Data & Society

Automated decision-making systems make decisions about our lives, and those with low socioeconomic status often bear the brunt of the harms these systems cause. Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyers Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities is a guide by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman to familiarize fellow poverty and civil legal services lawyers with the ins and outs of data-centric and automated-decision making systems so that they can clearly understand the sources of the problems their clients are facing and effectively advocate on their behalf.

Drawing on Tim Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet’s precarious foundation, this talk details how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself is wildly misrepresented. Audience Q&A follows the discussion.“In this well-grounded, heretical attack on the fictions that uphold the online advertising ecosystem, Subprime Attention Crisis destroys the illusion that programmatic ads are effective and financially sound. One can only hope that this book will be used to pop the bubble that benefits so few.” — danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, founder of Data & Society, and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research

ProPublica editor and reporter Ryan McCarthy and Data & Society Senior Research Analyst Cristina López G. have looked into dynamics of amplification, inconsistent enforcement of community standards, and the democratic pitfalls of hyper-targeting audiences in their reporting and research. In this Databite, they discuss their findings and recommendations for holding companies accountable, protecting voting rights, and stopping the spread of false election claims. Audience Q&A follows the discussion.Ryan McCarthy reports and edits stories for ProPublica’s Electionland, focusing on voting rights, election security and misinformation.Cristina López G. conducts qualitative research on political disinformation and antagonistic amplification. She was born and raised in El Salvador, where she received an undergraduate law degree from Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN) and led a non-profit that promotes youth participation in politics and activism. She’s been a weekly op-ed columnist for a main Salvadoran newspaper since 2010. She moved to Washington, DC in 2012 to pursue a Masters in public policy from Georgetown University. After completing her degree, Cristina joined Media Matters for America as a researcher of Hispanic and Spanish-language media, focused on media coverage of immigration policies. She eventually became the organization’s deputy director for extremism, leading its research into extremism and disinformation that proliferate on tech platforms. She’s fluent in Spanish and memes.

Joseph Torres, Free Press’ Senior Director of Strategy and Engagement, advocates in Washington to ensure that our nation’s media policies serve the public interest, and builds coalitions to broaden the movement’s base. Joseph writes frequently on media and internet issues and is the co-author of The New York Times bestseller News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He is the 2015 recipient of the Everett C. Parker Award, which recognizes an individual whose work embodies the principles and values of the public interest. Before joining Free Press, Joseph worked as deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and was a journalist for several years.Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Angèle shows how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. Angèle is currently a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She is an affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute.danah boyd is the founder and president of Data & Society and a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. She is the author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and has authored or co-authored numerous books, articles, and essays. She is a trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, a director of the Social Science Research Council, and a director of Crisis Text Line. She has been recognized by numerous organizations, including receiving the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer/Barlow Award and being selected as a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Originally trained in computer science before retraining under anthropologists, danah has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information.

The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge―decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists―“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”―Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and others: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and host of the podcast, The Last Archive. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States(2018),an international bestseller and was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. (A recent essay considers responses to the book.) Her latest book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is available on September 15, 2020.danah boyd is founder and president of Data & Society, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, and a visiting professor at New York University. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. More on boyd here.

Concurrent with launch of the Trust & Safety Professional Association, Alexander Macgillivray and Nicole Wong provide context and suggestions forward as regulation, policy, and public awareness of content moderation and trust and safety issues evolve.Audience Q&A follows the discussion.Speaker Bios:Alexander Macgillivray, aka “amac,” is curious about many things including law, policy, government, decision making, the Internet, algorithms, social justice, access to information, and the intersection of all of those. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the last two plus years of the Obama Administration. He was Twitter‘s General Counsel, and head of Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google and created the Product Counsel team. He has served on the board of the Campaign for the Female Education (CAMFED) USA, was one of the early Berkman Klein Center folks, was certified as a First Grade Teacher by the State of New Jersey. He is proud to be a board member at Data & Society, Creative Commons, and Alloy.us, and an advisor to the Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows, and part of the founding team of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. https://www.bricoleur.org/Nicole Wong develops tech international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies. She previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Twitter’s Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the boards of WITNESS, an organization supporting the use of video to advance human rights; the Mozilla Foundation, which promotes the open internet; and The Markup, a non-profit investigative news organization covering technology. Nicole currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Freedom Forum. More info here: about.me/nwong.Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, researching issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies. Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development on society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

The Class Differential in Data Privacy | Michele GilmanData & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman discusses the ways that data-centric technologies adversely impact low-income communities. In her talk, Gilman argues there is a class differential in privacy law that harms poor people, but that poverty lawyers and their clients are working to challenge this differential in order to advance economic justice.Feminist Data Futures and Relational Infrastructures | Anita Say ChanData & Society Fellow Anita Say Chan shares her work on data justice networks and research collectives in the global Americas, exploring their shared genealogies with feminist data methods developed at the turn of the century.The Depth of the Data | Dan BoukData isn’t simple, thin, or objective. Data has depth, that can and must be read deeply. Data & Society Fellow Dan Bouk demonstrates such reading in this talk with democracy’s data, the data produced by the U.S. census.Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute moderates the discussion and audience Q&A. Learn more about our fellows work, wide-ranging interdisciplinary connections, and a few of the provocative questions that have emerged this year.

This recording is a Q&A with André Brock following his presentation of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.In Distributed Blackness, Brock asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this talk employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as- technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things.” Hence, Black technoculture.

In Distributed Blackness, André Brock asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this talk employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as- technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things.” Hence, Black technoculture.

How can feminist thinking be operationalized into more ethical and equitable data practices? As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, asymmetrical methods of application, and unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists—and others who rely on data in their work—to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science, with whose interests in mind?” These are some questions that emerge from what we call data feminism; a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. This talk draws on insights from the authors' collaboratively crafted book about how challenges to the male/female binary can challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; and how the concept of “invisible labor” can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. About the Speakers Catherine D’Ignazio (she/her) is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. D’Ignazio is an assistant professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where she is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. More information about Catherine can be found on her website at www.kanarinka.com. Lauren F. Klein (she/her) is a scholar and teacher whose work crosses the fields of data science, digital humanities, and early American literature. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs, and, with her students, cooked meals from early American recipes—and then visualized the results. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Klein is an Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. More information can be found on her website: lklein.com. About Databites Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.