Controversy around Ethics of Facebook’s Study is Missing the Real Issue

[Originally posted here]

Facebook came in for considerable criticism recently when they revealed that, over a one week period in 2012, they conducted a study on 689,000 users. By filtering the status updates that appeared on individuals’ new feeds, the study set out to measure “emotional contagion”, a rather hyperbolic term for peer effects on the emotional state of individuals. The study concludes that Facebook users more exposed to positive updates from contacts in turn posted more positive updates, and less negatives ones, themselves. The result for those exposed to more negative updates was the opposite.

Some of the claims made by the study are open to challenge, but here I’m interested in the response to it. I’ll go on to argue that we should actually be grateful to Facebook for this study.

Criticism revolved around two interrelated themes: manipulation and consent. Of the first, Labour MP Jim Sheridan, member of the Commons media select committee, declared that “people are being thought-controlled”, and several news stories declared it “creepy”. The second response, as reported here, was led by academics highlighting clear differences between the ethical requirements they are required to meet when conducting research, and those the Facebook study adopted.

Without informed consent, it’s difficult not to see an attempt at mass emotional manipulation as creepy, so it is highly problematic that the study’s claim for consent is so weak. It states “Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, [constitutes] informed consent for this research”. This is simply nonsense. Even if we pretend every user actually read the Data Use Policy rather than just clicked past it (and how many of us ever read the Terms and Conditions?), this should have happened shortly before the study – rather than potentially as long ago as 2005 when Facebook first launched. Further stretching the definition of “informed” is the fact that the key sentence in the Policy comes at the bottom of a long list of things Facebook “may” use your data for. This solitary sentence – “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement” – embedded in a 9,091 word document, may legally constitute consent, but from an ethical standpoint it certainly isn’t informed.

It is perhaps surprising, having said all this, that I think Facebook should be congratulated on this study. What they have managed to do is draw back the curtain on the increasingly huge impact that tech companies’ algorithms have on our lives. The surprising, and rather worrying thing, is that Facebook has done this inadvertently, whilst reporting on a study of social contagion. The really important ‘contagion’ revealed by this work is that of invisible filters and rankings in structuring our access to information online. The reason why this is worrying is that not seeing this controversy coming suggests Facebook are as blind to the social consequences of these processes as most of the public have been.

Despite the accusations of “creepy” manipulation, the only thing that is unique about what Facebook did in this experiment is that in reporting it they publically admitted that the processing they carried out was not done in the “interests” (as defined by Facebook) of the individuals involved. There are two issues here. The first concerns what is in the interests of the individual. For Facebook, and no doubt other tech companies relying on advertising income base on page views, this is defined as what people like (or ‘Like’ in Facebook’s case). In a healthy, pluralist society we shouldn’t only be exposed to things we like. Being a citizen in a democracy is a job for grown-ups, and important information is not always as immediately palatable as videos of cats on skateboards are. And what of serendipity, of finding interesting content from a novel source? Filters strip this away, in a manner which is entirely purposeful and almost always invisible.

The purpose behind these filters leads us to the second issue. Alongside their interest in keeping users satisfied, tech companies have, of course, their own commercial interests which at times may conflict with those of the user. Google, in a case that has been rumbling on since 2010, is facing sanction from the European Commission (EC) for altering the all-important ranking of websites so its own businesses appear at the top of searches. The ability to present information in a manner which favours the company at the expense of others – whether businesses or individuals – is available to any tech company which provides content to users.

As the tech sector matures, we may increasingly also see political interests shaping their actions. The ongoing ‘net neutrality’ battle in the US has brought to light that one of the biggest potential beneficiaries of abandoning neutrality – the Internet Service Provider Comcast – spent more on lobbying last year ($18m) than any other company except the arms manufacturer Northrop Grumman. In the Facebook controversy some critics have already raised the prospect of such filters being used to alter users’ emotional states during an election, in order to affect the outcome. Even the small effects described in the study could have huge impact given Facebook’s reach, as the study itself acknowledges: “an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.”

There was actually no need, in this case, to use such a poor approximation of informed consent. We shouldn’t though let that complaint obscure the bigger story here. It may have been by accident, but Facebook have, I hope, triggered a vital public debate about the role of algorithms in shaping our online lives.

As societies, we are currently a long way behind the curve in dealing with the possibilities for information manipulation that the internet offers. Of course information manipulation is as old as information itself, but users of a news website know that they are receiving a curated selection of information. We do not yet have such expectations about Google searches or the updates of our friends that Facebook makes available to us. We must then begin to think about how we can ensure such powers are not abused, and not rely just on one-off cases such as Google’s battle with the EC. The challenge of balancing public interest and commercial secrecy promises to result in a long battle, so it’s one that needs to begin now.

In my view, Facebook’s mistake was not in conducting such work, but in reporting it as a study of human behaviour, rather than of tech companies’ influence over us. Ethics are not set in stone, and must always be balanced with what is in the public interest. If there is sufficient benefit for society as a whole, it may be considered justifiable to transgress some individuals’ rights (as is the case, for example, when the news media reports on a politician committing adultery). As such, it could be that argued that Facebook’s study was actually ethical. For this to be the case though, Facebook would need to show an understanding of what the public interest actually is in this case.

The future is in high-tech work, not high-speed trains

 [Originally posted on The Conversation, here]

The UK’s most ambitious infrastructure project is in trouble. Criticism of the High Speed Two rail network has come from left and right of the political spectrum, with both the New Economics Foundation and the Institute of Economic Affairs challenging the government. The project’s costs are rising all the time: they now stand at around £40 billion while the economic benefits have been continually revised downwards.

The crux of the government’s problem is the need to find a justification for such a huge investment. Ultimately, this is really a question about what Britain will look like over the next century and what this implies for mobility.

Even if everything goes to plan, the first phase of HS2, between London and Birmingham, will not open until 2026. Since the Treasury assesses such schemes over a 60 year period of operation, justifying HS2 requires the government to produce a vision of the UK in the late 21st century. When we look at the flaws and gaps in this vision, we have to ask whether HS2 is a sensible investment.

Don’t look back

The government is failing to win the case for HS2 because its vision has not been sufficiently compelling or credible to persuade its critics.The Department for Transport has attempted to create a vision of the UK’s future through a process of modelling; taking selected observed trends from recent history and rolling them forward.

The most important of these is the demand for train travel. In recent decades this has consistently risen, leading the Dft to declare in its economic case for HS2 that there will be a continuing growth in long distance rail travel.

The past, however, is often a very poor basis for creating visions of the future. Consider the very same data the DfT uses to identify rising rail demand. Until 2005 domestic air travel (against which HS2 would compete) also grew consistently. Past trends would suggest no slow down, but it actually fell steeply in subsequent years. The extra security checks introduced in response to terrorism fears made it less competitive relative to other options, and demand fell accordingly.

Travelling trends

Click to enlarge

An alternative future

The impact of increased security reminds us that what determines travel demand is the immensely complex outcome of intersecting social, political, technical and economic processes. Many potential developments over the decades to come could drastically change the case for HS2.

Some of these are already here. One major line of attack on the case for HS2 has focussed on its assumption that train travel is economically unproductive – that people do not work on trains. While this view might have been credible 20 years ago, technological advances, such as laptops and Wi-Fi, mean that a train carriage today functions as a mobile office. The Institute of Directors recently surveyed its members on this issue and found that only 6% do not work when travelling by train.

The same class of technology has the potential to change life radically in the coming years. Indeed, just such a vision is being pursued by the government as it funds research into the digital economy.
In the digital economy future, UK economic and social activity will have continued to move online. Interaction with others is increasingly virtual. People do not travel to occupy the same physical space but use technologies like video conferencing, and, further ahead, advanced virtual reality. Work becomes ever more distributed as the convenience and low cost of digital communications comes to outweigh the value of physical proximity. Manufacturing, too, becomes increasingly localised, as technologies like 3D printing and computer-aided manufacturing reduce the requirements for concentration to achieve economies of scale.

None of these developments are particularly “out there”. They are based on an analysis of current trends, in the same way that the DfT has looked into travel demand. As with growing demand for trains, none of these outcomes is inevitable, and neither are they a zero sum game – we might adopt all these practices and still find reasons to travel long distances in ever increasing numbers. If we do travel though, it is difficult to envisage how technology will not continue to blur the lines between stationary and mobile activity.

Today smartphones, 3G, tablets and laptops enable us to consume and produce information and entertainment on the move. Just ten years ago, most of these activities could only be done at home or in the office. If this process continues, the actual time spent travelling could become increasingly irrelevant, because what we do during that journey will be largely indistinguishable from what precedes and follows it. In such a situation, the logic of investing billions to shave 35 minutes off the journey from London to Birmingham becomes highly questionable.

The HS2 project hangs in the balance. Unless the government can produce more convincing visions about the mobility that will be required by the UK in the late 21st century, it has no hope of convincing the public that its money really is best spent on high speed trains.

Climate Science, Power, and Engagement: Notes from a Conference

I witnessed something rather remarkable at the Planet Under Pressure (PUP) conference in London last week. PUP was a huge event: some 3000 scientists, of both natural and social stripes, assembling to present and discuss the latest science on climate change. There were in fact several aspects which could be called remarkable, such as the emerging consensus that we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are a dominant driver in many global systems. Also remarkable is how bleak the future looks from current climate modelling, with emissions on track to cause 4 degrees of warming or more, at which point all number of positive (destructive) feedback loops could kick in, leading to runaway change.

From a social science perspective, the organisation of the conference was itself remarkable, with its overt focus on influencing a political process, namely the Rio+20 UN summit this June. To this end, a 'state of the planet' declaration was worked on throughout the conference and read out at it's closing. This was not the scene I want to talk about, but in raising the question of where science should begin and where it should end, and what 'engagement' really means, it's a relevant framing.

The scene in question happened during the plenary sessions on the first morning of the conference. A panel of speakers were on stage to discuss 'The Planet in 2050'. One of them was a fellow called Martin Haigh from the oil company Shell, and shortly after he began speaking two protesters (from the group London Rising Tide) slipped on to the stage and unfurled a banner depicting the Shell logo as a human skull:

A burst of applause quickly gathered from a sizeable portion of the audience (myself included), before a wonderfully English scene played out in which the slightly shaken host politely asked the pair to leave and they quietly did so, flanked by flustered-looking men in suits.

Why this 30 seconds stuck in my mind was that one of the dominant themes of the conference was that politics at the national and supra-national level has failed to address climate change. The only real source of optimism is to be found at the city and community level, where activists are building the capacity to begin challenging the destructive status quo. Lord Anthony Giddens argued this in his plenary talk just an hour before the panel took to the stage, and it was a claim I heard repeated at several points during the following four days. What I didn't see during those four days, and what made the Shell protest remarkable, were any other activists. I did see panels featuring representatives from a couple of other corporations - the insurance giant Aviva and Sainsbury's - but the grassroots were nowhere to be seen.

I find this rather troubling. Alongside the missing grassroots was a missing question that the open recognition of political failure demanded be asked: why has politics at the national level failed? Beyond a few muttered comments no one seemed to want to talk about this. When panel members were asked similar questions by delegates there was generally embarrassed silence followed by a swift move on to something else. The lowest points in this discourse of omission were when speakers lamented the turn of publics, particularly in the US, towards climate change denial, as if this was simply a process sui generis, with no larger structural forces behind it.

Answering the Missing Question

In depth, the answer to this missing question could be terrifyingly complex, incorporating all number of actors, driven by diverse ideologies, economics, technologies and institutional cultures, but it can distilled down to a very simple answer: that many of the holders of power in the current paradigm feel threatened by what a systemic shift could entail, and are expending resources accordingly. The greatest single impediment to meaningful progress on climate change right now is the political toxicity of the issue in the US. This impasse is not the product of some organic bottom-up movement (as a couple of conference panellists seemed to imply) but an orchestrated effort by elites such as the Koch brothers, who have been major funders of the Tea Party movement, both directly in financial terms, but also indirectly in ideological terms though their funding for climate skeptic and 'free market' think tanks.

There was no doubt amongst the conference attendees about the lethality of the precipice that society is blithely marching off right now. It was also explicit in the organisation of the conference that science can no longer simply limit itself to generating knowledge - it must also concern itself with ensuring that this knowledge is acted upon, through engagement with wider society.

Putting these elements together, it seemed clear to me that many scientists are convinced by their data that a paradigm shift in the socio-economic organisation of society is required at this point. The current system is simply unsustainable. What wasn't clear to me was a willingness on the part of many to actually start thinking through (at least openly) what such a shift means for engagement. Is focusing on the defenders of the status quo really the best way of instigating change? As a strategy it doesn't seem to have got us far - carbon emissions rose at their fastest rate ever last year. Shouldn't we give a little more attention to those who do share our goals, and invite them on to the stage rather than ask them to leave it?

Ultimately, this is a question of power. Powerful opponents of change were invited on to the stage at PUP, whilst powerless proponents of change were not. Engagement with powerful actors is of course vital if paradigm change is to be achieved, but that engagement will not achieve anything if it is naively uncritical. Shell's appearance is a powerful example of this. No matter how many photos of wind turbines are placed on their website, they remain a company whose balance sheet relies on their holdings of billions (trillions?) of dollars of oil. How such an organisation can be recruited as a agent of transition to a carbon-free future is somewhat beyond me.

By no means was PUP a one note song: there were many at the conference who were thinking though these issues, and going beyond simply a desire for change to think about what it might mean in practice, both for society at large, and scientists themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these seemed mainly to be the social science delegates (after all, for many of us it's our day job), but there were notable exceptions like that of Anne Glover, the biologist and chief scientific advisor to the European Commission, who spoke passionately on some of these issues. My hope is that by the time of the next PUP, such awareness is more apparent amongst the conference organisers too. They achieved a great many successes during the week, but they failed to create a space conducive to the radical thinking the climate science is demanding. Perhaps in a setting in which Occupy are as visible as Big Oil, the delegates will feel better able to speak openly on what engagement entails when the goal is paradigm change.