Digital Citizenship

July 5, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Events

The Vision Archive: An online library of aspirational, open source social justice imagery

By Gracen Brilmyer & Una Lee, CTSP Fellows | Permalink

Our movements need more images! Social justice organizers have a wide visual vocabulary of protest — raised fists, barbed wire, marchers holding placards — but should we not also depict the world we are building in addition to the forces we’re resisting? How can we communicate concepts we hold dear; concepts like beloved community, allyship, and consent?

The Vision Archive brings together designers, artists, advocates, and community organizers to co-create images for the world we want to build. Visionarchive.io is a Github for visionary social justice images, allowing users to upload images so other users can download and remix them and upload their new creations.

April 25, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Events

Developing Strategies to Counter Online Abuse

By Nick Doty, CTSP | Permalink

We are excited to host a panel of experts this Wednesday, talking about strategies for making the Internet more gender-inclusive and countering online harassment and abuse.

Toward a Gender-Inclusive Internet: Strategies to Counter Harassment, Revenge Porn, Threats, and Online Abuse
Wednesday, April 27; 4:10-5:30 pm
202 South Hall, Berkeley, CA
Open to the public; Livestream available

These are experts and practitioners in law, journalism and technology with an interest in the problem of online harassment. And more importantly, they’re all involved with ongoing concrete approaches to push back against this problem (see, for example, Activate Your Squad and Block Together). While raising awareness about online harassment and understanding the causes and implications remains important, we have reached the point where we can work on direct countermeasures.

April 15, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Opinion

Please Can We Not Try to Rationalize Emoji

By Galen Panger, CTSP Director | Permalink

Emoji are open to interpretation, and that’s a good thing. Credit: Samuel Barnes

This week a study appeared on the scene suggesting an earth-shattering, truly groundbreaking notion: Emoji “may be open to interpretation.”

And then the headlines. “We Really Don’t Know What We’re Saying When We Use Emoji,” a normally level-headed Quartz proclaimed. “That Emoji Does Not Mean What You Think It Means,” Gizmodo declared. “If Emoji Are the Future of Communication Then We’re Screwed,” New York Magazine cried, obviously not trying to get anyone to click on its headline.

April 7, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Opinion

Moderating Harassment in Twitter with Blockbots

By Stuart Geiger, ethnographer and post-doctoral scholar at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science | Permalink

I’ve been working on a research project about counter-harassment projects in Twitter, where I’ve been focusing on blockbots (or bot-based collective blocklists) in Twitter. Blockbots are a different way of responding to online harassment, representing a more decentralized alternative to the standard practice of moderation — typically, a site’s staff has to go through their own process to definitively decide what accounts should be suspended from the entire site. I’m excited to announce that my first paper on this topic will soon be published in Information, Communication, and Society (the PDF on my website and the publisher’s version).

This post is a summary of that article and some thoughts about future work in this area. The paper is based on my empirical research on this topic, but it takes a more theoretical and conceptual approach given how novel these projects are. I give an overview of what blockbots are, the context in which they have emerged, and the issues that they raise about how social networking sites are to be governed and moderated with computational tools. I think there is room for much future research on this topic, and I hope to see more work on this topic from a variety of disciplines and methods.

What are blockbots?

Blockbots are automated software agents developed and used by independent, volunteer users of Twitter, who have developed their own social-computational tools to help moderate their own experiences on Twitter.

The blocktogether.org interface, which lets people subscribe to other people’s blocklists, publish their own blocklists, and automatically block certain kinds of accounts.

March 29, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Infrastructure, Standards & Governance

Privacy for Citizen Drones: Use Cases for Municipal Drone Applications

By Timothy Yim, CTSP Fellow and Director of Data & Privacy at Startup Policy Lab | Permalink

Previous Citizen Drone Articles:

Startup Policy Lab is leading a multi-disciplinary initiative to create a model policy and framework for municipal drone use.

A Day in the Park

We previously conceptualized a privacy policy-by-design framework for municipal drone applications—one that begins with gathering broad stakeholder input from academia, industry, civil society organizations, and municipal departments themselves. To demonstrate the benefits of such an approach, we play out a basic scenario.

A city’s Recreation and Parks Department (“Parks Dept.”) wants to use a drone to monitor the state of its public parks for maintenance purposes, such as proactive tree trimming prior to heavy seasonal winds, vegetation pruning around walking paths, and any directional or turbidity changes in water flows. For most parks, this would amount to twice-daily flights of approximately 15–30 minutes each. The flight video would then be reviewed, processed, and stored by the Parks Dept.

March 22, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Infrastructure, Standards & Governance

Privacy for Citizen Drones: Privacy Policy-By-Design

By Timothy Yim, CTSP Fellow and Director of Data & Privacy at Startup Policy Lab | Permalink

Startup Policy Lab is leading a multi-disciplinary initiative to create a model policy and framework for municipal drone use.

Towards A More Reasoned Approach

Significant policy questions have arisen from the nascent but rapidly increasing adoption of drones in society today. The developing drone ecosystem is a prime example of how law and policy must evolve with and respond to emerging technology, in order for society to thrive while still preserving its normative values.

Privacy has quickly become a vital issue in the debate over acceptable drone use by government municipalities. In some instances, privacy concerns over the increased potential for government surveillance have even led to wholesale bans on the use of drones by municipalities.

Let me clear. This is a misguided approach.

Without a doubt, emerging drone technology is rapidly increasing the potential ability of government to engage in surveillance, both intentionally and unintentionally, and therefore to intrude on the privacy of its citizenry. And likewise, it’s also absolutely true that applying traditional privacy principles—such as notice, consent, and choice—has proven incredibly challenging in the drone space. For the record, these are legitimate and serious concerns.

Yet even under exceptionally strong constructions of modern privacy rights, including those enhanced protections afforded under state constitutions such as California’s, an indiscriminate municipal drone ban makes little long-term sense. A wholesale ban cuts off municipal modernization and the many potential benefits of municipal drone use—for instance, decreased costs and increased frequency of monitoring for the maintenance of public parks, docks, and bridges.

March 15, 2016 In Digital Citizenship

The Neighbors are Watching: From Offline to Online Community Policing in Oakland, California

By Fan Mai & Rebecca Jablonsky, CTSP Fellows | Permalink

As one of the oldest and most popular community crime prevention programs in the United States, Neighborhood Watch is supposed to promote and facilitate community involvement by bringing citizens together with law enforcement in resolving local crime and policing issues. However, a review of Neighborhood Watch programs finds that nearly half of all properly evaluated programs have been unsuccessful. The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, an appointed neighborhood watch coordinator at that time, has brought the conduct of Neighborhood Watch under further scrutiny.

Founded in 2010, Nextdoor is an online social networking site that connects residents of a specific neighborhood together. Unlike other social media, Nextdoor maintains a one-to-one mapping of real-world community to virtual community, nationwide. Positioning itself as the platform for “virtual neighborhood watch,” Nextdoor not only encourages users to post and share “suspicious activities,” but also invites local police departments to post and monitor the “share with police” posts. Since its establishment, more than 1000 law enforcement agencies have partnered with the app, including the Oakland Police Department. Although Nextdoor has helped the local police to solve crimes, it has also been criticized for giving voices to racial biases, especially in Oakland, California.

February 2, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Infrastructure, Standards & Governance

Citizen Drones: delivering burritos and changing public policy

By Charles Belle, CTSP Fellow and CEO of Startup Policy Lab | Permalink

It’s official: drones are now mainstream. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that consumers purchased 1 million drones — or if you prefer to use the more cumbersome technical term “Unmanned Aerial Systems” (UAS) — during the past holiday season alone. Fears about how government agencies might use data collected by drones, however, have led to bans against public agencies operating drones across the country. These concerns about individual privacy are important, but they are obstructing an important discussion about the benefits drones can bring to government operations. A more constructive approach to policymaking begins by asking: how do we want government agencies to use drones?

Reticence amongst policymakers to allow public agencies to operate drones is valid. There are legitimate concerns about how government agencies will collect, stockpile, mine, and have enduring access to data collected. And to make things more complicated, the FAA has clear jurisdictional primacy, but has not set out any clear direction on future regulations. Nonetheless, policymakers and citizens should keep in mind that drones are more than just a series of challenges to privacy and “being under the thumb” of Federal agencies. Drones also offer local public agencies exciting opportunities to expand ambulatory care, deliver other government services more effectively, and support local innovation.

January 12, 2016 In Digital Citizenship, Reviews

Reviewing Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

By Richmond Wong, UC Berkeley School of Information | Permalink

Earlier this year, CTSP sponsored a reading group, in conjunction with the School of Information’s Classics Reading Group, on Danielle Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Citron’s book exposes problems caused by and related to cyber harassment. She provides a detailed and emotional description of the harms of cyber harassment followed by a well-structured legal argument that offers several suggestions on how to move forward. It is a timely piece that allows us to reflect on the ways that the Internet can be a force multiplier for both good and bad, and how actions online interact with the law.

Cyber harassment is disproportionately experienced by women and other often disadvantaged groups (see Pew’s research on online harassment). Citron brings the emotional and personal toll of cyber harassment to life through three profiles of harassment victims. These victims experienced harm not only online, but in the physical world as well. Cyber harassment can destroy professional relationships and employment opportunities, particularly when a victim’s name becomes linked to harassing speech via search engines. Victims may be fired if their nude photos are publicly published. The spread of victims’ personal information such as addresses may lead dangerous and unwanted visitors to their homes.

September 28, 2015 In Digital Citizenship

A virtual/in-person reading group on garbage, hate and harassment

By Nick Doty, CTSP | Permalink

Key to maintaining free expression on the Internet is understanding and responding to the hate, harassment and abuse that the communications network also delivers. This challenge isn’t new, but it has become more apparent recently. Responses to descriptions of the problem or how to handle it often prove the need for this kind of work.

The replies to our last tweet are precisely why we are exploring ways to combat online harassment.

— Google Ideas (@googleideas) September 23, 2015