We are living through an information revolution. Traditional knowledge gatekeepers – librarians, journalists and government officials – have largely been replaced by technology gatekeepers – search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and network feeds society.
Whatever their flaws, the old gatekeepers are, on paper at least, well known to the public. The new gatekeepers are essentially only interested in profits and their shareholders.
That is about to change, thanks to a bold European Union experiment.
With key provisions to come into force on August 25, an ambitious package of EU rules, Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the biggest attempt to test Big Tech’s strength (aside from outright bans in places like China and India). First time, Tech platforms will have to satisfy the public in countless ways, including granting users the right to complain when their content is removed, providing algorithmic selection, and prohibiting micro-targeting of children and adults based on sensitive data such as religion, identity ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require major tech platforms to test their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights, and the physical and mental health of minors. and other users.
This will be the first time companies have been asked to identify and address the harms caused by their platforms. To hold them accountable, the law also requires major tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is one key factor that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will have access to any data.
Traditionally, journalists have been at the forefront of enforcement, pointing out the harms researchers can extend and regulators can act on. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which we learned how consultants to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign mined the Facebook data of millions of users without their permission, was reported by The New York Times and The Observer of London revealed. BuzzFeed News reported on offensive posts detailing Facebook’s role in facilitated the massacre of the Rohingyas. My team while I worked at ProPublica discovered how Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate in employment and housing advertisement.
But it’s getting harder and harder to get data from platforms. Facebook has been particularly aggressive, closing the accounts of researchers at New York University in 2021 because “illegal vehicle” when accessing Facebook ads. That year, it also legally threatened a European research group, AlgorithmWatch, forcing it to shut down its Instagram surveillance project. And earlier this month, Twitter began restricting all users’ ability to view tweets in what the company describes as try to block automatically crawls Twitter’s website using AI chatbots as well as bots, spammers and other “bad actors”.
Meanwhile, tech companies have also stopped authorized access to their platforms. In 2021, Facebook disband the team monitor the CrowdTangle analysis tool that many researchers have used to analyze trends. This year, Twitter replaced its free research tools with an extremely expensive and unreliable. As a result, the public is less likely than ever to observe how our global portals are behaving.
Last month, US senator Chris Coons introduced Platform Accountability and Transparency ActThe law requires social media companies to share more data with researchers and provides immunity to journalists from collecting data in the public interest with legal privacy protections. physical.
But for now, the European Union’s transparency efforts depend on European academics, who will apply to the regulator to get access to data from the platforms and, then, hopefully. publish research reports.
That is not enough. To truly hold the platforms accountable, we must support journalists who are on the front lines of documenting how autocrats, disruptors, spies, marketers and mobs hate. Enemies are weaponizing technology platforms or being enabled by them.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa runs Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines that has been take the lead analyzes how Philippine leaders have used social media to spread misinformation, hijack social media hashtags, manipulate public opinion, and attack independent journalism.
For example, last year, Rappler revealed that the majority of Twitter accounts using certain hashtags to support Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, were created over a one-month period, making them more likely. is a fake account. With the Twitter research feed Rappler used now closed and platforms blocking access to the data, it is unclear how Ms. Ressa and her colleagues can continue. implement this important type of accountability journalism.
Ms. Ressa asked the European Commission, in public comment submitted in May, to give journalists “access to real-time data” so they can provide “a macro view of the patterns and trends these tech companies are creating as well as like the real-world harm they cause.” (Me too submit comments to the European Commissionalong with more than a dozen journalists, asked the committee to support access to background data for journalists.)
As Daphne Keller, program director for platform regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, argued in her comments to the European UnionAllowing journalists and researchers to use automated tools to collect public data from platforms is one of the best ways to ensure transparency as it “is a rare form of transparency.” regardless of the platform being studied itself to generate information or act as gatekeepers.”
Of course, technology platforms often push back against transparency requirements by claiming that they must protect user privacy. This is funny, since their business model is based on mining and monetizing users’ personal data. But that aside, user privacy interests are irrelevant here: The data journalists need is already made public to anyone with an account on these services.
What journalists lack is access to vast amounts of public data from technology platforms to understand whether an event is an anomaly or represents a larger trend. Without that access, we would continue to have what we have now: lots of anecdotes about this piece of content or that user being banned, but no real meaning as to whether the statements Is this statistically significant?
Journalists write the first draft of history. If we can’t see what’s happening on the biggest speaking platforms globally, that history will be written for the benefit of the platforms — not the public.
