Of TMI, Constructed Identities and Privacy Issues

Last week, I was shocked to read an article about a New York statistician being asked for his Facebook password when he went to interview for a job. The man refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. The media reported the story widely, and soon prompted a strong reaction from Facebook, condemning the New York company for its unfair and invasive practices.

  Facebook’s privacy policy has come under intense scrutiny in recent years.
Image: PC World via Google Images.

                                         

Today, being on a social networking site is the norm. But few people stop to read these sites’ long-winded privacy policies or take the time to understand the consequences of signing up. It’s a well known fact that data once uploaded in cyberspace, cannot be scrubbed away. It maybe hidden, but it remains in cyberspace for eternity, as the U.S. Military recently found out when it tried to remove information about Sgt. Robert Bales who is accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians. News outlets reported that the information was easily available via the U.S. Military website’s cached pages.

  Similarly, pictures, videos, text, etc. uploaded on to social networking sites become the property of the companies that own them. They’re free to use it the way they see fit. Sometimes, even deleting accounts doesn’t help. Meanwhile, social networking sites encourage users to part with more and more data through a variety of apps that ask, for instance, their location in exchange for store credit, encourage them to announce their purchases on social networking sites and get rewarded, and even report their most personal lives. The rich data mine at the disposal of social networking sites is a dream for marketers who use it in a variety of ways. For instance, Twitter’s data was recently opened to several new marketers who pay their licensing fees, making it easy for marketing companies to look at important and private information such as the organizations people support, the information they re-tweet, their Twitter friends, the activities they like, and most importantly—where they spend their disposable income.

Marketers paying Twitter licensing fees now have access to old tweets, which they can mine for useful data. Image: Google Images.

                                          

   In a world where social networking sites are constantly trying ways to get people to give up more information, the definition of privacy and the consequences of having one’s privacy interrupted is a serious issue. danah boyd gives very apt definitions of privacy in an online context, with special reference to Facebook. She defines it the context of data invasion (2008) and as losing “control over information, the context where sharing takes place, and the audience who can gain access.” Facebook’s Timeline feature comes to mind here. It rearranged data that was already public, but in doing this, it made meaning out of discrete data, opening up enormous advertising opportunities for companies, not to mention, laying out a person’s entire life in an easy-to-digest chronological order, with pictures and videos, much like a comic book.


  Then there’s the very real problem of identity theft that social media sites help propagate. With smart phones and apps storing users’ data, it has becoming infinitely easier for unscrupulous people to steal identities. For instance, an article in The Wall Street Journal reported that “32% of smartphone owners don’t update to new operating systems when they become available. And 62% don’t use a password on their home screen, meaning that anyone who steals or finds their smartphone can easily access their personal information” (Waters, 2012). The same article reported that 7% of Google+ users and 6.3% of those on Twitter reported a case of identity fraud. Among Facebook users, 5.7% said they were victims.

Social networking sites make it easier for identity thieves to steal personal information.
Image: Google Images.

  I think the fault lies with social networking sites as well as users who are either too ill-informed to notice the ill-effects of giving out too much information online, or are too addicted to their online persona to notice. While it’s difficult to completely cut oneself off from social media, there are ways in which one can bypass the intense scrutiny it involves—both from humans (who are on the users’ friends lists) and electronic (from marketers and the social networking companies themselves). boyd gives the example of teenagers who protect their privacy by limiting access to their profiles and disguising their comments in such a way that they can be understood only by those people whom the user knows and interacts with offline. Perhaps adults need to find some online social codes of their own too.

  Another topic that boyd and other online researchers often talk about is the quality of online relationships. However, I don’t agree with either boyd who says that people mistake online friendships for real ones, and take solace in “fake intimacy,” or with researchers who say that the amount of online self-disclosures affect online social connection and relational closeness. The latter study (Ledbetter et. al, 2011) was performed on a sample that included mostly undergraduates and women. I think unless the sample is tweaked to reflect a demographic that reflects the U.S. population that uses Facebook, it might be hard to generalize the results.

  One thing I do agree with, is boyd’s application of Granovetter’s theory of performance to social media networks (2011). Take the case of actor Ashton Kutcher who wanted to hand over control of his Twitter account to his public relations company after he came under criticism for tweeting wrongly about coach Joe Paterno’s dismissal. According to this article, a fan wrote: “I am not unfollowing [Kutcher] because of his uninformed Penn St. comment. I’m unfollowing him because he is no longer tweeting for himself.” This, in my opinion, sums up the paradoxical nature of social media. It’s not practical to be yourself online, you need to portray a certain identity, but if you make the mistake of acknowledging this, it can reduce your online credibility instantly.

References:

boyd, d., (2008). Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 14(1): 13–20

boyd, d. (2011). Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. (Unpublished manuscript).

Ledbetter, A. M., Mazer, J. P., DeGroot, J. M., Meyer, K. R., Yuping, M., & Swafford, B. (2011). Attitudes Toward Online Social Connection and Self-Disclosure as Predictors of Facebook Communication and Relational Closeness. Communication Research, 38(1), 27-53.

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.

Waters, Jennifer. (2012). “Why ID Thieves Love Social Media,” Online Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577293851

The Net Delusion

  Evgeny Morozov’s book, The Net Delusion (2011) is a sobering read. In an age where the Internet is often hailed as all-powerful—it is supposed to have the power to topple governments, get behemoth financial institutions to reverse their decisions, and launch manhunts for killers—it was very useful to read the other, less-reported side of the story.

  According to  Morozov’s thesis, the media and the masses like to think that since information is power, access to the Internet can set the oppressed free. They forget that the Internet can also be used by dictators, just as easily as it’s used by protesters. Countries like Egypt may block the Internet at times, but they can also take advantage of it, using it not just to help track down dissidents, but also to dispense propaganda. Others like Russia use it cleverly to keep its citizens occupied with other, more frivolous distractions, and thus curb dissent. This is how, Morozov says, the Internet may actually prevent revolutions from getting off the ground.

A poster calls for the return of the internet after it was shut down by the government in February in Cairo, Egypt. Image: Getty Images, via CNN.com.
                         
I read with awe about Morozov’s examples from around the world where social networking sites, and the Internet, made it easier for governments to conduct surveillance on protesters and crack down on them effectively. The most telling example of the government’s technological prowess was the case of Iran, whose government used Facebook to contact Iranians abroad who were actively using Facebook and Twitter to help advance the cause of rebels back home. The Chinese government is widely known to censor all social media networks, even going so far as to regularly scrub tweets and Facebook posts for politically offensive words and anti-government propaganda. Using face-recognition technology, apps that display users’ location with the help of GPS data from their phone, and clever crowdsourcing techniques (as used in 2009 by the Iranian government), rebellions can be quashed effectively.

At least 5,000 websites are currently being blocked within Turkey. Image: indexoncensorship.org. 

                                                               
As I read these examples, I wondered why the media has not reported as much on this aspect of the Internet. There have been stray stories like this one by Malcolm Gladwell, about the limitations of an online-revolution, but on the whole, journalists have scrambled to pronounce the Arab Spring as an Internet-powered revolution. The reason, I think, is that everyone loves stories where the underdog wins—if they use technology, that’s even better! And reports on Twitter revolutions make great copy! Not to mention how easy they are to write up. Just log in, view tweets, work them into your story, and voila, you’re done!

  Morozov points out in this article and in his book, about the failure of an anti-censorship software called Haystack in the Iran revolution. The media praised the software without asking pertinent questions such as: “Was Haystack really being used in Iran?” and “How might all this extra publicity in the Western media affect its users?” Therefore, when the software failed, it came as a surprise to everyone.

  From this, I am led to believe that Twitter-revolutions and online slacktivism may well be a media hype. In the 24X7 news cycle, journalists are constantly being challenged to come up with new stories and interesting trends, and they might be resorting to hype just so they can fill up newsholes. The pressures of the profession, along with a lack of understanding about the deeper effects of technology and how it actually works in the hands of people, leads to unbalanced stories about the power of the Internet.

  Morozov’s thesis strikes at the very root of the notion of unrestricted freedom of thought and expression on the Internet. I think one needn’t look too far from home to find examples of this. The media recently reported that the FBI is inviting proposals for an app that will help the FBI, among other things, to have the capability to automatically search Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites; automatically translate foreign-language Twitter tweets into English; and plot both domestic and international terror data. The intention behind it is good—on paper at least. However, the app, when developed, will raise questions about the role of Facebook and Twitter in promoting democracy, as well as the government’s right to violate citizens’ privacy.

In her book, Consent of the Networked:The worldwide struggle for Internet freedom (2012), author Rebecca MacKinnon says one of the solutions to stop Internet censorship is to “build and strengthen alternative netizen-driven institutions and communities that can exist alongside existing ones,” and to get “people to stop thinking of themselves as passive “users” and “customers,” and start acting like citizens of the Internet—as “netizens.” I agree. Citizens need to be more aware about technology, and develop a skepticism in media reports about the unlimited power technology. After all, as attractive as armchair activism might be, revolutions have almost never succeeded without blood.

References:

Bosch, Tory, (2011, February 1) Tangled Web. Slate.com. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/02/tangled_web.single.html

MacKinnon, Rebecca. (2012). Consent of the Networked: The worldwide struggle for Internet freedom. Basic Books.

Morozov, Evgeny, (2011). The Net Delusion. New York: PublicAffairs.

Pro-Choice or Pro-Life?

While reading about the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke spat this past weekend, I couldn't help but wonder how public opinion had changed in the US over the years. I tried to look up some polls and found this one from Gallup:

It was interesting because it showed that opinions had become more conservative over the years. Pro-choice supporters had fallen from 56% to 47% over the past 15 years, while pro-life supporters had gone up from 33% in 1996 to 47% in 2011. It will be interesting to study the reasons behind this change. Perhaps my next blog post will be about this? 

Public Interest vs Media Coverage

The Pew Research Center's Weekly News Index and News Coverage comparison for 2011 showed that the media and the public were often in sync about their interests. The only times news coverage exceeded public respect was in the coverage of foreign issues--the U.K. hacking scandal (July 21-24) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest (May 19-22). The times when news coverage fell below the public's interest in news was on two instances--gas and oil prices (Apr 28-May 1) and when a helicopter crash in Afghanistan killed 30 troops (Aug 11-14.)

I thought it was interesting that the public and media opinion about what's important news differed with respect to foreign news. Studies have shown that the media guides public opinion. But it this case it appears to be the opposite. Here are some charts mapping news coverage and news interest. All figures are from the Pew Center's website.

    

My thoughts on priming and the role of the news media

The article, “Altering the Foundations of Support for the President through Priming” (Krosnick, J.; Kinder, D., 1990) uses the theory of priming to show that when the media pays more attention to a particular issue or portrays it in a certain way, citizens tend to incorporate what they know about that issue into their overall judgment of the president.

The study is useful because it uses a major event which captured national attention in 1986—the Iran-Contras issue—and combines it with reliable data from the 1986 National Election Study.
However, I think some questions need to be answered before the conclusions of this study are applied broadly to the American public. The study selected 1,086 people from the original sample of 2,176 people because they had answered a rich variety of questions pertaining to the focus of the study. However, the authors don’t mention if that sample mirrors the U.S. population demographically. The equation used to measure public opinion controls for age, sex, race, education, etc. therefore, the results are valid, but without indication that the original sample reflects the U.S. population, generalization of the results is difficult.

Also, when the authors divided this group into those interviewed before the November 25 revelations and those interviewed after, the size of the first group (N=714) was more than double the size of the second group (N=349), which, in my opinion, makes comparison difficult. Table 1, which shows the opinion of people about President Reagan and opinions on foreign affairs before and after the Contras issue, lists the figures in percentages. Due to the different strength of the two groups, these figures might not reflect the truth.

Referencing Table 1, the authors say that public opinion about foreign affairs vis a vis the Contras issue remained unchanged. I think this is true only for two of the four questions. The question regarding U.S. involvement in Central America registered a perceptible change (nearly 4% fewer people said the U.S. should be less involved post-revelation) as did the question about aid to Contras in Nicaragua (4% people in the post-revelation questionnaire said aid should be increased).

Also, the authors make a suggestion that the reason why more people claimed that the U.S’s role as a superpower was in decline was because of the perception that the administration had taken an arms-for-hostage deal with Iran, not because of the Contras issue. This assertion sounds like a hypothesis without foundation or proof.

The authors, while investigating whether political novices were more perceptible to priming than political experts, assess political expertise by asking respondents to identify six political figures. This is a very simplistic scale because political knowledge cannot be measured by a simple face and name recognition question. People who are unable to remember a name or recognize a political person might be well-versed in a political issue that’s more relevant to them, and it’s unfair to classify them as political novices. Similarly, recognizing a political figure or name does not make a person a political expert.

Moreover, the authors fail to test the relationship between amount of news coverage and degree of priming. They report in their discussion that increased news coverage of a particular issue serves to focus public attention on that topic, but if they had found a way to measure exposure, it would have made for a more convincing case.

Interestingly, another study (Malhotra, N. & Krosnick, J., 2007) challenges the conclusion of Krosnick and Kinder’s study, that the media’s coverage of issues can influence political novices. Malhotra and Kosnick used national survey data collected between February and September of 2004 and found no support for their hypothesis that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign precipitates changes in the weight citizens place on an issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among those exposed most to the news. The authors concluded that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified very precisely.

References:
Krosnick, J., & Kinder, D. (1990) Altering the Foundations of Support for the President Through Priming. The American Political Science Review. 84(2). pp. 497-512.

Malhotra, N., & Krosnick, J. (2007). Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming. Political Behavior, 29(2), 249-278. doi:10.1007/s11109-007-9027-8.

Digital Media and Political Knowledge

The article, “The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns: Evidence from panel data,” (Dimitrova, D. Shehata, A.; Strömbäck, J. & Nord, L., 2011) shows that digital media causes a negligible effect on political knowledge but has “appreciable effects” on political participation.

The study is useful in that it uses panel survey data which can more reliably establish causality, and that it was conducted during a period of high political importance—during the 2010 Swedish election campaign, when most people were expected to have a heightened interest in politics. I can see how at least on the surface, some of the conclusions of this study could be broadly generalized beyond the sample used in the study. One of the conclusions of the study was that the use of digital media leads to increased political activity among the public at large. According to some media reports and studies, (Ali, A., 2011) this is true, as seen during the recent revolutions in the Arab world. However, revolutions cannot happen through social media alone. I think what Dimitrova et all fail to account for in their study is the significant human intervention in the form of leadership and grassroots level organizing, that might have influenced offline participation.

Another conclusion, that the use of digital media has only limited effects on political knowledge and political participation is hard to prove and hard to measure because digital media—online news websites, social media networks and political websites—are not mutually exclusive. Almost all news sites have links leading to social media sites and social media sites have links that lead to news websites. A person could have heard about political information on a social media site and then clicked through links on a news website to read a story. Would it be fair to say then that the person got information only from the news website and not from the social media site?

Another problem I had with the study was in the methods section, where participants were asked to fill an online survey. A previous study (Prior, 2009) showed that when people were given an online survey about their exposure to television news, they tended to over-report their exposure, mostly because they could not remember the exact amount of time they spent watching television or because they did not properly understand the questions. I think the Dimitrova et all study could also suffer from the flaw of over-reporting because the survey was administered online.

In the measures section, for digital media, the researchers measure the use of political party web sites by a survey item tapping how often the respondents had visited a number of party web sites. However, I think this is not an adequate measure. In order to see if readers’ came away with any knowledge from the websites, there should have been a question about the average amount of time they spent on a website and the sections they looked at most.

In the study, Dimitrova et all conclude that the use of different forms of digital media, controlling for other factors, has little impact on political knowledge. This statement reminds me of a study (Prior, 2005) that said “despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably.” The study found that greater media choice allowed people to only seek information they liked. Thus, the more politically inclined watched political shows and got more knowledgeable about politics, while those who preferred entertainment-based shows, avoided political shows and were less likely to vote.

Similarly, from Dimitrova et all’s study it appears that though election campaigns and online news organizations try to reach out to people through digital media, they may only have limited success. Just as people can choose to watch political or entertainment programs on television, people can choose to use the Internet and social media to get political or educational information or spend time connecting with friends, surfing or playing games, watching movies and listening to music. With apps now becoming the norm, people can customize what they read and watch to suit their specific tastes. Thus, though it would appear that digital media empowers marginalized people and gives them a chance to express themselves on the same platform as elites, it doesn’t really matter, because there’s no one listening.


References:
Ali, A. (2011). The Power of Social Media in Developing Nations: New Tools for Closing the Global Digital Divide and Beyond. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 24(1), 185-219.
Dimitrova, D.; Shehata, A.; Strömbäck, J. & Nord, L. (2011) The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns: Evidence from panel data. Communication Research. (online) 1-24.
Prior, M. (2005). News vs. Entertainment: How increasing media choice widens gaps in political knowledge and turnout. American Journal of Political Science. 49(3), 577-592.
Prior, M. (2009). Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News Exposure. The Journal of Politics. 71(3), 893–908.