Skip to content

Category: Libraries

Published on
source: applift.com

Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.

To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,

[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .

Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."

Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120

This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!

That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:

  • Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
  • Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
  • Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
  • Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.

The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!

Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.

Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.

The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison

(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)

Barbara Fister helpfully pointed out why librarians should not be intimidated by Kanopy video's tactics with library users.
Published on
Intimidation sculpture by Michel Rathwell from Cornwall, Canada
[CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Barbara Fister's post on InsideHigherEd Unkind Rewind (June 26) is totally correct about Kanopy Streaming Video's creepy tactics, contacting users directly when a library cancels its Kanopy contract. This is an outrageous abuse of user data and has the long-term effect of completely undermining librarians' trust in the Kanopy organization.

Barbara references the Twitter feed @Libskrat as an oblique reference to Kanopy complaining to New York Public Library management when a librarian spoke out about their practices on a mailing list (AKA "listserv" but that's trademarked in the USA). Kanopy referenced a supposed NDA and may have threatened legal action. If this violates any NDA my library inadvertently agreed to, then let Kanopy bring it on. I do not see any non-disclosure stipulated in the Kanopy TOS (terms of service), but other terms are fairly creepy: the requirement to submit to binding arbitration by the American Arbitration Association, which is as good as useless. I may seek to cancel my library's Kanopy account on that basis alone. I expect my University General Counsel may in fact require that I do so.

In addition, Kanopy's privacy policy allows them (at 2.(a)), in their view, to abuse librarians' trust outrageously:

We may ask for certain information such as your name, institution name, email address, password and other information. We may retain any messages you send through the Service, and we may also retain other information you voluntarily provide to us. We use this information to operate, maintain and provide to you the features and functionality of the Service, and as further described below.

Barbara Fister (back to her blog) makes one claim, though, with which I differ:

For librarians, my advice is to resist the shiny and trust we are relevant, to value the rights we traditionally have when we purchase content, and push for transparency and fairness in licensing deals.

I did not fail to "resist the shiny" when we began to work with Kanopy in 2014. My library entered into an agreement with Kanopy for good reasons.

We began to work with Kanopy, in the first place, because our Communications school (then department) contracted with Kanopy without informing the library--and then expected to use the library's proxy service. (Actually a rather ignorant former staffer there wanted every student to create her or his own login, an obvious non-starter for Kanopy.) The Communications faculty wanted access to the Media Education Foundation's Media Studies and Communication. Only later did the library add the patron-driven acquisition, user-initiated (PDA) model which proved unsustainably expensive in the past fiscal year. We did so because we needed to move the library into providing streaming video for curricular use, not because it is "shiny" (. . . and some of it is not!)

With Barbara's help (above), I realize that we happily dodged a bullet. Because we could not cut Kanopy off entirely (Communications still wants and has that MEF license), Kanopy has never contacted our users to deplore our decision to discontinue PDA. What we have done instead is more circumspect. We left Kanopy in our A-Z databases list, but publicly discouraged its use. We removed records for any videos that are not licensed from our discovery service.

When an instructor wants to use a video in class (we have some of those), we attempt to re-direct the instructor to Academic Video ONline (AVON), which we have leased from ProQuest at a more affordable (and controllable) price. If no suitable content is available, we will reluctantly authorize a PDA license for that one video --but we make sure the instructor knows how much this it costs for 365 days. If a student wants access for a class or paper, we gently deny the request. (We can distinguish student requests from faculty because students have a slightly different e-mail domain address.) We make sure that department chairs, program directors, and Deans know how much Kanopy costs. They completely support our plan to control expenses.

So my advice to librarians: don't discontinue Kanopy, simply bury them. Take them out of your A-Z databases list. Remove them from your catalog or discovery service. Act as though they don't exist. Make Kanopy your library's "frenemy." And refuse to knuckle under to anyone's mob-like tactics of intimidation.

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, plea
Published on

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to another another, and to our past and to what is still to come. I realized that this entire time, learning about the library, I had been convincing myself that my hope to tell a long-lasting story, to create something that endured, to be alive somehow as long as someone would read my books, was what drove me on, story after story; it was my lifeline, my passion, my way to understand who I was. . . .

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

--Susan Orlean, The Library Book, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 309-310

--Whispering post? See this article from Rochford, Essex, England. Rochford is approximately 70km east of central London.