The Internet has become the backbone of the social fabric. The United Nations Human Rights Council declared access to the Internet a fundamental human right over a decade ago. Yet, Africa remains the region with the widest Digital Divide where most of the population is either sparsely connected or has no access to the Internet. This has in turn created a race amongst Western big tech corporations scrambling to “bridge the Digital Divide”. Although the Internet is often portrayed as something that resides in the “cloud”, it heavily depends on physical infrastructure, including undersea cables. In this paper, we examine how current undersea cable projects and Internet infrastructure, owned, controlled, and managed by private Western big tech corporation, often using the “bridging the Digital Divide” rhetoric, not only replicates colonial logic but also follows the same infrastructural path laid during the trans-Atlantic slave trade era. Despite its significant impact on the continent’s digital infrastructure, we find publicly available information is scarce and undersea cable projects are carried out with no oversight and little transparency. We review historical evolution of the Internet, and detail and track the development of undersea cables in Africa, and illustrate its tight connection with colonial legacies. We provide an in-depth analysis of two current major undersea cable undertakings across the continent: Google’s Equiano and Meta’s 2Africa. Using Google and Meta’s undersea cables as case studies, we illustrate how these projects follow colonial logic, create a new cost model that keep African nations under perpetual debt, and serve as infrastructure for mass data harvesting while bringing little benefit to the Global South. We conclude with actionable recommendations for and demands from big tech corporations, regulatory bodies, and governments across the African continent.
互联网已成为社会结构的支柱。联合国人权理事会早在十多年前就宣布上网是一项基本人权。然而，非洲仍然是 "数字鸿沟"（Digital Divide）最严重的地区，大部分人口要么网络连接稀少，要么无法访问互联网。这反过来又在西方大科技公司之间掀起了一场争相 "弥合数字鸿沟 "的竞赛。虽然互联网经常被描绘成 "云 "中之物，但它在很大程度上依赖于包括海底电缆在内的实体基础设施。在本文中，我们将探讨当前的海底电缆项目和互联网基础设施是如何由西方私营大科技公司拥有、控制和管理的，并经常使用 "弥合数字鸿沟 "的说辞，这不仅复制了殖民逻辑，而且还沿袭了跨大西洋奴隶贸易时代所铺设的相同的基础设施道路。尽管海底光缆对非洲大陆的数字基础设施产生了重大影响，但我们发现公开信息很少，而且海底光缆项目的实施缺乏监督，透明度很低。我们回顾了互联网的历史演变，详细介绍并追踪了非洲海底电缆的发展，并说明了其与殖民遗产的紧密联系。我们深入分析了目前横跨非洲大陆的两大海底电缆项目：谷歌的 Equiano 和 Meta 的 2Africa。以谷歌和 Meta 的海底电缆为案例，我们说明了这些项目是如何遵循殖民逻辑，创造出一种新的成本模式，使非洲国家长期背负债务，并成为大规模数据采集的基础设施，而给全球南方国家带来的好处却微乎其微。最后，我们向非洲大陆的大型科技公司、监管机构和政府提出了可行的建议和要求。
{"title":"Undersea cables in Africa: The new frontiers of digital colonialism","authors":"Esther Mwema, Abeba Birhane","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13637","url":null,"abstract":"The Internet has become the backbone of the social fabric. The United Nations Human Rights Council declared access to the Internet a fundamental human right over a decade ago. Yet, Africa remains the region with the widest Digital Divide where most of the population is either sparsely connected or has no access to the Internet. This has in turn created a race amongst Western big tech corporations scrambling to “bridge the Digital Divide”. Although the Internet is often portrayed as something that resides in the “cloud”, it heavily depends on physical infrastructure, including undersea cables. In this paper, we examine how current undersea cable projects and Internet infrastructure, owned, controlled, and managed by private Western big tech corporation, often using the “bridging the Digital Divide” rhetoric, not only replicates colonial logic but also follows the same infrastructural path laid during the trans-Atlantic slave trade era. Despite its significant impact on the continent’s digital infrastructure, we find publicly available information is scarce and undersea cable projects are carried out with no oversight and little transparency. We review historical evolution of the Internet, and detail and track the development of undersea cables in Africa, and illustrate its tight connection with colonial legacies. We provide an in-depth analysis of two current major undersea cable undertakings across the continent: Google’s Equiano and Meta’s 2Africa. Using Google and Meta’s undersea cables as case studies, we illustrate how these projects follow colonial logic, create a new cost model that keep African nations under perpetual debt, and serve as infrastructure for mass data harvesting while bringing little benefit to the Global South. We conclude with actionable recommendations for and demands from big tech corporations, regulatory bodies, and governments across the African continent.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140707050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Margaret Young, Upol Ehsan, Ranjit Singh, Emnet Tafesse, Michele Gilman, Christina Harrington, Jacob Metcalf
Ongoing calls from academic and civil society groups and regulatory demands for the central role of affected communities in development, evaluation, and deployment of artificial intelligence systems have created the conditions for an incipient “participatory turn” in AI. This turn encompasses a wide number of approaches — from legal requirements for consultation with civil society groups and community input in impact assessments, to methods for inclusive data labeling and co-design. However, more work remains in adapting the methods of participation to the scale of commercial AI. In this paper, we highlight the tensions between the localized engagement of community-based participatory methods, and the globalized operation of commercial AI systems. Namely, the scales of commercial AI and participatory methods tend to differ along the fault lines of (1) centralized to distributed development; (2) calculable to self-identified publics; and (3) instrumental to intrinsic perceptions of the value of public input. However, a close look at these differences in scale demonstrates that these tensions are not irresolvable but contingent. We note that beyond its reference to the size of any given system, scale serves as a measure of the infrastructural investments needed to extend a system across contexts. To scale for a more participatory AI, we argue that these same tensions become opportunities for intervention by offering case studies that illustrate how infrastructural investments have supported participation in AI design and governance. Just as scaling commercial AI has required significant investments, we argue that scaling participation accordingly will require the creation of infrastructure dedicated to the practical dimension of achieving the participatory tradition’s commitment to shifting power.
{"title":"Participation versus scale: Tensions in the practical demands on participatory AI","authors":"Margaret Young, Upol Ehsan, Ranjit Singh, Emnet Tafesse, Michele Gilman, Christina Harrington, Jacob Metcalf","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13642","url":null,"abstract":"Ongoing calls from academic and civil society groups and regulatory demands for the central role of affected communities in development, evaluation, and deployment of artificial intelligence systems have created the conditions for an incipient “participatory turn” in AI. This turn encompasses a wide number of approaches — from legal requirements for consultation with civil society groups and community input in impact assessments, to methods for inclusive data labeling and co-design. However, more work remains in adapting the methods of participation to the scale of commercial AI. In this paper, we highlight the tensions between the localized engagement of community-based participatory methods, and the globalized operation of commercial AI systems. Namely, the scales of commercial AI and participatory methods tend to differ along the fault lines of (1) centralized to distributed development; (2) calculable to self-identified publics; and (3) instrumental to intrinsic perceptions of the value of public input. However, a close look at these differences in scale demonstrates that these tensions are not irresolvable but contingent. We note that beyond its reference to the size of any given system, scale serves as a measure of the infrastructural investments needed to extend a system across contexts. To scale for a more participatory AI, we argue that these same tensions become opportunities for intervention by offering case studies that illustrate how infrastructural investments have supported participation in AI design and governance. Just as scaling commercial AI has required significant investments, we argue that scaling participation accordingly will require the creation of infrastructure dedicated to the practical dimension of achieving the participatory tradition’s commitment to shifting power.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140704671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability. We conclude by urging researchers to work on defined tasks for which we can develop safety protocols, rather than attempting to build a presumably all-knowing system such as AGI.
{"title":"The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence","authors":"Timnit Gebru, Émile P. Torres","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636","url":null,"abstract":"The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability. We conclude by urging researchers to work on defined tasks for which we can develop safety protocols, rather than attempting to build a presumably all-knowing system such as AGI.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140704910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introductory essay for the special issue of First Monday, “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,” considers how power operates in AI and machine learning research and publication. Drawing on themes from the seven contributions to this special issue, we argue that what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science. We argue that naming and grappling with this power, and the troubled history of core commitments behind the pursuit of general artificial intelligence, is necessary for the integrity of the field and the well-being of the people whose lives are impacted by AI.
{"title":"Introduction for the special issue of “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power”: Naming power","authors":"Jenna Burrell, Jacob Metcalf","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13643","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory essay for the special issue of First Monday, “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,” considers how power operates in AI and machine learning research and publication. Drawing on themes from the seven contributions to this special issue, we argue that what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science. We argue that naming and grappling with this power, and the troubled history of core commitments behind the pursuit of general artificial intelligence, is necessary for the integrity of the field and the well-being of the people whose lives are impacted by AI.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140706597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Machine learning ethics research is demonstrably skewed. Work that defines fairness as a matter of distribution or allocation and that proposes computationally tractable definitions of fairness has been overproduced and overpublished. This paper takes a sociological approach to explain how subtle processes of social-reproduction within the field of computer science partially explains this outcome. Arguing that allocative fairness is inherently limited as a definition of justice, I point to how researchers in this area can make broader use of the intellectual insights from political philosophy, philosophy of knowledge, and feminist and critical race theories. I argue that a definition of injustice not as allocative unfairness but as domination, drawing primarily from the argument of philosopher Iris Marion Young, would better explain observations of algorithmic harm that are widely acknowledged in this research community. This alternate definition expands the solution space for algorithmic justice to include other forms of consequential action beyond code fixes, such as legislation, participatory assessments, forms of user repurposing and resistance, and activism that leads to bans on certain uses of technology.
机器学习伦理学研究明显存在偏差。将公平定义为分配或分配问题的研究，以及提出可计算的公平定义的研究，都被过度生产和过度发表。本文从社会学角度出发，解释了计算机科学领域内微妙的社会生产过程如何部分地解释了这一结果。我认为分配公平作为正义的定义具有内在局限性，并指出该领域的研究人员可以如何更广泛地利用政治哲学、知识哲学以及女权主义和批判性种族理论的知识见解。我认为，主要借鉴哲学家伊里斯-马里恩-扬（Iris Marion Young）的论点，不公正的定义不是分配不公，而是支配，这样就能更好地解释研究界广泛认可的算法伤害现象。这一替代定义扩大了算法正义的解决空间，使其包括代码修复之外的其他形式的后果性行动，如立法、参与性评估、用户再利用和抵制形式，以及导致禁止某些技术用途的激进主义。
{"title":"Automated decision-making as domination","authors":"Jenna Burrell","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13630","url":null,"abstract":"Machine learning ethics research is demonstrably skewed. Work that defines fairness as a matter of distribution or allocation and that proposes computationally tractable definitions of fairness has been overproduced and overpublished. This paper takes a sociological approach to explain how subtle processes of social-reproduction within the field of computer science partially explains this outcome. Arguing that allocative fairness is inherently limited as a definition of justice, I point to how researchers in this area can make broader use of the intellectual insights from political philosophy, philosophy of knowledge, and feminist and critical race theories. I argue that a definition of injustice not as allocative unfairness but as domination, drawing primarily from the argument of philosopher Iris Marion Young, would better explain observations of algorithmic harm that are widely acknowledged in this research community. This alternate definition expands the solution space for algorithmic justice to include other forms of consequential action beyond code fixes, such as legislation, participatory assessments, forms of user repurposing and resistance, and activism that leads to bans on certain uses of technology.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140705621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shazeda Ahmed, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Archana Ahlawat, Amy Winecoff, Mona Wang
The emerging field of “AI safety” has attracted public attention and large infusions of capital to support its implied promise: the ability to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) while reducing its gravest risks. Ideas from effective altruism, longtermism, and the study of existential risk are foundational to this new field. In this paper, we contend that overlapping communities interested in these ideas have merged into what we refer to as the broader “AI safety epistemic community,” which is sustained through its mutually reinforcing community-building and knowledge production practices. We support this assertion through an analysis of four core sites in this community’s epistemic culture: 1) online community-building through Web forums and career advising; 2) AI forecasting; 3) AI safety research; and 4) prize competitions. The dispersal of this epistemic community’s members throughout the tech industry, academia, and policy organizations ensures their continued input into global discourse about AI. Understanding the epistemic culture that fuses their moral convictions and knowledge claims is crucial to evaluating these claims, which are gaining influence in critical, rapidly changing debates about the harms of AI and how to mitigate them.
{"title":"Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety","authors":"Shazeda Ahmed, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Archana Ahlawat, Amy Winecoff, Mona Wang","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13626","url":null,"abstract":"The emerging field of “AI safety” has attracted public attention and large infusions of capital to support its implied promise: the ability to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) while reducing its gravest risks. Ideas from effective altruism, longtermism, and the study of existential risk are foundational to this new field. In this paper, we contend that overlapping communities interested in these ideas have merged into what we refer to as the broader “AI safety epistemic community,” which is sustained through its mutually reinforcing community-building and knowledge production practices. We support this assertion through an analysis of four core sites in this community’s epistemic culture: 1) online community-building through Web forums and career advising; 2) AI forecasting; 3) AI safety research; and 4) prize competitions. The dispersal of this epistemic community’s members throughout the tech industry, academia, and policy organizations ensures their continued input into global discourse about AI. Understanding the epistemic culture that fuses their moral convictions and knowledge claims is crucial to evaluating these claims, which are gaining influence in critical, rapidly changing debates about the harms of AI and how to mitigate them.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140704780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this work we challenge the argument for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we argue that machines are not the kinds of things that may be denied or granted rights. Building on theories of phenomenology and post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, we ground our position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously connected, controlled, digitized, and surveilled society. Ethically, we argue that, given machines’ current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights, a highly controversial concept whose most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence on politics and law. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke screen, allowing theorists and futurists to fantasize about benevolently sentient machines with unalterable needs and desires protected by law. While such fantasies have motivated fascinating fiction and art, once they influence legal theory and practice articulating the scope of rights claims, they threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice and human suffering.
{"title":"Debunking robot rights metaphysically, ethically, and legally","authors":"Abeba Birhane, J. V. Dijk, Frank Pasquale","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13628","url":null,"abstract":"In this work we challenge the argument for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we argue that machines are not the kinds of things that may be denied or granted rights. Building on theories of phenomenology and post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, we ground our position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously connected, controlled, digitized, and surveilled society. Ethically, we argue that, given machines’ current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights, a highly controversial concept whose most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence on politics and law. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke screen, allowing theorists and futurists to fantasize about benevolently sentient machines with unalterable needs and desires protected by law. While such fantasies have motivated fascinating fiction and art, once they influence legal theory and practice articulating the scope of rights claims, they threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice and human suffering.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140705952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Norah Abokhodair, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Konstantin Aal, Houda Elmimouni
Social media platforms, while influential tools for human rights activism, free speech, and mobilization, also bear the influence of corporate ownership and commercial interests. This dual character can lead to clashing interests in the operations of these platforms. This study centers on the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah events in East Jerusalem, a focal point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that garnered global attention. During this period, Palestinian activists and their allies observed and encountered a notable increase in automated content moderation actions, like shadow banning and content removal. We surveyed 201 users who faced content moderation and conducted 12 interviews with political influencers to assess the impact of these practices on activism. Our analysis centers on automated content moderation and transparency, investigating how users and activists perceive the content moderation systems employed by social media platforms, and their opacity. Findings reveal perceived censorship by pro-Palestinian activists due to opaque and obfuscated technological mechanisms of content demotion, complicating harm substantiation and lack of redress mechanisms. We view this difficulty as part of algorithmic harms, in the realm of automated content moderation. This dynamic has far-reaching implications for activism’s future and it raises questions about power centralization in digital spaces.
{"title":"Opaque algorithms, transparent biases: Automated content moderation during the Sheikh Jarrah Crisis","authors":"Norah Abokhodair, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Konstantin Aal, Houda Elmimouni","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i4.13620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13620","url":null,"abstract":"Social media platforms, while influential tools for human rights activism, free speech, and mobilization, also bear the influence of corporate ownership and commercial interests. This dual character can lead to clashing interests in the operations of these platforms. This study centers on the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah events in East Jerusalem, a focal point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that garnered global attention. During this period, Palestinian activists and their allies observed and encountered a notable increase in automated content moderation actions, like shadow banning and content removal. We surveyed 201 users who faced content moderation and conducted 12 interviews with political influencers to assess the impact of these practices on activism. Our analysis centers on automated content moderation and transparency, investigating how users and activists perceive the content moderation systems employed by social media platforms, and their opacity. Findings reveal perceived censorship by pro-Palestinian activists due to opaque and obfuscated technological mechanisms of content demotion, complicating harm substantiation and lack of redress mechanisms. We view this difficulty as part of algorithmic harms, in the realm of automated content moderation. This dynamic has far-reaching implications for activism’s future and it raises questions about power centralization in digital spaces.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140706638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Advancement in quantum networking is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with some arguing that a working quantum network may be reached by 2030. Just how these networks can and will come to be is still a work in progress, including how communications within those networks will be secured. While debates about the development of quantum networking often focus on technical specifications, less is written about their social impacts and the myriad of ways individuals can engage in conversations about quantum technologies, especially in non-technical ways. Spaces for legal, humanist or behavioral scholars to weigh in on the impacts of this emerging capability do exist, and using the example of criticism of the quantum protocol quantum key distribution (QKD), this paper illustrates five entry points for non-technical experts to help technical, practical, and scholarly communities prepare for the anticipated quantum revolution. Selecting QKD as an area of critique was chosen due to its established position as an application of quantum properties that reaches beyond theoretical applications.
{"title":"Societal implications of quantum technologies through a technocriticism of quantum key distribution","authors":"Sarah Young, Catherine Brooks, J. Pridmore","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.13571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.13571","url":null,"abstract":"Advancement in quantum networking is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with some arguing that a working quantum network may be reached by 2030. Just how these networks can and will come to be is still a work in progress, including how communications within those networks will be secured. While debates about the development of quantum networking often focus on technical specifications, less is written about their social impacts and the myriad of ways individuals can engage in conversations about quantum technologies, especially in non-technical ways. Spaces for legal, humanist or behavioral scholars to weigh in on the impacts of this emerging capability do exist, and using the example of criticism of the quantum protocol quantum key distribution (QKD), this paper illustrates five entry points for non-technical experts to help technical, practical, and scholarly communities prepare for the anticipated quantum revolution. Selecting QKD as an area of critique was chosen due to its established position as an application of quantum properties that reaches beyond theoretical applications.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140255974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Even though Instagram has been the subject of numerous studies, none of them have systematically investigated its potential as a narrative medium. This article argues that Instagram’s narrative capabilities are comparable to those of literature and film. To support our claims, we analyze a number of prominent female Instagram creators and demonstrate how they employ the platform’s diverse features, functionalities, and interface to create multi-year biographical narratives. Furthermore, we discuss the applicability of theories developed in literary and film studies in analyzing Instagram’s narrative capabilities. By employing Bakhtin’s influential chronotope concept, we examine in depth how these narratives make specific use of space and time. Additionally, we compare time construction in film and Instagram narratives using the cinema studies’ theory of narrative time in movies.
{"title":"Instagram as a narrative platform","authors":"Mariya Kozharinova, Lev Manovich","doi":"10.5210/fm.v29i3.12497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i3.12497","url":null,"abstract":"Even though Instagram has been the subject of numerous studies, none of them have systematically investigated its potential as a narrative medium. This article argues that Instagram’s narrative capabilities are comparable to those of literature and film. To support our claims, we analyze a number of prominent female Instagram creators and demonstrate how they employ the platform’s diverse features, functionalities, and interface to create multi-year biographical narratives. Furthermore, we discuss the applicability of theories developed in literary and film studies in analyzing Instagram’s narrative capabilities. By employing Bakhtin’s influential chronotope concept, we examine in depth how these narratives make specific use of space and time. Additionally, we compare time construction in film and Instagram narratives using the cinema studies’ theory of narrative time in movies.","PeriodicalId":38833,"journal":{"name":"First Monday","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140255869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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