Data & Society

Researchers Arthur Gwagwa and Deb Raji join our host, Natalie Kerby, to discuss data, AI, and automation, and the different ways they operate across geopolitical contexts such as the US and Africa. The episode covers not only the harms that can result from these systems, but also how we might address and prevent those harms.

Arthur Gwagwa (@arthurgwagwa) is a researcher at Utrecht University’s Ethics Institute in the Department of Philosophy.

Deb Raji (@rajiinio) is a fellow at Mozilla and works closely with the Algorithmic Justice League.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

At social media and gaming companies, the user is the constant focus — at least in theory. How to get them to use this platform more? To stay longer? To come back tomorrow? Attention and resources are poured into answering these questions throughout the industry. That same attention and those same resources are not, however, put toward the well-being of a major group of their users: young people. 

Data & Society’s new report, The Unseen Teen: The Challenges of Building Healthy Tech for Young People investigates how social platform companies think about and design for young people and their health and digital well-being. Based on a multi-year, qualitative research project interviewing social media and social gaming company workers in a variety of roles, we learned that many companies struggle to imagine and design for the breadth of their users, especially minors. Instead by focusing on averages, and limited quantitative metrics, tech companies miss the nuance in differential impacts that has real consequences for real people. We discuss the report, our recommendations, and the real world implications of our findings on those entrusted to help companies think about the well-being of their youngest users.

Speaker Bios

Amanda Lenhart studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. A quantitative and qualitative researcher, Amanda is the Health + Data Research Lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, how harassment has thrived in online spaces, and how automation will impact workers. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on the ways technology affects workers’ jobs and lives, as well as the family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.

Charlotte Willner is the Founding Executive Director of the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Trust & Safety Foundation after fourteen years of working in trust and safety operations. She began her career at Facebook, where she led international user support, then built out their first safety operations team. She went on to build and lead Pinterest's trust and safety operations team, overseeing online safety, law enforcement response, and intellectual property matters. She holds a degree in English from Bowdoin College and is delighted to show you that this is, in fact, what you can do with an English degree.

Aden Van Noppen is the Founder and Executive Director of Mobius, an unconventional collective of technologists, scientists, activists, and spiritual teachers working together to create a world in which technology brings out the best in humanity. She was a Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House Office, where she developed the led programs that leverage tech as a tool for social and economic justice. After that, she spent a year as a Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School focusing on the intersection of tech, ethics and spirituality and was an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Aden was also part of the founding leadership team of The Sanctuaries, the first interfaith arts community in the country. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, WIRED, and elsewhere.

Scholar Shaka McGlotten and activist Chris Ramsaroop join our host, Natalie Kerby, to discuss data in the context of labor. The episode addresses the historical ways that data has been used to organize labor, the labor of making ourselves visible to data-centric systems, and the different ways that people, and more specifically workers, are resisting datafication.

Shaka McGlotten (@shakaz23) is a professor of anthropology and media studies at Purchase College, SUNY and 2020-2021 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society.

Chris Ramsaroop (@j4mw) is an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

In the first episode of our new season, “Becoming Data,” artist Mimi Onuoha and data journalist Lam Thuy Vo join host, Natalie Kerby, to consider what is lost when human life becomes translated into data. How do people show up in data, and what are some of the inequalities that can result from data collection?

Mimi Onuoha (@thistimeitsmimi) is a media artist who makes work about what it means for the world to take the form of data.

Lam Thuy Vo (@lamthuyvo) is a reporter who digs into data to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is an incoming Data Journalist-in-Residence at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

In the podcast series, Natalie Kerby of Data & Society asks her guests: How long has human life been quantified as data, and in what contexts? What are some major implications of humanity being measured as data? How are people pushing back against the datafication of human life, work, health, and citizenship?

She speaks with academics, artists, activists, and journalists to explore these questions and more. 

To facilitate a global understanding of possible vulnerabilities that will arise from vaccine passport adoption, we bring together Ranjit Singh, expert on digital identity systems, Amy Fairchild, public health ethicist, and Imogen Parker, head of policy at Ada Lovelace Institute, to discuss the past and future of digital health systems. The conversation is hosted by Data & Society Health and Data Program Director Amanda Lenhart.

Speaker Bios

Amanda Lenhart (Host)
Amanda Lenhart studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. A quantitative and qualitative researcher, Amanda is the Health + Data Research Lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, how harassment has thrived in online spaces, and how automation will impact workers. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on the ways technology affects workers’ jobs and lives, as well as the family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.

Amanda specializes in translating rigorous research for a broad national audience. Dedicated to public communication, she has testified before congressional subcommittees and the Federal Trade Commission. Amanda’s work has been featured in numerous national publications and broadcasts, including the PBS Newshour and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Imogen Parker (Co-Host)
Imogen is Head of Policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, where she is responsible for creating social change through developments to policy, law, regulation and public service delivery. She is a Policy Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Science and Policy.

Her career has been at the intersection of social justice, technology and research. In her previous role as Head of the Nuffield Foundation’s programmes on Justice, Rights and Digital Society she worked in collaboration with the founding partner organisations to create the Institute. Prior to that she was acting Head of Policy Research for Citizens and Democracy at Citizens Advice, Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and worked with Baroness Kidron to create the children’s digital rights charity 5Rights.

Ranjit Singh (Panelist)
Ranjit Singh has a doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University. His research lies at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy. He uses methods of interview-based qualitative sociology and multi-sited ethnography in his research. He examines the everyday experiences of people subject to data-driven practices and follows the mutual shaping of their lives and their data records. His dissertation research on Aadhaar, the national biometrics-based identification infrastructure of India, advances the public understanding of the affordances and limits of biometrics-based data infrastructures in practically achieving inclusive development and reshaping the nature of Indian citizenship.

He has published his research in venues such as the Journal of South Asian Studies and the ACM CHI Conference; he has presented his work at conferences including CSCW, 4S, AAA, and ECSAS. Beyond the dissertation, he has focused on two additional infrastructures: (1) the National Register of Citizens in Assam, India—an effort to differentiate citizens from illegal immigrants. (2) US Credit Scoring—the efforts of low-income individuals to improve their creditworthiness within the lending industry. In all these projects, his research is oriented towards understanding how data is increasingly used to imagine and develop new digital solutions for democratizing inclusion. He was also involved in developing the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical program at Cornell University, to study and support individuals in their struggles to secure fair representation in data infrastructures.

Amy Lauren Fairchild (Panelist)
Amy Lauren Fairchild is a historian who works at the intersection of history, public health ethics, and public health policy and politics. Her work helped establish public health ethics—which is concerned with the well-being of populations—as fundamentally distinct from either bioethics or human rights. Whether exploring the tension between privacy and surveillance, immigration and border control, or paternalism and liberty, Fairchild assesses the social, political, and ethical factors that shape not only the potential and limits of the state to intervene for the common good but also what counts as evidence.

Fairchild has written two books: Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove). In addition, she has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, and the JAMA. The National Endowment for the Humanities funds her current book project: a social history of fear and panic.

A graduate of the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Fairchild received her MPH and PhD from Columbia University. She was on the faculty at Columbia for 22 years in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. At Columbia, she served as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Foundations module and Integration of Science and Practice in the MPH Core Curriculum. She continues to serve as Co-Director, with Ronald Bayer, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics at Columbia’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. Fairchild also served on the faculty at Texas A&M University. There, she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Public Health and Associate Vice President for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the Health Science Center.

Fairchild feels extraordinarily honored to serve as Dean of the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University. Any university with the chutzpah to have a poison nut for a mascot is the kind of place she wants to stay.

Data & Society and Stanford PACS host a special book launch: One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.

To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.

Speaker Bios

Robyn Caplan | @robyncaplan
Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on 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 in society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

Lucy Bernholz | @p2173
Lucy Bernholz is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. She has been a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Hybrid Reality Institute, and the New America Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including the annual Blueprint Series on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, the 2010 publication Disrupting Philanthropy, and her 2004 book Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She is a co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (2016, Chicago University Press) and of the forthcoming volume Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. She writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award winning blog, philanthropy2173.com.

She studied history and has a B.A. from Yale University, where she played field hockey and captained the lacrosse team, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Rob Reich | @robreich
Rob Reich is professor of political science and, by courtesy, professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Education, at Stanford University. He is the director of the Center for Ethics in Society and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review), both at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). He is also the author of several books on education: Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). His current work focuses on ethics, public policy, and technology, and he serves as associate director of the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence initiative at Stanford. Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. Reich was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review, of Giving Tuesday, and at the Spencer Foundation. More details at his personal webpage: http://robreich.stanford.edu

Seeta Peña Gangadharan
Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions around democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She currently co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on members of marginalized communities in the United States, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which explores the impacts of data-driven technologies and infrastructures on European civil society. She is also a visiting scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School, Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Affiliate Fellow of Data & Society Research Institute.

Before joining the Department in 2015, Seeta was Senior Research Fellow at New America’s Open Technology Institute, addressing policies and practices related to digital inclusion, privacy, and “big data.” Before OTI, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and MacArthur Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She received her PhD from Stanford University and holds an MSc from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Seeta’s research has been supported by grants from Digital Trust Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

Archon Fung | @Arfung
Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals. He received two S.B.s — in philosophy and physics — and his Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

Algorithms make a wide range of morally important decisions, and many people now argue that members of the public should be more directly involved in deciding the moral tradeoffs that such systems entail. But most ideas for public or stakeholder involvement are still on the drawing board, and there are few real stories of public deliberation over the design of a morally important algorithm. This talk explores one such story.

On December 4, 2014, the algorithm that allocates kidneys for transplant in the United States was replaced, following more than a decade of debate and planning. The development process was highly transparent and participatory, faced hard ethical questions explicitly, and incorporated elements of simulation and auditing that scholars often recommend. Scientist and researcher David Robinson describes how this story played out — including a twist ending — and will draw out four broader lessons to inform the design of participation strategies for other high stakes algorithms. The talk is hosted by Data & Society Senior Researcher, Alex Rosenblat.

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