fighting out what they understand this means. And when you have Europe using the same terms as China, it’s the recipe for disaster in my view.

00:39:28 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So we’re slowly wrapping up, but do you see the upcoming EU elections, uh, sort of like a tipping point for let’s, let’s call it the umbrella term of human rights online or in the Information Society, do you see a new generation of policymakers coming up and rising to the challenge of everything that we’ve talked about and more obviously?

00:39:59 Callum Voge

Yeah, I think the next few elections will be really key because as we just identified you know this all also has kind of multilateral diplomatic policy aspect as well. So, you know the EU historically has or always claimed that they’re for an open unfragmented internet, you know, that’s a statement that the EU has made in the past. So, if we really are going to stick to this and, you know, abide by it, then moving forward, that would really hopefully continue to shape.

I don’t know the values and the policies that come out of the EU, that’s actually been very helpful for us, for our advocacy. You know when there have been proposals from the EU that use the term digital sovereignty, for example, there was NIST 2, which was the Cyber Security Directive or there was the DNS for EU, which was about DNS resiliency. You know, in those cases we could point to you and say, well, you’re against fragmenting the Internet, that these proposals might have risks for Internet fragmentation, you know, are, are you aware of these risks? And it was a really good kind of opening and talking points. So, I think for the new elections, it really, you know… Will these values kind of remain? Will they change? I think it’s a really important breaking point where we can, as Europeans can either become stronger or we can step back. And I think that’s really important, and we’ll have to see how it goes.

00:41:25 Domen Savič / Citizen D

My question regarding the new generation of decision-makers is because that… We’ve seen in in the last year or maybe in the last two years, you know, a flood of regulatory frameworks coming from the EU that are addressing artificial intelligence, digital disinformation… And all of these, at least to me, seem very rushed seem very unproven to work and it also almost feels like they’re just doing this because they feel they need to do something, but they don’t really know even what the actual issue is.

And this is something that’s very worrying, because as we’ve already mentioned, you know the uneven playing field of discussion, the pressure groups, the lobbying, the interest groups from different from different public and or private sector are gearing up. So, I was trying to sort of get your reaction… do you think the situation will improve? Will it stay the same?

00:42:47 Callum Voge

Yeah. No, it’s a great question. Yeah, there’s been a huge rush of so many new proposals, so many new regulations coming in. I have to tell you, these are all actually related to digital sovereignty as well because, you know, there’s this high-level strategy document that the EU has. It’s called Europe fit for the digital age and they use the term digital sovereignty there, and technically, all of these regulations, you know, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, European Chips Act, AI ACT, et cetera, they all fall under that high level strategy, right.

So, we can say pretty authoritatively that digital sovereignty is driving this, and I think kind of unspoken thing here is that Europe is falling behind. You know, when you look at the providers, you see it domination by the US and like a lesser extent by China. So, whereas the EU and all of this, how can the EU be a leader? Well, at least we can be the leaders in regulation, and we can have the success of GDPR.

So let’s be first movers in these other areas too and that’s how we can maybe, you know create a… I don’t know, a niche for ourselves, and there’s also kind of that view, right, that if the EU has stronger regulations that that could also create a good environment for alternative providers, right? So maybe providers that are more compliant with EU values and users you’ll want to use those providers as opposed to the US Big tech, right?

I mean, these are all kind of… It’s all guesswork at this point, but I think that’s at the heart of it, right? It’s like the EU wanting to find leadership in a new area where if we can’t be the providers, at least let us be the regulators. And I think that really pushes this huge influx all at once of so much stuff.

00:44:36 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Thank you. Thank you, Callum, for your thoughts… for this, for this wonderful discussions on issues related to the Internet, digital rights and human rights and the digital sphere. This was a Citizen D episode, published on the 15th of October. We publish an episode every month, so we will see you next time.

Citizen D advice:* Demand clear language from decision-makers when it comes to digital regulation * Engage in public debate related to human rights online * Encrypt everything

More information:* Europol Sought Unlimited Data Access in Online Child Sexual Abuse Regulation – article * ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content – article * Navigating Digital Sovereignty and Its Impact on the Internet – analysis * Fact Sheet: Client-Side Scanning – article * Internet Impact Brief: European Commission Proposal to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse – brief

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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We caught up with Paris Marx, a technology writer. They have written frequently in, amongst others, NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, and OneZero, and speak internationally on the future of transport. They are also a PhD student at the University of Auckland and the host of the critical technology podcast ‘Tech Won’t Save Us‘. They are based in Newfoundland, Canada.

Their book, “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation” addresses the future of transportation and the questionable way Silicon Valley is “solving” this issue. We also talked about the quality tech journalism, the consumer’s optimism in the tech economy and the non-solution of e-cars.

Finally, we also address the issue of policy shaping, the need to change the discourse around technology and the role of the journalists in this field.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D
Welcome everybody. It’s the 28th of June 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of September same year. With us today is Paris Marx, tech critic and author of the book “Road to nowhere: What Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation”. He’s also the host of the podcast “Tech won’t save us”. Welcome, Paris.

00:00:32 Paris Marx
Thanks so much for having me.

00:00:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D
Let’s start with your book. You talk about transportation, you talk about Elon Musk, you talk about the way Silicon Valley is trying to reshape the future of transport. And I find it interesting or fascinating for two reasons. One is that in the book you go in depth not just about the current state of the transportation industry and the situation going on in Silicon Valley, but you also start with the, let’s call it the history of transport. When the first cars came into power, so to say.

And basically, you talk about the hijacking of the public sphere of the public streets that were back then divided between different, let’s call them interest groups like the pedestrians, salesman and so forth and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the following question. Can history tell us something about the current state of the future in the area of transportation?
00:01:54 Paris Marx
Oh, absolutely. You know, there was one way to approach the book where, you know, all I did was look at what happened in the past 10 or 15 years. As the tech industry kind of, you know, founded Uber and released ideas for self-driving cars and hyper-loops and all these sorts of things and just assessed why they were not going to address the problems in our transportation system.

But I thought, you know, one of the things that Silicon Valley does really well is it makes sure that people don’t think about the history, that they only think about the present, and in particular the future and they don’t look back at what has happened in the past, but part of the reason that these tech billionaires and these tech companies are putting out ideas for transportation in the present is that there are a lot of problems in our transportation system that come of our over reliance on cars.

I would argue, you know, that is a big piece of this and so it felt wrong then to write a book about transportation and about what the tech industry is proposing for transportation and not to go back to, you know, the kind of moment when the car emerges to look at the ideas around the car then and how that played out, how the car became such a dominant part of the transportation system.

Because I think that that helps to kind of demystify the system that we have right now in terms of transportation. But also to question whether you know ideas for transportation that are really based around the car, as many of Silicon Valley’s ideas are, are really going to solve these fundamental problems like, you know, the amount of people who are injured or die because of cars. The amount of time that people spend stuck in traffic, the emissions that come from cars, you know, and all of these other questions that come along with it.

So those are real issues that we do need to address, but is it going to be addressed by, you know, some new technology released by some, some American tech companies, or do we need to look at a much deeper level and I think that going into the history tells us that, yes, like we need to, we need to look much deeper than just the technology that we’re flying on.

00:04:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D
And if you had to answer a question about where did things start to go wrong in, in the past for, let’s say the general area of of transportation, what was key moment or what were some of the key moments that got us where we are today with cars; not enough roads, not enough infrastructure to support the transportation system that is currently in place?

00:04:35 Paris Marx
Hmm, it’s a difficult question because I would say it happens over a long period of time, right? But and obviously I should also say that, I look in particular at the American context in particular because you know that you know Silicon Valley is rooted in the United States, the United States has this really long history of car dependency and kind of, you know, pushing the car as this object of of freedom and modernity and things like that.

So I look a bit less at the European context in the book, though, I know that obviously the car has been very influential in shaping European transportation as well. They’re probably not to the same degree as what happened in North America, where I am based.

And so I think that for me there are, you know, a number of moments that we could point to as very important moments in this kind of transformation of the transport system.

You know, we can go back to when the car starts to emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and, you know, I think a lot of people forget that in that moment, it wasn’t obvious that the car we were going to use to get around was going to be one within internal combustion engine that was reliant on fossil fuels.

But at the time, you know, there were also electric cars in that moment and for a while it looked like they might actually be kind of, you know, the form of vehicle that became mass transportation instead of the internal combustion engine and there were even cars at the time that were powered by steam power, because that was, you know, a very common form of kind of, you know, mobility or creating energy or whatnot in that. So I think that that’s one important moment.

But then I think if you kind of fast forward a few decades as the car starts to become more common in you know North American cities, but European cities as well, what you really see is kind of a conflict, right? On one hand, you have cars that are becoming more common on the street, but you also have a street car that is designed around a different way of getting around the city, right?

It’s designed around people who are walking, who are taking bicycles, who are taking the streetcar, who are taking horse drawn carriages, all things that move relatively slowly within the streets of cities. And then you’re moving toward the car, which slowly kind of gets faster, can kind of maneuver more in a more agile way, I guess. And what happens is that more people start to die and be injured because of automobiles, right? In particular, children and young women.

And that creates a backlash in cities in the United States through the 1910s to about the 30S and so in that moment the question is really, you know, are we going to allow this car, this, this form of transportation, to become entrenched in the city or are we going to take regulatory measures to restrict how fast cars can go to restrict, you know, how much space they can take up to restrict, you know, how much they can actually use the roads when there’s all these other people who are trying to use them as well, and what we ultimately see as, as you said, is that there’s a kind of wide range of interest groups that see that they are going to profit from the car becoming a form of mass transportation.

And so they all kind of work together to make sure that regulations don’t stifle the growth of the automobile and that ultimately, in the decades that follow, whether it’s through the 1930s as the US government is trying to kind of, you know, take programs to recover from the Great Depression or in the post war period in particular.

After the late 1940s, into the 1950s and 60s, as there’s a big kind of infrastructure building program. And in that moment, you know, the push is really to build a lot of suburban housing, a lot of highway infrastructure or a lot of road infrastructure. And at the same time, there’s not the kind of investment put into the rail network or into public transportation or things like that. The focus is really to get people to drive cars, to use cars and to reshape the transportation system around that.

00:08:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D
And jumping ahead into, let’s say, today’s atmosphere, where are we regarding the current, let’s say state of the future of transportation, the self-driving cars, the electric cars… Things you described happening in the past I could draw some parallels with same or similar things happening in the present as well, right.

So you have self-driving cars driving over people and pedestrians, you have accidents, you have projects that are trying to overcome different different snags in the transportation system and failing horrifically in some examples. Would you say that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating or that we, the industry, the policymakers learned something from looking back or trying to address the current situation?

00:09:43 Paris Marx
It’s tough to say, and again I wouldn’t want to kind of generalize because I don’t know exactly what regulators across different European countries have done, but I would say that in general, while lessons were learned for a while and there were actions taken for a number of decades in order to kind of you know further restrict cars to make sure that environmental kind of expectations, you know, they’re less smog coming from cars and things like that were taken, I think that for a while we have not done enough to kind of keep up with the impact that cars have had on cities and to try to actually deal with the problems that we face.

And again, this is not a universal thing. Some cities and countries have been better than others, but especially in the kind of North American context, the car really kind of took over, right? And so what we’re seeing now and what we’ve I guess been seeing in the past about 15 years is the tech industry did recognize that there was a serious problem in our transportation system again.

With, you know, people dying on the roads with the amount of people stuck in traffic for long periods of time, with the emissions coming from cars with the high cost of car ownership, all these other sorts of problems, right, and they said instead of having a political conversation around how we address these problems that have arisen from kind of decades of making policy decisions to encourage people to drive.

Let’s not have that conversation and instead let’s just try to come up with a new technology that is going to solve these problems, right? So ride hailing services, electric cars, self driving cars, all this kind of stuff. And you know, obviously services like Uber are available, you know, ride hailing services, they have actually had an impact on cities. But what we see in that case is that the company promised that was going to kind of have these amazing beneficial effects on cities, but the studies that were done in North America find that they actually made traffic worse. They took people away from public transit systems, they didn’t have the beneficial effects that we expected to see or at least that the company led us to believe that we would see.

Again, the self driving cars they were supposed to arrive years ago, you know, all these companies kept saying that they were just a few years away in the 2010s and we still see they’re just being tested in some cities right now but they certainly haven’t taken over transportation, as the companies told us they were going to. Electric cars – I would say that is one that is really starting to take root right now and I think that that is an important piece of, you know, the transition toward reducing emissions from transportation, moving over to electric vehicles.

But my concern there is that we’re not reckoning with how the electric vehicle also still has a very significant environmental footprint and I feel like a lot of our governments are moving in the direction of saying, you know, if we want to address the emissions that come from transportation, all we need to do is adopt electric cars and not do anything else.

And I think that that is a real missed opportunity kind of going back to what you were saying, the comparisons to the past where there is a real push to get us to buy cars and to ensure that we’re driving a lot and that was very profitable for a number of commercial interests from automakers to oil company to developers who are building suburban infrastructure and road infrastructure and things like that.

And what we see now is very much a push to say, OK, there are different paths that we can take here. If we want to address these problems and in particular the issue of contributing to climate change. But you know, a lot of governments and a lot of industries, of course, seem to be pushing us toward the direction of electric car power, which means more automotive manufacturing, which means more mining in order to get the minerals that are needed for batteries and of course more battery production.

Instead of saying maybe instead of trying to just get everyone to buy an electric car, we should be investing a lot more in public transportation, in cycling infrastructure and things like that are not only, you know, more sustainable, but you know will help to address some of those other problems like traffic, like high cost of car ownership like vehicle deaths and things like.

00:13:57 Domen Savič / Citizen D
Are there in your opinion any particular reasons why the political discourse or the political conversation about you know, what do we do about cars isn’t happening on a scale that maybe you and I would want it to happen, right? So you just said, you know, electric cars aren’t built for scalability, so to say, so you have the industry on one side that’s very good with lobbying efforts with pushing against the decision makers proposals that don’t include them.

On the other hand, you have the problems you already mentioned about ecology, about batteries, about building parts for electric cars. So why do you think that political political discussion is still not happening despite everything that we’ve been through and despite everything that’s happening in the current moment?

00:15:03 Paris Marx
I think that there are a couple of reasons for that. I think one is that our governments over the past number of decades have really lost any kind of vision for the future and what a better future could look like. And you know, I think that’s in part because of, you know, the neoliberal turn that politics have taken and largely, you know, more concretely, the idea that the government and the public sector should be doing less in society and we should be leaving more of the kind of decisions and, you know, kind of handling important infrastructures and services to the private sector.

And I think that has meant that, you know, our governments have kind of taken a step back of thinking what a better life actually looks like for the people who live in our communities and our cities and our countries, and instead has has just been trying to kind of encourage private industry to come up with ways to kind of generate more economic activity.

And I don’t think that is always a positive thing are always going to generate kind of widespread benefits beyond, you know, benefits for those companies and the executives that at them, and I think that the other piece of that is that when you look at the potential paths forward for transportation, right, if we were to kind of put two general paths in front of us and say one is where you know a lot of us drive electric cars, we don’t really change the kind of dependence on cars that exist in our societies right now and so we basically need to replace all the fossil fuel vehicles with electric cars and then if we look at another future where we say, OK, instead of having so many people driving cars, we put a much greater focus on investing in public transportation, in rail infrastructure, in cycling infrastructure so that people don’t need to own as many cars just in society in general.

So if we look at those two different futures, we can very clearly see that the one where more people are driving electric cars is the one where there is a more obvious kind of economic activity taking place, right? You need to be building more cars which take more labor power in order to produce, you need to be mining a lot to build the big batteries that are gonna go into those vehicles.

And of course, you need to produce the batteries as well, and then you’ll need to keep charging those vehicles, you’ll need to keep paying insurance on those vehicles, you’ll need to get them maintained very frequently – you know there’s a whole load of other costs that come along with it.

And just because of the way that our economies are set up right now, that looks a lot more attractive kind of on the on the balance sheet or on the spreadsheet or in the GDP figures than something where we kind of reduce the amount of transactions that need to be taken for transportation and just invest in collective public solutions instead.

00:17:48 Domen Savič / Citizen D
So is there a difference between the, let’s say, the scalability of car infrastructure in the US in let’s say the developed countries and in countries that are that are, let’s say going the same way like I’ll give you an example.

In Slovenia the concept of the six lane motorway hasn’t really taken off yet. So we are now having these discussions in the public sphere about building and expanding the motorways. The people who are opposing this expansion are using the arguments that are also in your book, but that are also present in the global sector that is more mindful about the environment and about the ecology, while the people who are for the six lane expansions are saying “Yes, yes, we know you know all about the futility of wider roads in developed countries” and they’re naming US and yeah, I guess maybe even Germany, “But you know, our case will be different because… Something,” so how would you say or how would you counter that that narrative in in if you were engaged in let’s say the, the political discussion about 6 lane motorways in in Slovenia or countries that that are still, you know, deciding to take the first step towards the future that we already know is not effectively solving anything.

00:19:45 Paris Marx
Yeah, it’s a good question and I would want to preface my answer by saying that obviously I don’t know the specifics of the situation in Slovenia, so I can’t comment specifically, right, but I would say this obviously questions of infrastructure and investment in that way, public investment, they kind of do help to determine the way that people move and the way that they transport themselves and goods and things like that into the future.

One thing that I see in the example from where I am in in North America is that we used to have, you know, pretty decent train infrastructure in the province that I live you know, it wasn’t perfect or anything like that, but at least we had it and then when they built the Trans Canada Highway network, that encouraged a lot more people to start driving instead of taking the train and the train then kind of, you know, fell into disarray, into disrepair.

It didn’t get the investment and, you know, the ridership that it had previously and eventually the train in my province was actually ripped up and we don’t have a train anymore and the only option is the highway. Right?

And so I just give that example to say that I think that there’s an important concept in transportation that really shapes a lot of discussions around these things called induced demand, and this is the question that, you know, if you make investments in a particular form of transportation infrastructure, that is going to encourage more people to get around in that way.

So if you’re building more six lane motorways that’s going to encourage more people to drive because the infrastructure is getting better for that form of transportation and I think ultimately in this moment we have kind of a debate or a question around what should that future of transportation look like and should cities and countries be kind of doubling down on automotive infrastructure in this moment, or should they be making other decisions to, you know, invest in the rail network, invest in public transportation and things like that?

So I wouldn’t want to specifically, you know, make a direct comment on the Slovenian situation, because I don’t know it, but again, when I look at other countries that have been developing in recent years, like you know, say, say, China, for example, in the past number of decades, you know, they have built out a fantastic high speed rail network around their country, but a lot of their cities are also kind of flooded with cars and transportation infrastructure and they have these massive highways as well.

So they’ve kind of gone in both directions, but they’re still a very strong automotive dependence and I think part of that comes from how the automobile and the car were long kind of positioned as and kind of framed as in, in marketing and advertising and things like that as a symbol of modernity, right.

And if a country didn’t move in the direction of adopting cars and getting its people to buy automobiles then they weren’t actually kind of developing properly or kind of moving up the chain of element and I think that that’s really a flawed notion and something that, especially in the 21st century, that we really need to be challenging and reconsidering to think, you know, what is the form of transportation or what is kind of the network of transportation that will actually make life better for people instead of just kind of, you know, assuming that we need to go in a particular direction because, you know, kind of the United States did it first, then we’re all looking to them as an example and we need to follow along and blah, blah blah, right. And I don’t think that that has worked out particularly well for places that have followed that example.
00:23:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D
And I wanna hear your thoughts on another issue that is related to this.

So you already mentioned the difference or the complementary roles of the public and of the private sector in this regard and I’m assuming that the transportation or the area of transportation is mostly relying on the work done primarily by the public sector, by, you know, infrastructure building.

But then you have also mentioned in your book the case of Elon Musk’s the case of hyper-loop. Is this a strong enough signal that the private sector is, let’s say, capable of of, you know, building things from the ground up, almost literally in a way that you know the private sector can decide: “OK, we’ll build an alternate transportation system from the ground up, building new effective roads”, so to say and other things that are necessary for the development of this area or is this just like a like a media trick or something that that is there to sort of entertain people, but doesn’t have any real impact or even intent to sort of changed and influence the way we we move around.

00:25:03 Paris Marx
Yeah, it’s a complex question because I think if you look historically, you would certainly see that there can be a role for the private sector in transportation. You know if we look at the North American example, the building of railways, the building of streetcars and things like that were initially done by the private sector, but of course heavily subsidized by the public sector, of course, to make that happen.

If we look at kind of what is happening in this moment and if we look at the ideas that are coming from the tech industry, as you say, you know they are proposing or they are kind of making us believe that these private companies from Silicon Valley or you know at least kind of following the playbook or the mindset that comes from Silicon Valley are going to up in the transportation system and fix a lot of the problems, whether it’s with Hyperloop or self driving cars or what have you, but I think that what we see time and again is that these companies love to come out and make huge promises about what their ideas and their technologies are going to mean for society and then a few years later, once you actually look at what they’ve achieved, you can see that they very rarely are able to actually follow through on all the promises that are being made.

And for me, what that says is that they’re not actually solving problems in the transportation system they’re just distracting from real solutions that could address those problems and are ensuring that they stick around and that we remain kind of dependent on cars, or that our transportation system remains stagnant for much longer than it has to be and that ultimately, if we’re going to solve these problems, you know, we need the public sector to be making these investments in public transportation and cycling infrastructure, in rail infrastructure to ensure that people have other options that are not just the car in order to get around, and that those options are kind of, you know, safe, reliable, affordable, that people can actually imagine taking them.

I’m sure many of your listeners will know that this can be a serious problem in North America in particular where we’ve built so much for the automobile in the past number of decades, I guess that we haven’t really kept up and public transportation is not that great of an option for people.

So that is really what stands out when I think of what the tech industry has done, it’s not to revolutionize transportation, it’s not to solve real problems in transportation, it’s to distract from real solutions that we already have and that we could be implementing right now because instead they don’t really want to see the system change, but they think that if it is going to change, they would rather it be done by them so that they can start getting a cut of the profit.

You know, we were talking about how all these various corporate interests have a lot of, you know, benefit immensely from the dependence on automobiles, whether it’s because people buy cars or buy gas or pay for maintenance or what have you and the tech industry doesn’t really want to change that.

They just want to ensure that their business models are now integrated too, so that they can get a bunch of data from your car so that they can start putting subscription services in your car and things like that. It’s not really going to change very much.

00:28:28 Domen Savič / Citizen D
And you’ve just mentioned it, so another reason for the current situation is also the media representation of let’s say the tech industry, and since you you host the podcast, with the title “tech won’t save us” – why would you say the journalists, the tech journalists in in general, on the global scale are always quick to or are still quick to fall for the Silicon Valley trick in in parroting their reason for their revolutionary future.

We’re seeing it come time after time in many different examples and just recently, there’s been a bit of a push-back from particular tech journalists trying to be more critical about Silicon Valley’s vision of the future. So, why would you say it took the journalist sector so long to sort of gain this opposition stance towards the Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley tech industry.
00:29:49 Paris Marx
Yeah, it’s a really good question and I think I would say, you know, there has always been kind of critical reporting on the tech industry, the problem is that for a long time it didn’t get much attention right?

The mainstream publications and the tech publications were very overwhelmingly positive, and we have started to see that shift a little bit in the past few years, but it’s still just, you know, kind of overwhelmingly positive and repeating the types of stories and narratives that the tech industry would like.

So I think that when you look at why that is, I think there are a number of reasons for it. I think on one hand, you know the people who get into reporting on technology are usually people who are interested in and like technology, right? And so there’s a bit of a built-in bias that comes with that where they do really want to see those companies succeed to follow through on the promises that they’re making.

And so I think that helps to explain some of the reporting that was done on the tech industry in the past, but I think that the tech industry is also one that depends a lot on access, you know. So you know, if you think about getting access to like a Big Apple event where they’re going to unveil the new products and then you get to try them out or something like that, a lot of these companies do ensure that if you have written critically about them, you won’t get access to those opportunities, right? And so there is kind of an inbuilt incentive not to be too critical toward the companies or you’ll lose access to getting interviews with executives, getting access to those kinds of media events and product unveilings and things like that. So that is another reason for it.

And I think that we need to consider that the media industry has faced a lot of challenges over the past couple of decades as the revenue model and the advertising business model that they’ve been built on has been seriously threatened, and so we’ve seen a lot of cuts to media, you know, publications closing down, journalists being laid off and just an expectation that at least for some journalists, that they need to be kind of producing more stories, which means that they have less time to actually look into issues and deeply investigate them.

So it’s much easier than just to say, OK, this tech industry kind of put out a press release about, you know, these various new products that are that are coming out, so let’s kind of, you know, just write stories based on these press releases or product announcements or whatever and we can just release that, right. And there’s not a lot of knowledge about the history of these industries, the history of technology, and all these sorts of things to try to put in a bit more of a critical perspective.

And you know, as you say, I think that we are starting to see that change a bit, but unfortunately a lot of the stuff is still really positive, especially when there’s a lot of hype about something new like we see right now with AI or we saw in the past few years with crypto and again that I think that’s in part because the journalists who cover the, the, the industry are scared to be wrong, are scared to say that a certain new idea or new product isn’t gonna go anywhere because it’s ridiculous and you know shouldn’t be adopted and because if they get it wrong then it might look bad on them, right? But if they hype it up and say that it might be the future, and then it is not the future.

Well, I guess that doesn’t look so bad or they don’t think so at least.

00:33:11 Domen Savič / Citizen D
So another question related to your part is what are some I should say, editorial guidelines when you’re trying to decide on the topic or when you’re deciding on the coverage of a particular topic, what do you look for? What do you pay attention to?

00:33:29 Paris Marx
Yeah, it’s a good question and I always try to present people with a critical perspective that they might not get elsewhere and so on the show, what I do is every week I have a different kind of guest and an expert on the show in order to talk about a different aspect of the tech industry and the goal, of course, as we were talking about with kind of the general positive nature of tech coverage is to say, you know, you get that those positive stories from anywhere else.

But you know, the podcast is really where you come to for a critical perspective on this industry to maybe get you to think about the companies in it and the technologies in, in a bit of a different way. And so for me, when I think about what to cover on the show and what to talk about, you know, part of it is motivated by my own interests You know, the stories that I think are interesting, the topics I think are interesting and then I want to have a conversation about and then the other bit of it is is also you know just what is kind of popular at the moment, what are people talking about, what maybe needs a bit of a pushback?

So if there’s something happening in the news like recently with the Apple Vision Pro headset, we did an episode on that because it felt like it was something that was necessary to discuss, but also you know, we’re in this kind of broader hype cycle at the moment about generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and so I’ve done a number of episodes since the beginning of the year, kind of giving people a bit of a critical perspective on those technologies and on this kind of moment that we’re in with all the hype around AI, you know, to to try to ensure that people have a bit of a different perspective and idea on that and why it’s being driven right now rather than, you know, just kind of buying into what the CEO’s will want us to believe about AI.

So I guess those are a few of the different things that kind of shape how we think about it.

00:35:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D
It’s very interesting to compare notes or to try to think because we on this show try to do something similar for exactly the same reasons. Try to offer some type of counter narrative or maybe even open up a discussion on certain issues that are very streamlined, if you’re reading the local general press, but since we’re coming to the end of the episode, I just have one more topic to discuss with you.

So we usually give a few advice to the listeners in terms of what are some of the counter tactics on the personal, on political on, on regional, on yeah, family level, even when we’re talking or when we’re discussing, let’s say, the future of transport and the current developments in the field, is there something that that can be done from from a personal perspective or is everything based just on hopefully good political decision making that that won’t take too many pages out of the out of the Silicon Valley playbook?

00:36:36 Paris Marx
Yeah, I definitely think that there are things that people can do as individuals, you know, kind of, especially when that means kind of doing things collectively as well, right. So I think that as individuals, we need to be able to look at these technologies and what’s coming from the tech industry and to really question these narratives. Makes sense, right?

And I think ultimately that means when we see these stories about technology in the industry, we ask who really benefits if this is kind of the future that is being sold to us. If this is the future that actually arrives, and I think that very clearly, if we look below the PR and the marketing that comes from these things we can see that, you know, in many cases these futures are not actually going to be beneficial for the vast majority of regular people in society and are just going to keep kind of the wealth flowing up to these billionaires and whatnot, I also find it’s great to kind of just have conversations with people that I know about technology.

You know, if you say that your listeners are a bit more critical on these things and you know maybe have a bit of a different perspective than what would just be regularly in the media you know my family members and my friends are always asking me about technology.

When they see things and what my opinion is on it, because they know that I have a bit of a different opinion and so we always discuss those things and you know, I find that those conversations are really fruitful, right.

And I think that the final thing I would say on that point is that, you know, we can’t just rely on the political system in order to kind of make these changes while we would certainly want to see the political system get more critical, that does actually require the public to also be more critical as well, right?

And to have kind of an active power or collective voice to be able to push the government to do something like that. But I think as well we also have the power to push back against these technologies kind of on an individual level when we’re collectively criticizing them. And I think that, you know, I point to examples like the Metaverse for example, where this was supposed to be the big future of meta and Facebook and people just thought it was a joke, and now you don’t hear very much about it. Cryptocurrency was another one that was very huge for, you know, about a year and a half and while there was a lot of hype and excitement about it, there was also a lot of very critical people who were saying, you know, don’t buy into this fantasy that we’re being sold and then we can see what happened, where the prices of these crypto tokens really collapsed and a lot of people lost a lot of money as a result.

And even if you go back to the kind of early 2010s you can see Google Glass, you know, the last time Google tried to sell us a bunch of smart glasses and people immediately kind of revolted against that, and that product was shut down and just becomes, became something used in enterprise spaces but not available to the regular public.

So I think that there are many different ways that we can push back on the tech industry and its visions for the future.
00:39:39 Domen Savič / Citizen D
I just have one more question, I was half laughing when you were talking about your family asking you for advice. Do you ever give them advice from my own experience as well, is there a situation or was there a situation when you were positive about tech and the tech industry, or are you always, like me saying: “You don’t need that”, “This is crap,”… you know, you’re probably better off without it, no matter what the topic of the discussion really is?

00:40:22 Paris Marx
It’s an interesting question, right, because I would say I used to be very positive about tech and very excited about tech. You know, I used to be an Apple fanboy back in the day. I was the kind of person who always got really excited about new Apple products and, you know, especially in, you know, the first decade of the 2000s. In the early 2010s I kind of believed a lot of stuff that came out of the tech industry and was very excited about what it might mean.

And I think that a lot of that started to change in the early to mid 2010s when I really started to see on one hand the impact of the share economy and services like Uber and food delivery services and things like that and what they were doing to to workers by ensuring that they didn’t have labor rights and that their their pay was being pushed down and things like that, but the other piece of it was also, you know, your listeners might remember in the mid 2010s there was a big kind of hype around automation and AI and the idea that robots were going to take all our jobs and there were gonna be no more truck drivers or taxi drivers and robots, we’re going to make our coffees and all this kind of stuff, right? And people were wondering what jobs we were gonna do as humans and that really didn’t happen, right? We didn’t have that elimination of work that all these people in the tech industry were saying that we were gonna have and all these people in the media were saying we were going to have and what actually happened was once again, these technologies were implemented in such a way as to reduce the power of workers and to increase the power.

And so that was a really kind of eye opening moment for me because I did actually believe that, you know, a bunch of jobs were going to be automated and I was concerned about what that was going to mean for people and then when I saw that didn’t happen, that made me look at these technologies and the industry itself in a very different way and to really think a lot more critically about what they were proposing and why they constantly have these different cycles where they’re pushing new technologies at us.

And it’s not because they are really looking to transform society and are really looking to roll out these technologies to make everyone’s life better. It’s just because it benefits them from a financial perspective every few years, have a new, have a new technology that gets hyped up, which means a bunch of companies see their valuations rise which means that the venture capitalists who invested in them can cash out and make money back on their investments. And then it all collapses and then you know a new cycle starts again. And this is just how the industry works and so that was a really kind of eye opening moment for me.

00:43:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D
A perfect a perfect ending to to this episode. Thank you so much, Paris, for the book and for your work, but also for sitting down with us and having this discussion. This was Citizen D podcast, we’ll see each other next month. Best of luck going forward and talk to you soon.

00:43:28 Paris Marx
Thanks so much.

Citizen D advice:* Think of a car as a problem, not as a solution * Reevaluate the role of tech journalism in a society * Study the past to understand the future

More information:* Science for the People: Vehicles of Extraction – article * How Corporate America Created Car Culture—And What We Can Do To Change It – article * The Internet Is Broken. How Do We Fix It? – essay * You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong – article

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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What was the impact of generative AI propaganda in the case of Russian invasion of Ukraine?

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What role do journalists play in surveillance capitalism?

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We sat down with a social antropologist Marie Heřmanová with a focus on digital anthropology, the internet and research on online identities and communities to talk about researching the influencer culture, influencers, platforms, credibility of the influencers, but also about fake news, propaganda and hate speech, related to them.

What she is most interested in about conspiracy theories is why they thrive so well on social media, how they function in online space, who meets them there, how this affects online communities, and what role the algorithms of digital communication platforms play in the spread of conspiracy theories.

She is also interested in what connection can be found between conspiracy theories and the socio-economic conditions of those who spread them, and what role digital inequalities play in this.

Transcript of the episode: Expand the transcript 00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen DWelcome everybody. It’s the 10th of May 2023 and you’re listening to this citizen D episode podcast. Wow. Citizen Day Episode podcast episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of May 2023 with us today is a researcher in the field of digital anthropology, Marie Heřmanová, who focuses, among other things on the issues of influences, their sociological and political impact and general klout. So welcome Marie, and welcome to the show.

00:00:37 Marie HeřmanováWell, thank you for inviting me.

00:00:39 Domen Savič / Citizen DLet’s go broad. It’s story time, and let’s first address the origin story of influencers. There’s been quite an uptick of these so-called or actual influencers in the in the past few years. I’ve I’ve read somewhere that young people these days don’t want to be firemen, they don’t want to be nurses, they don’t want to be doctors. They want to be influencers when they grow up. So if we label the humans of late 21st century as as homo computerus, where do influencers come into the mix?

00:01:19 Marie HeřmanováSo what is the origin story? Just now that you mentioned all of this research or data floating around like you know 80% of the kids actually want to be Youtubers, I always look into it and I have never seen like a proper research to actually, you know, back up this data. It’s usually just some media outlet that did some sort of survey on their website or something like that, so I’m just saying I’m not actually sure if that’s true that 80% of the kids want to be influencers, but it’s probably true that a lot of the kids or a lot of young people see this as a sort of viable career for them.

The origin story? So influencers as a profession or as a position of authority is tied with what we call the user generated content platforms. So it’s not just, you know, one-dimensional relationship from the producer to the consumer of the message, but where everyone can become a producer as well. I think the first generation of what we could call today influencers were Youtubers, so early Youtubers, you know, it was mostly like entertainment content and gamers. I think gamers were the first big group of influencers.

But I think the real origins of the influencer culture as we know it now was with Instagram, so it was after 2010 and I would say the peak was maybe like 2015 probably. So I would say from 2010 to 2020, there was a decade of the influencers. It might be now coming to an end. That’s another interesting question.

So I think that’s the origin story. And I think it also makes sense that, you know, if we have these platforms than everyone can sort of become an authority bottom up. So that’s what created the influencer

Another interesting question is about the influencer word itself. We don’t really have a good definition, and there are some researchers that are saying it’s not even a good word for what we are trying to describe because influence is a one way relationship from someone who is active to a passive audience, and that’s not the case with the influencers

This is a multidimensional relationship that that they are in in direct touch with their audiences.

00:04:12 Domen Savič / Citizen DYou’ve opened up a lot of talking points, so my next question would be the media representation of influencers, right? So how is is? How is this fueling and at the same time, how is it sort of slowing down the influencer industry?

Because I would guess or based on on my knowledge of, let’s say the media representation of influencers in Slovenia is that it’s it’s very one sided, right. So there is these stereotypes about influencers shilling for their brands, we had a little bit and we’re going to touch upon that later on a little bit of controversy of influencers during the pandemic. But generally speaking the general, the mass media, the old media is very one-trick pony when it comes to to asking or representing the influencer culture. So what are some of the what is the media getting right about them and where does the media totally completely I mean totally misses missed the mark on on influencers?

00:05:19 Marie HeřmanováI mean it’s difficult for me to judge it from a sort of global point of view, but from what I see in the Czech Republic, and I would say probably, you know, Slovak, I would say the central Eastern Europeans. I think most journalists just missed the point completely.

I think you were right that there is a lot of sort of stigma around the word influence, right? It’s also interesting that when I talk with them and do my interviews, none of them ever said to me, I am an influencer. They hate the word. They don’t want to be called an influencer.

That’s also an interesting point, I said because there is this sort of general stigma that these are just, you know, really vain people, just being on their phone all day, taking selfies and being paid huge amounts of money for it, which is obviously not an accurate picture of what they do. At this point it’s a profession.

It’s a job, just like any other and here are people who are doing a good job and there are people who are doing a bad job. Obviously the people who are doing the bad job, which could mean that, you know, they have this really bizarre, ridiculous ads or badly done brand corporations or they’re just spreading fake news and propaganda and obvious like conspiracy theory.

So this is where the media usually start their reporting – that influencers are people who have big audience and they’re just telling nonsense and there’s usually some sort of moral panic about it. But that is just, you know, one aspect of it and the same as if you have journalists who are doing a really bad job and you have influencers who are doing a really bad job, but you also have a lot of influencers who are doing a really good job and who really have managed to build some sort of authority and who really communicate in a really interesting way with their audiences.

For example, what I have seen happening in the Czech Republic and it was very visible – we had presidential elections few months ago and in the campaign leading to the presidential elections, it was really visible that, you know, there were influencers who were participating in the campaigns, some of them were probably and that’s another interesting issue, some of them probably being paid by the teams, by the by the marketing teams of the presidential candidates, some of them are just, you know, expressing their support and for me, it sort of looked like that the journalists were freaking out a little bit because look, now they are basically a competition now, like there are people who have access to information, who have access to big audiences and who are doing podcasts and who are doing their own shows and who are writing newsletters and people are not reading, you know what I’m writing anymore? They are just listening to influencers.

So for me, that was a really interesting point where journalists were really like something is really going on here. And we probably cannot just look at these people as you know, like marketing channels anymore and just make fun of them because this is getting serious and they were freaking out a little bit.

00:08:42 Domen Savič / Citizen DWhy do you think that happens? So why do you think the audiences started to move away from, let’s say, the mainstream traditional, whatever you may call it old media outlets, and focusing more on these firebrands on these people with microphones and cameras talking to them online. What happened there?

00:09:07 Marie HeřmanováI don’t think there’s one reason you can pinpoint like it’s it’s all part of bigger shifts in, the whole media ecosystem and the whole media landscape, I would say. But obviously I think one of the reasons like it, you know, general reasons like we have issues definitely in the Czech Republic, we have big issues with you know, declining trust in the media.

One of the reasons why influencers are now becoming competition for journalists is and that’s a big part of authenticity, obviously, because they have a completely different relationships with their audience that based on authenticity that’s based on this really strong para-social relationship where you feel like, you know the person. You trust them because they’re being really transparent about who they are, what they do on an everyday basis. So it’s a really different sort of relationship.

Also, a lot of the influencers are, you know in age or in just, you know, social standing really close to their audiences so they are also able to translate the news and translate the political events in a language that is more fun and accessible to their audiences.

I think it’s also the general shift in you know in how we consume content on the Internet, what we are interested in and it has to do with you know the general content hyper separation, the information disorder.

If you go go on the Internet today, you know, it used to be, I am so old that I remember the Internet in those days where you just opened a feed on Facebook and you actually got some interesting stuff. You got the news and maybe you open Twitter and you were following journalists and you could actually get your news in this way, but that that’s not the case anymore.

Now it’s so much content, most of it it ads, most of it is like algorithmic content that you’re not interested in at all, and I think what the influencers are doing is a really good job is that they are being they are now in a position of sort of curators of the content.

So you pick people that you know, that you like that have a charisma, that appeal to you. You pick people that are sort of are interested in the same type of content that you are and they do the job for you.

So you follow your influencer, digital opinion leader, writer, podcaster, whoever, and you know that you know, if I follow this person, I will get the content that I’m interested in and I don’t have to look at all the garbage in my feed to find what is interesting, so it also has to do with how the whole you know how Internet works, how the media landscape works, and what we expect from it.

00:11:55 Domen Savič / Citizen DBefore we move on, I wanna I want to touch on on the subject of authenticity. So you’ve mentioned one of the reasons that people are shifting towards the influencer media outlets. Let’s call them that is because authenticity but on the other side you see a lot so-called debunking videos where the influencers are showing the their audience their true selves in terms of “Here’s what it here’s what I need to do before I appear in front of the camera,” “It’s not all real, it’s fake,” … There’s a lot of setup involved in.

00:12:30 Marie HeřmanováBut that’s part of, isn’t it? That’s a strategy of how to be more authentic that you show all, the work behind it.

00:12:40 Domen Savič / Citizen DTrue, but only some of them are doing it so I’m guessing that people who aren’t doing that aren’t being authentic, or am I wrong?

00:12:48 Marie HeřmanováWell, that’s such a great question and we have written a whole book about authenticity so I could talk about this for ages really.

00:12:53 Domen Savič / Citizen DGo, go, go.

00:12:55 Marie HeřmanováBut I think authenticity is so interesting because really in in online communication and influence, the communication specifically, it’s a buzzword, it’s, you know, it’s the Holy Grail, because it works right?

Because if you manage to, if you’re presence on a platform such as Instagram or YouTube or Twitter or wherever, if your presence feels authentic to your audience, then this is what enables to you to, you know, have some sort of social capital that you can then turn into economic capital. So this is what makes you a good influencer.

But I think, I have to use the word sorry, authenticity is social construct, right? It’s not a thing. It’s not a state that you can achieve once and then you will be authentic forever. It’s a really dynamic process.

It’s a performative process as well. What you just mentioned – so influencers are aware that is important part of their you know, self presentation of social media. So they develop all these strategies how to sort of enhance their authentic performance.

So just showing you know the note filter photos showing the behind the scenes videos for example what you just described. And what is really interesting about authenticity in on social media and in influencer communication that you know, it’s this dynamic negotiation.

Like, what do we agree on that, we feel this is authentic and the change is so it’s it’s not a static thing, it’s it’s a process that gets negotiated every day between the producers and their audiences and I think this is what’s so interesting about it.

There’s this paradox like we know that the influencers are doing it, that it’s a performance that they want to appear authentic to us. So it’s staged a little bit, so it shouldn’t be authentic, but it still feels authentic to us. So it’s this interesting paradox and interesting process of negotiating where are the boundaries of of authentic performance.

So yeah, really interesting question.

00:15:05 Domen Savič / Citizen DBut yeah, and to follow up… so you’ve mentioned the early days of of the Internet or the early days when when content was still king and I wanna follow up with a question on how did the influencers move from this brand related communication towards a more let’s say political piece.

So it it seems that that there was a shift in the middle where influencers were not just reviewing makeup, toys, games and commenting on on, let’s say products or services, but they moved, towards commenting like actual like political events or events that were that were happening in the more general media landscape.

So what happened there?

00:15:59 Marie HeřmanováThis is really interesting question again, because what I’m interested in right now in in my current research project is specifically this shift like to what we can what we could probably call political influencers, even though, yeah then it really depends how you define politics, how you define influencer. So it’s it’s an interesting debate, but yes.

I think because influencers when I mentioned you know we dates the first peak of the info answer culture to you know, 2010, 2012 just as I mentioned. So in those days influencers were mostly like marketing channels, really just doing lifestyle content then working with lifestyle brands and you know, talking about food and cosmetics and travel and I think the shift maybe started, you know, before the pandemic, it definitely started before the pandemic.

But again, in the Czech Republic, it might have been similar in in Slovenia as well, I think this really accelerated with the pandemic.

And that is because, one thing I think most of the research that we have on the notion of political influencers or social media personalities turning like political readers or political opinion leaders is from is about the far right political influencers. So most of the research that we have would be on the American outright or generally outright far right groups in the English speaking world.

So in a way, the research is a little bit biased, but it also makes sense because these groups tend to be really progressive in the way they use social media so they were really like the alt-right Youtubers, they were really sort of, you know, they invented this whole type of political communication, I would say.

And the mainstream and the left is only slowly catching up, but also the reason why it all accelerated during the pandemic is because… I have actually written an article about this where I used this concept of politicization of the domestic. Which means that if you are a lifestyle influencer, I don’t know a mom influencer and you talk about, you know, raising your kids and you talk about products for the kids or their outfits, whatever.

But then overnight you are in a situation when you know the lifestyle disappears. You can’t go out with the kids, there’s no reason to get dressed or anything, but at the same time these everyday decisions, such as you know, will I go grocery shopping to the supermarket? Will we go on holiday? Will we organize a play date for kids?

These everyday decisions, they basically became part of the political debate because, you know, within the context of the pandemic and the entire pandemic restrictions, you had to defend them. You have to explain why I decided to actually go out with my kids, because this is my opening and on this and this, this is this is how I see, you know, the government decision to restrict people going out, for example.

So what I had this was really interesting for me to follow because I started my poster project beginning of 2020, then the pandemic started like you know, March 2020. So I have really have been able to follow it in in real time and for a lot of the influencers and specifically women influencers, this was sort of an opportunity how to really use their authority for the first time and how to really use this sort of influence and this sort of really strong relationship that they have with their communities.

And it was for the first time that they felt like, you know, I have, I have a say in this. I have a voice and I feel responsible to use this voice.

So yeah, I think the pandemic really played a big role in it, but there’s no going back. We are now in this really interesting situation, where influencers are more and more influential in political communication and the same time, a lot of journalists, a lot of politicians, are also adapting more and more of influencer communication strategies.

So yeah, I don’t have any interesting observations about this yet, but this is what I’m interested right now. We are probably heading to some sort of completely new type of bottom up grassroots digital authority, so it will be really interesting to follow.

00:20:41 Domen Savič / Citizen DOK, so so so first question right off the bat. Why is there such a huge difference between the alt right or the right wing influencers, the right wing politics and the left wing politics? Why are the left wingers playing catch up with the basically the alt-right Neo Nazis in this area?

00:21:01 Marie HeřmanováI don’t know. You know, maybe there is a good answer to this question, but maybe I’m not the right person to answer it because I’m not an expert on far-right, politics. But I think this is also because there might be a bias in the research that there is a tons of research on the far right. We don’t have as much research on how, for example, you know like this political group are using Internet for political messaging, for activism. I think you know if you think about how populism works, then social media is sort of, you know, there there’s tons of research about how social media enabled populists to sort of rise and grow and create a strong relationship with their audience.

Because this is where they try it. If populism is about positioning yourself as the voice of the people, and now you have this communication tool where you can talk to the people and then you can pretend you are really like one of them because you don’t need the mediators, you don’t need intermediaries such as journalist or the established institutions than are built into the system, you can skip all this, then this is obviously what populist try to do in this environment.

So I think that’s that’s one of the reasons. It’s kind of difficult to say I think because we, even though the research is, as I’m say, we don’t have the same data that we have about the far right as we have about the life, political, online communication, even though it’s changing obviously and we definitely don’t have enough research about these things.

For example, in our languages in the central Eastern European spaces, most of the research is from the US or from English speaking online spaces. We’re just getting part of the picture, but from what we know, usually the far right groups are just less concerned with propagandist tactics and they’re less concerned with spreading fake news and disinformation.

If you look at the numbers, the right wing political activists are spreading more information that can be labeled at disinformation and fake news. So that’s one of the reasons as well, that they’re probably just care about less or that’s that’s a very easy explanation.

But we could say they care less about if what they’re saying is actually true. They just care about that it works on the Internet, but I’m not sure if that’s the whole story.

00:24:08 Domen Savič / Citizen DSo to sum it up, stupid sells, right?

00:24:12 Marie HeřmanováObviously, but that was always true even before the Internet.

00:24:16 Domen Savič / Citizen DSo you’ve mentioned different platforms, right, you we talked about Facebook, Instagram, there’s there’s a lot of other platforms that are that are that are living off the influencer culture.

I wanna hear your thoughts on on the role of platforms in, in this development of influencer culture right?

I just recently I saw a brand of of cameras pitching to the audience “This is the perfect camera for an influencer”, right? So you have platforms, you have technology, you have gadgets, you have IKEA furniture for, for influencers. So, how big or what’s the role of of these platforms supporting this, should we say, influence our economy influencers? Job, social, social aspects, living style. So everything is influencer right?

00:25:21 Marie HeřmanováThat’s a really good question again. Because it’s always like a really dynamic relationship between the users and the platform, and you can see for example that I think one of the reasons why Facebook lost most of its relevance in the recent years is because they, the platform never managed to build a good relationship with the type of influencers that were on Facebook.

If you compare it to YouTube or Instagram where you know the Instagram is debatable lately, because I think it’s also losing relevance and it’s one of the people is that they didn’t manage to establish a stable and really reliable environment for the influencers to make their living and to sort of rely on the platform that it will enable them to make a living and on Instagram influencers are mostly complaining about the algorithm and they’re fighting with the algorithm.

So you can see that when the platforms sort of early on when the people behind the platform and when tech people and when the algorithm algorithm developers, when they managed to sort of predict or not to predict really, but when they manage to see, OK, so there is this group of people who are bringing a lot of audience and a lot of clicks and a lot of you know potential ads audience to our platform.

So how can we keep them here and how can we make their life easier.

So this is what YouTube got further early on because there was a way how to make money directly from YouTube on the platform, not from the beginning, but very early on this, for example, never happened on Instagram like there’s no way to support someone directly on Instagram, right? You don’t earn any money from just people being on your profile or seeing your reels or seeing your posts.

TikTok is also using the Creative fund and you can make some money. It’s not much, but you can make money from TikTok because if you manage to get a certain number of views, then there is a way how you can work directly with the platform. So I think this is really important.

But at the same time the platforms play a huge role, but for me it’s an interesting relationship because the I think the platforms and the people behind the platforms, they have the power for so long, the relationship was always sort of asymmetric that the platform, you know, there are these huge companies that basically monopolize the Internet and the individual users have very little power and very few ways how to impact what is going on on the platforms and I think this is shifting a little bit.

Because you have this whole new way of communicating, because this whole new generation of influencers, generations of digital opinion leaders are working cross platforms so they build their presence on on several platforms at the same time and they’re also trying to monetize their content and keep their audience in different ways, they’re moving to various subscription platforms such as Patreon or Substack.

There’s a lot of diversity and I think the platforms are slowly like, they’re not really losing their power. But I think the platforms you didn’t manage to catch up with these influences, they’re losing. It happened on Facebook, it’s now happening on Instagram.

It will be really interesting to see where YouTube and TikTok are going with this, but I don’t think because the influencer culture you know as we have known it for the past 10 years was tied to this like there are these huge mainstream platforms.

Everyone is on the same platform, so there is the possibility to build a really big audience on one platform and make a lot of money. That is not true anymore.

I don’t think this will be true in the future that you know, the Internet is splitting into smaller communities, smaller platforms, so the influencers are also adapting, they’re communicating in different ways and they’re diversifying how they work with their audiences.

So, yeah, again, it will be interesting to observe how this develops in the future.

00:30:00 Domen Savič / Citizen DSo would you say like listening to you talk about the splitting of the Internet or splitting of the audience, would you say that the same thing that that happened to the mass media in regards to the influencers is now happening to the influencers in regards to let’s call them micro influencers?

00:30:21 Marie HeřmanováHmm, good question. Yeah, maybe.

00:30:24 Domen Savič / Citizen DCause I remember like my degree from journalism was on the issue of blogs back in 2008 I think and I in the conclusion of this I basically wrote about giving creed or giving clout to individual bloggers in terms of OK, the mass media will lose the audience when the audience will delegate the relevance factor to individual bloggers, and they’ll take away the relevance factor from the, let’s say, the mass general media.

So in the influencer economy, let’s call it that, using the most broad term for this type of activities is probably the way I see it going the same way, right. So you’re losing, platforms are spreading or, you know, dividing audiences.

Influencers are turning into these digital workers that are trying to game the algorithm and they’re trying to get ahead of the game and at the same time, the audience is basically, you know, disappearing or splitting up because nobody or that’s my, let’s say, educated guess, is present on all platforms at the same time, right?

So we’re all like the older people are moving towards, you know, Facebook, and I’m not gonna even say Twitter, I’m just going to say Facebook and the younger ones are…

00:32:05 Marie HeřmanováBecause we don’t know what will happen with Twitter tomorrow.

00:32:09 Domen Savič / Citizen DTrue, true.

00:32:10 Domen Savič / Citizen DTwitter is quite risky.

00:32:12 Domen Savič / Citizen DQuite risky at the moment, and it’s even worse because there’s no actual like for political influencers, there’s no, at least in Slovenia. Let’s say there’s no there’s no genuine replacement for Twitter right now. So where do you, where do you want to go, right?

00:32:27 Marie HeřmanováThat is actually such a good example for what we’ve just discussed and one of the things, or one of the many things I would say that Elon Musk probably doesn’t get about the platform that he bought, is that that the big users, the Twitter influencers…, you know, the whole mess with the blue check marks and with verification on Twitter, so that how do you know, if you are now looking at the real profile or not?

But also, paying for the subscription and that was one of the reasons, if you have these people who really bring the attention and really make the audience stay on your platform that you need these people.

You have to enable them to make money off the platform, otherwise they’ll go elsewhere. You have to enable them in some way to be verified to really prove to their audiences that this is legit.

So I think this is a really great example of how the platform is losing relevance because that’s one of the many reasons why the platform is losing relevance. But because they just didn’t get this main concept like, you know, who are the influencers? Why do I need these people on my platform?

But you asked, sorry, I I interrupted you asked about the splitting of the audiences and there’s this interesting term like niche influencers, influencers that are sort of gaining relevance and they’re, you know, people who have maybe smaller community.

But they have a they have a community that’s really dedicated to some niche issue and it could be an anime series or knitting or crocheting… It doesn’t really matter, so or it could be a PC game, whatever.

We can see this process where these again as I said, I think the era of big platforms with big influencers with huge audiences, basically people like mainstream people who are trying to be as specific as possible and talk about everything to everyone… I think this is really over and we are now looking for people who have the same interest as you?

And you are trying to look for communities where you can, you know, follow these specific interests and I think younger people today or generally the future of Internet, is that you have many profiles on many different platforms and you don’t expect to get all the content or everything you want from one specific place.

You have a server on discord where you discuss your favorite game, or you are on Tumblr because you are part of fandom, then you are on Instagram because you follow people there who talk about books, then you get your for you page on TikTok that serves you whatever you are interested in. Then maybe you follow some people doing cultural analysis on YouTube, but you sort of curate whom you follow and you don’t look for these big names. You look for people who have really created this particular niche that is interesting for you.

But at the same time this is really important because I think these more, you know, these communities and some of the newer platforms, for example, Discord, they work with privacy and anonymity in a different way.

So most people on Discord, for example, you don’t use your real name, right? It’s very different; the presentation and the communication and the interaction you have there; it’s very different from how you present yourself from Instagram or Twitter, even when it’s all about like building a personal brand.

So again, that’s another thing that I think it’s a matter of the past, the personal brands on Internet.

But at the same time, if you are in this small niche community, probably the relationship you have with other people in the community and to the leader of the community, to the niche influencer is much stronger. And it’s a, it’s a really, you know, tight knit relationship.

And then the way these niche influencers influence their communities is probably much more complex and interesting than what we’ve seen with these big influencer names.

So that’s, another part of the problem I would say.

00:37:26 Domen Savič / Citizen DWe’re slowly wrapping up and I and I just wanna touch upon the previously mentioned COVID pandemic, the fake news propaganda conspiracy theories. So we’ve just said that different platforms enable sort of or offer support to different types of of influencers. You have platforms that are more suited for, I don’t know, game reviews for that are more suited for political analysis or comments.

So why do you think the propaganda conspiracy theories, fake news, hate and everything else works on every platform. So when you look on Twitter, Tumblr, Twitch, the myriad of platforms that are present you always find haters literally everywhere.

00:38:26 Marie HeřmanováIt’s a very universal emotion, isn’t it? But yes, you have good content, bad content, interesting content, rubbish content, you know, positive content and hate content everywhere. But I think it’s all on all of the platforms, but it works and it manifests and it impacts the users on every platform in a really different way.

I read somewhere that the only platform or that the least hateful platform is actually Pinterest. And it was a study that I read, and it’s actually an interesting example because Pinterest and I didn’t know about it before and it’s definitely worth looking into, because Pinterest was actually very strict from the beginning about regulations and about banning and certain type of content and they actually managed to build a platform that is pretty safe for a lot of people now, which is interesting, but it’s not a mainstream platform and I think this gets more and more difficult to figure.

I think the easy or the easiest, the most straightforward, but I think also probably the most useful answer to the question that hate is everywhere because people are everywhere, and because the hateful content is there.

It’s interesting to see and discuss how the features and the technical affordances of the platform and some platforms enable hate content to spread faster and further than on some other platforms.

But the hate is there because there are bad actors and there are propagandists or they are paid propagandists, or they’re just bad actors, or they are just psychopaths everywhere who just, you know, this is the most effective communication tool that we have right now, so obviously the bad actors are going to use these communication tools, so a part of it is about how the platforms handle it.

But the reason that we have hate everywhere is because we have the reasons for people to be hateful and I think this is a very common mistake that we that we sometimes make that all polarization in the society, a lot of toxic content, then this is all because of Facebook or because of Meta or because of TikTok. And let’s just bend the platform and just regulate the platform. But the platforms they do not really create these inequalities and these problems in the society, they just make them more visible and they just offer tools for the people to get their frustration out.

But even if we ban the whole Internet, the inequalities and the reasons why people feel the need to hate on other people, the reasons for this are elsewhere.

00:41:28 Domen Savič / Citizen DSo that’s my my second final question. Citizen Citizen D Podcast has many final questions.

So I just wanna sort of steer you down this road that you’ve you’ve just started. So the platform regulation, let’s say political debate, that is going on right now, right, you have platforms that are basically saying something similar to to your words just now, saying we are not responsible for the hate that goes on our platforms.

On the other hand, you have critics that are saying, you know, you’re not responsible per say, but your, you know, your algorithms and your your inner workings are sort of amplifying the hateful rhetoric.

So how do you see the current debate around regulation, self and co regulation going? Is it going in in an I’m not gonna say the right direction… I’m going to say in an effective direction to sort of limit or to sort of this type of behavior online.

00:42:38 Marie HeřmanováYou know, I think there is the problem really is I wouldn’t say the platforms aren’t responsible. Obviously they are and I think it’s their obvious argument like “We’re just the platform. We’re not responsible for the content”, I think that’s bullshit from my point of view.

But the reason why I was saying it is because people sometimes… they just don’t want to look at why are people so frustrated. So they just blame it on Facebook and that’s not productive, that’s not going to solve anything.

So that’s that. That’s one important point, but the other one is, the platforms work in the attention economy. So they are private companies and their main, you know, the reason why they exist are profits.

But at the same time, these platforms are now basically, their function in the society is resembling the sort of public infrastructure. And I think this is where we get the problem. So we have actors, we have platforms. They mostly just want to, you know, gain money. But how they work in the society and what they provide to the society is something that we all sort of, you know.

We now rely on as a sort of public infrastructure that we need for political discussion, that we need for the functioning of the society and we consider it integral to be part of the democratic processes, and this is.

This is the problem because you can regulate, you should regulate and you know, for example, as I see it, the DSA and the DMA and the European legislation, from my point of view, I’m not an expert on and policy expert, but from what I know about it, I think it is going into the right direction and it’s definitely the most progressive legislation around it, if you compare it to other countries, if you compare it, for example to the US, I think the European Union is doing a lot of… It’s definitely discussing it a lot and doing a lot of interesting attempts, so I would say yes, it’s going to right direction, but it’s perhaps too slow and it won’t solve this basic paradox that it’s really the way how hate speech and toxic content gets spread on social media.

It’s built into the business models of the platforms and in order to really do something about, the final regulation really would be to turn them into something completely different, it would be to say look, your main goal, your aim why you exist, is not to make money from ads, but it’s to serve as public infrastructure, and that’s a really difficult discussion.

And do you even want to do this again? In the free market, democratic society, can you turn, you know, private company, can you push them into this direction? Obviously you can’t. There’s just not enough political pressure that just I don’t see a political will to do this, but I think we have to acknowledge this, there’s no way around it.

The business model of the platforms, part of the business model is that toxic content will always be spread on the platforms unless you really turn the whole model into something completely different.

00:46:14 Domen Savič / Citizen DI think I think this is the perfect conclusion to to to our episode. We always try to end up on a positive note, even though we’re usually talking about things that don’t have many positive notes in them, so thank you so much Marie for dropping by and best of luck with with your future endeavors.

00:46:36 Marie HeřmanováThank you so much and thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Citizen D advice:* Rethink the role of the influencers in the media/politics industry * Focus on niche and quality metrics * Consider the influencers as a political tool and power

More information: Politicisation of the Domestic: Populist Narratives About Covid-19 Among Influencers – article * Cultures of Authenticity – book * Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life – website * Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube – analysis*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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doc. dr. Aidan Cerar se na Inštitutut za politiko prostora ukvarja s trajnostnim urbanim razvojem, skupnostnimi praksami, ustvarjanjem prostora in trajnostno mobilnostjo, predvsem pa sodelovanjem javnosti v urejanju prostora.

V epizodi se pogovarjava na temo pametnih mest po svetu in doma – kakšni so trendi na tem področju, kako se scena v Sloveniji razlikuje od drugih vodilnih držav na tem področju, kakšna je vloga meščana pri sooblikovanju politik urbanističnega razvoja?

Kako dr. Cerar ocenjuje posamezne projekte pametnih mest v Sloveniji, imamo tukaj kakšne dobre prakse ali gre za eksperimente brez dolgoročnih potencialov? Kdo so glavni motivatorji razvoja, kako se na tem področju obnaša država?

Državljan D svetuje:* Potrebujemo suverene politične odločevalce, ki ne bodo podlegali interesom industrije * Nobeno mesto ni premajhno za “pametnizacijo” * Zasebnost in podatkovna ekonomija sta del problema in rešitve pametnih mest

Dodatne informacije: Tudi v Sloveniji imamo pametna mesta, katero je najpametnejše? – članek * Pametna mesta – priložnosti in pasti – oddaja * Smart cities present risks but also opportunities for inclusion – članek * Pametna mesta v Sloveniji – analiza*

O podcastu:Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

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We caught up with Jason Scott on his visit to Slovenia in december 2022 when he visited the Computer Museum in Ljubljana and participated in the fireside chat about his work with the Internet archive, the challenges of archiving the digital age and other related topics.

We also talked about the best way to preserve our digital memories, how do internet historians decide on what to archive and what to abadon and other questions related to his work.

Citizen D advice:* Archive your data on different media and different location * Be careful when using walled garden systems * Check the consistency of archived data

More information:* Fireside chat with Jason Scott – recording * Archiving the web and Twitter – article * On AI and art – article

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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How do journalists and activists investigate black box algorithms, what happens once the reports go out and who is blame for the disasters by black box algorithms that impact human lives?

We sat down with investigative reporter Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse reports to discuss the decision-making algorithms wreaking havoc, the safe-guards against algorithmic injustice and the political discourse revolving around these issues.

Spanning several decades, the algorithmic decision making systems are being highlighted by activists, researchers and journalists and the political discource is slowly shifting from techno-deterministic to critical and human-centric. How did we get here and what lies ahead?

Citizen D advice:* Demand transparency and access to your data * Question self-regulatory model and focus on political oversight * Support critical media outlets

More information: Lighthouse reports: The Algorithm Addiction – article * Lighthouse reports: Junk Science Underpins Fraud Scores – article * Amnesty International Netherlands: Xenophobic machines: Discrimination through unregulated use of algorithms in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal – article * Politico: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms – article*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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Leto začenjamo delovno s pogovorom o delu v informacijski družbi, socio-ekonomski realnosti spletnih velikanov in vlogi medijev pri konstrukcije medijske realnosti na tem področju.

Neja Berger je novinarka medija Pod črto, sodeluje pa tudi na Radiu Študent. Hkrati se v okviru študija ukvarja z vidiki dela v informacijski družbi in problemov, ki nas na tem področju še čakajo.

V pogovoru debatiramo o vlogi regulatorja in kritičnega potrošnika ter državljana, razmišljamo o domači in mednarodni sceni ter gledamo v prihodnost ter označujemo premike na temu področju.

Državljan D svetuje:* Zakonodajalec je na področju urejanja razmerij informacijske družbe ključen, potrošnik vedno manj * Potrebujemo nov premislek o smislu in cilju regulacije informacijske družbe * Politike se oblikujejo na lokalni in regionalni ravni

Dodatne informacije:* Življenje kot neskončen delovni dan – članek * Mit o oblaku – članek * Temačno odlašanje – članek * Hiranje ekstra I: telo podatkov – članek * The Vectoralist Class – članek * Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire- članek

O podcastu:Podcast Državljan D je podcast za produktivno preživljanje časa, v katerem igramo vlogo državljana. Državljan D v pogovorih s strokovnjaki določenega področja informira in aktivira. Da se. Gremo naprej!

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Dr. Rys Farthing, the director of Children’s Policy at Reset Australia, an affiliate of Reset, an initiative working to counter digital threats to democracy across the world.

Dr. Farthing is focusing on securing children’s rights in the digital age and in our discussion we’ve touched upon the historical development of this field, the many misguided solutions that we have rejected over the years and the road forward.

Our discussion also touched upon the fabled self-regulatory model and its many issues that prevented actionable defense of digital rights in the past plus a look onwards where we can finally see a glimmer of hope.

Citizen D advice:* Consider digital users as citizens, not as workers or consumers * Transpose workable solutions from offline to online * Reject the self-regulatory model

More information: The General Comment – website * Age-appropriate design – article * Why the Era of Big Tech Self-Regulation Must End – article * Regulating online – safety lessons from Australia – article*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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In this month’s episode, we sat down with an investigative reporter Michael Colborne at Bellingcat that is focusing on the issues related to the far right movements in the Central and Eastern Europe.

We start by talking about his work and the issues he’s covering in the field and then move to the issue of the popularization of far right movements in general european societies, the political narratives and media discourses.

What are some of the key factors that play a role in the process, how can we counter the rise as citizens and as consumers and who else is involved? What are some of the main differences between the far right movements in the Western and Eastern Europe, how do these influences play a role in the uptick of far right movements and how do we oppose them on a local, regional and state level?

Citizen D advice:* Counter the far right narratives in the local environment * Question the political backings of far right ideology and push back against its normalisation * Worry about the support system that is enabling the spread of far right ideologies locally and globally

More information: An Interview with Bellingcat Journalist Michael Colborne on the Azov Movement in Ukraine – article * Bellingcat archive for Michael Colborne – archive * Silence won’t make the Ukrainian far right go away – article*

About the podcast:Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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Can you win a war against propaganda with media literacy?

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Why is the future a lot like the past?

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How do we decentralize the web?

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How do you develop responsible tech and services?

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How did surveillance become a market category?

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The S in smart city is for Surveillance.

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What role do humanities play in the gordian knot of tech?

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What can we do about surveillance advertising?

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Hate speech is good business.

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Kje smo po dveh letih pandemije in kdo je kriv za to?

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Automated policing - fiction or boring dystopia?

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Surveillance ad industry is everywhere. What can we do for a more privacy-orientated world?

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Technology is political!

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What's the role of world wide web in promotion and normalisation of hate?

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Kakšen se vam zdi podcast Državljan D?

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The value of work in the age of platforms is changing. For the worse.

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How good are the digital giants at self-regulating user privacy and freedom of expression?

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In the case of online hate, follow the ad money.

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How do we save the world wide web again?

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Are you a good citizen? The government already knows!

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The rug really ties the room together.

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A city under corporate control.

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All roads lead to Palantir.

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Who owns you online and what can you do about it?

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The ad bubble is ready to burst. There won't be any survivors.

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What can the refugee crisis tell us about the future of surveillance society?

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We are living in an era of techno-utopian myths.

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Surveillance solutionism is upon us. What do we do?

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Why does the current coronavirus pandemic benefit the fake news producers and what can we do about it?

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Kako se obraniti slabe zakonodaje, ki nažira uporabniško zasebnost?

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Kitajska na področju informacijske družbe prehiteva EU in ZDA. Zakaj?

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Zakaj vera v znanost upada?

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Tehnologije prepoznavanja obrazov so tu! Kaj to pomeni za industrijo in kaj za družbo?

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Kako je z aktivizmom v digitalni dobi?

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Why should be be scared of boring tech and ignore the exciting one?

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S Savičem o aktivizmu, sistemskem delovanju, Državljanu D in drugih zadevah, povezanih z njegovim likom in delom.

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Urban development is suffering in the IT society. Can we make it fairer?

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Why does not work work anymore and what needs to be done to change that?

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Na volitve!

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Where is the internet going, what can we do about it and what are some agents of change?

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Zakaj sploh iti na evropske volitve?

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Posebna izdaja podcasta Državljan D gre na volitve. Nosilka liste Povežimo se Urša Zgojznik ugotavlja, da je sedaj pravi čas.

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Can art be used to make sense of the internet or can the internet be used to make sense of art?

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James Bridle thinks there is something wrong with the internet. We agree.

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Sovražni govor in mi.

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Everything is fake.

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Kako se lotiti medijskih vsebin za mlade?

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Zakaj medijska pismenost ni digitalna pismenost, zakaj ni samo za otroke in zakaj smo zaradi pomanjkanja medijske pismenosti vsi na slabšem.

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Zakaj je novinarstvo pomembno za demokracijo in zakaj si ti njegov ključen del?

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Roboti smo mi.

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Zakaj se premalo ukvarjamo s problemom digitalnih modrih ovratnikov, zakaj naj bo to še drago stalo in kje je politična reprezentanca mladih v Sloveniji?

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What is wrong with the internet, how do we make it work again and why does the net matter.

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What will it take for the digital economy to start paying attention to user personal data?

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Why the current content regulation debate is going to end in tears and what can we do about it?

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Kako pravno regulirati kriptovalute, kako to počnejo drugi in katere neznanke kriptovalutam preprečujejo vstop v mainstream?

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Kako algoritmi uničujejo vsebine in zakaj je boljše otroku v roku dati škarje kot neomejen dostop do Youtube portala?

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Z ustvarjalci portala Pod črto smo debatirali o vedno bolj zaprtem svetovnemu spletu, medijski regulaciji, zlobnih posrednikih informacij in povezavi med Titanikom in regulacijo radijskih valov.

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Smart cities. Net neutrality. Internet policy development.

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O slovenskih žvižgačih. In o osebni odgovornosti.

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Z Gorazdom Božičem smo se v mesecu kibernetske varnosti pogovarjali o zadnjih mednarodnih incidentih na tem področju, prihodnosti in naučenih lekcijah.

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Zakaj GDPR ne pomeni konca sveta in zakaj se vas bo dotaknil?

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Kaj smo se naučili iz zgodbe o WannaCry izsiljevalskim virusom in česa ne?

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Z ustvarjalci podcasta Siniševo delo o produkciji novejših novinarskih žanrov in kriku za človečnost vseh nas.

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V informacijski družbi tehnologije nimajo samo pozitivnega učinka, temveč se z njimi razvija in odvija tudi vedno bolj invaziven in vseprisoten komunikacijski nadzor.

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Z Evo Matjaž, "mamo" slovenskega coworkinga smo se v tej epizodi podcasta Državljan D pogovarjali o definicijah, smislu in prihodnosti tega ekonomskega modela.

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V informacijski družbi se trendom uporabe informacijske tehnologije prilagaja tudi vojskovanje. Kibernetski napadi, kibernetsko branjenje kritične infrastrukture in premik težišča v digitalno okolje postaja vedno bolj pomembno s prodorom informacijske tehnologije v vse pore našega življenja in okolja.

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Kakšna je tvoja vloga v kibernetski vojni?

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Debati o cepivih ni videti konca, a v čem je sploh problem?

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Koliko časa še? Zakaj?

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O tem, kdo vse davi internet, komu bo to uspelo in kaj za vraga lahko počnete s krtačo za lase, ki beleži porabljene kalorije?

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Parlameter je orodje za spremljanje dela izvoljenih predstavnikov v parlamentu. Kako, zakaj, do kje? Z Žigo Vrtačičem, članom kolektiva Danes je nov dan.

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Z novoimenovanim glasnikom digitalnih tehnologij Marko Grobelnikom smo debatirali o znanosti, tehnologiji, družbi in politiki.

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Z Vidom Doria, generalnim sekretarjem Transparency International Slovenija o oazah in zakaj je to strup za demokracijo.

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Kakšno je slovensko tehnološko novinarstvo, kako ga narediti boljšega in zakaj je to pomembno?

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Varnostna kultura rešuje življenja in podjetja! Kakšno je stanje in koliko gesel imate lahko napisanih na listkih?

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Tehnologije nadzora razvijajo ljudje. Prav je, da zahtevamo odgovoren in do ljudi prijazen razvoj.

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Ob svetovnem dnevu telekomunikacij in informacijske družbe so v torek v pogovoru zavoda državljan D v Poligonu spregovorili o razmerah informacijske družbe v Sloveniji.

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Masovni podatki predstavljajo vedno bolj pomemben del spletne ekonomije. Je to dobro ali slabo in kaj lahko naredimo mi?

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V četrti epizodi se z novinarkami in urednicami Manico J. Ambrožič in Suzano Lovec pogovarjamo o vlogi in nalogi tega medija, o razliki med urednikom in novinarjem ter o Slavku Bobovniku.

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Kaj je z okoljem in zakaj smo se navadili, da na tem področju vlada trajna panika?

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Pred Snowdenom je bila Manning. Pred Manning je bil Wigand. Pred Wigandom pa Globoko grlo. Vmes pa še na desetine neznanih posameznikov, ki so se v nekem trenutku odločili izstopiti iz svoje vloge znotraj sistema in javnosti razkriti resnico. Kaj jih je gnalo? Kakšen je bil njihov namen? Zakaj so nepogrešljivi? In zakaj so hkrati največja sramota za demokratične režime?

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V tretji epizodi se z urednico spletnega medija Metina lista, Natašo Briški, pogovarjamo o ubijalcu medijev, ki mu to delo ne gre ravno od rok.

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Z Aljo Isaković, razvijalko programske in strojne opreme, smo se pogovarjali o odnosu razvijalcev do razumevanja uporabniške zasebnosti, do poudarjanja pomembnosti tega vidika razvijanja tehnologij in o spodbujanju dialoga med samimi razvijalci

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V drugi epizodi se z urednikom spletnega Večera, Samo Trtnikom, pogovarjamo papirju, ki noče umreti, o spremembah v glavah in o ljudeh, ki odločajo.

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Na tretjem predavanju dogodka je Igor Eršte (Urad Vlade RS za varovanje tajnih podatkov) pojasnjeval cilje in ukrepe strategije kriptografije.

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V prvi epizodi se z Matejem Praprotnikom, pomočnikom direktorja Radia Slovenija za razvoj digitalnih strategij, pogovarjamo o radijskih valovih, podcastih, binaural mikrofonu in zgodbah.

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Zakaj so pametni telefoni najbolj neumna stvar na tem svetu?

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Kdo ima v lasti kable do interneta?

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Je enkripcija res nekoristna?

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Zakaj je #zmed bolj oglas za ministrico kot dobra rešitev za slovensko glasbo v medijih in spletne komentarje?

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Kako pa vi mislite informacijsko varnost?

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Kako cenite svoje osebne podatke, kako lahko zasebnost preživi v družbi totalnega nadzora in zakaj so trgovine hujše kot NSA?

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Ali ima kupec danes več vpliva na blagovno znamko kot podjetje? Na čem temeljijo vaše poslovne odločitve, na mnenjih ali številkah? Kako ocenjujejo zadovoljstvo s svojim delom slovenski marketingaši?

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4mediji so tedenske debate v novembru 2015 o slovenski medijski sferi. Vsak ponedeljek v novembru ob 19h v Poligonu na Tobačni.

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4mediji so tedenske debate v novembru 2015 o slovenski medijski sferi. Vsak ponedeljek v novembru ob 19h v Poligonu na Tobačni.

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4mediji so tedenske debate v novembru 2015 o slovenski medijski sferi. Vsak ponedeljek v novembru ob 19h v Poligonu na Tobačni.

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Kako razmišljati o hrani, ločevati med oglasom in podatkom ter jesti zdravo?

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4mediji so tedenske debate v novembru 2015 o slovenski medijski sferi. Vsak ponedeljek v novembru ob 19h v Poligonu na Tobačni.

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Ali je vsak človek kreativen? Kako poteka spodbujanje kreativnosti na sistematičen način, ki ga učijo metode dr. Edwarda de Bona? Kako biti ustvarjalen v poslovnem komuniciranju? Ali je mogoče učinkovito razmišljati in sodelovati? Kaj je pozitivna revolucija?

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Kaj je informacijska družba? Jo v Sloveniji imamo? Je ni? Kaj nam še manjka?

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Bonus epizoda podcasta Državljan D se vrača na kraj zločina. Nevtralnost interneta je najbolj pomembna stvar na svetu. In sedaj ji grozi smrt. TI jo lahko rešiš te usode!

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Ali direktna pošta prinaša rezultate v časih nalepk proti nenaslovljeni pošti? Kako pridobivati kakovostne sledi (leade) za prodajo? Kaj se pri nas prodaja prek katalogov? Sta faks in TV-prodaja še vedno živa? Kako učinkoviti pri prodaji so spletni mediji?

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Kaj muči slovenski novinarski ceh, kako se ukvarjati s podatkovnim novinarstvom in kaj nas na medijskem področju čaka v prihodnosti?

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Kako vzpostaviš službo za odnose z javnostmi v podjetju? Kaj delajo službe za odnose z javnostmi in kaj službe za marketing? Kako uspešno voditi odnose z mediji? Kako je delati božično revijo poleti? Ali je intranet kraj, kamor gredo podatki umirat?

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Državljan D se tokrat pogovarja z Državljanom V, ki se bori za Airbnb.

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Kaj (digitalnega) mora danes obvladati vsak, ki se ukvarja s poslovnim komuniciranjem?

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Z ravnateljico o podmornicah in raketah. In vlogi šole in vlogi učiteljev in vlogi nas vseh.

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Kaj se je zgodilo v marketingu po zlatih devetdesetih? Je oglaševanje obrt ali umetnost? Ali je delo v marketinških agencijah mladim privlačno? Zakaj v tem poslu potrebujemo čas in ne denarja (prosto po Alenki Bratušek)? Ali Perutnina Ptuj razume piščance?

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Koliko svetniškega sija je na svetniku javne televizije in zakaj bi jim morali VSI pisati pisma?

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Ali lahko ima piarovec svoje mnenje? Kaj je bolj pomembno - hiter ali kakovosten odgovor novinarjem? Ali ima humor svoje mesto v odnosih z javnostmi?

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Tema pogovora je nadzor na spletu, afera Tetra in spremenjen način razmišljanja o odprtem svobodnem spletu, kot ga vsi poznamo.

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Kako je kriza vplivala na marketing in odnose z javnostmi? Kdo je dober piarovec? Kje je najboljši javni zdravstveni sistem v Evropi in kako deluje?

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Devet zgodb. Devet problemov. Devet rešitev. Državljan D.

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Zadnja nulta epizoda je namenjena pravicam in dolžnostim.

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Zakaj z varovanjem lastne zasebnosti še ne podpiramo teroristov, zakaj se policija trudi za spremembo stanja in kako grejo lahko stvari zelo hitro zelo narobe?

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Do rok, ki glitchajo, je po nekaterih napovedih samo še nekaj let. Kako dobro smo pripravljeni na svet, priklopljen na splet in kaj vse gre lahko narobe. Ter zakaj to mogoče niti ni tako slabo.

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Kako se je Ljubljana znašla na drugem mestu lestvice Lonely Planeta Najboljše v Evropi 2014? Od kod ime bela Ljubljana? Ali v Sloveniji obstaja luksuzni turizem?

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Šest epizod. Šest zgodb. Šest problemov. Šest rešitev. Tri ure vsebine. Državljan D.

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Zakaj bo TTIP bolj slab kot dober, kaj imajo zadrogirani piščanci veze z avtomobili in zakaj je vladno financiranje protivladnih aktivnosti nekaj najboljšega na svetu?

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Zakaj je drugi največji lobist v državi društvo za transparentno lobiranje, kaj se zgodi, ko pohvališ javnega uslužbenca in zakaj bi morali vsi skupaj dihati za boljšo družbo.

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Zakaj se v zadnjem času vedno več novinarjev znajde pred organi pregona, v čem je trik preiskovalnega novinarstva in kdo tepe koga s kom?

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Kaj sem se naučil iz prvih treh in zakaj bodo druge tri še boljše.

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Zakaj brezplačno pripravništvo na dolgi rok ne služi nikomur, na kratki rok pa samo redkim? Kdo ne opravlja svojega dela in kaj lahko kot državljani naredimo glede tega?

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Kakšno vlogo igrajo množični mediji v naši družbi, kako lahko vplivamo na vsebino javnih in komercialnih medijev in kako lahko mi pomagamo pri razvoju boljše medijske scene v Sloveniji.

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Zakaj bi se morali zanimati za internetno nevtralnost, kako jo lahko pomagate ohraniti in zakaj je internetna nevtralnost dobra za vse.