Exploring Digital Spheres

Wouter met Martin Riedl in the middle of Berlin to discuss how platforms keep the internet "clean" from undesirable content – but what is undesirable? And what does it mean for moderators when they click through thousand of graphic images?

To assure that the content on social media platforms adheres to the standards set by those platforms thousand of content moderators decide everyday which content should be deleted. Martin Riedl, former fellow and currently associated researcher at the HIIG, is interested in the labour conditions and well-being of those workers. In his current research, he looks at the question: how can we reveal the minimum amount of information to a human reviewer such that an objectionable image can still be correctly identified?

In order to find an answer, a current study looks at how blurred images affect the moderation experience with respect to accuracy and emotional well-being: But Who Protects the Moderators? The Case of Crowdsourced Image Moderation (Brandon Dang, Martin J. Riedl, Matthew Lease, 2018)

Nick Couldry has recently coined the term 'data colonialism' in order to highlight continuities from colonialism’s historic appropriation of resources to today's datafication of everyday life.

Couldry, professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), visited us in Berlin for his lecture "Colonised by data". HIIG researcher Thomas Christian Bächle met with Couldry – who once was his professor at Goldsmiths College in London eleven years ago – for a talk on the digital society. In this episode, we learn about Couldry's very own media rituals – celebrity spotting and falling asleep to the radio news – as well as how a media professor is dealing with knowing what kind of personal data WhatsApp is collecting. Also: What exactly is data colonialism? How is it different from concepts such as surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018) or data capitalism?

More information and literature mentioned in this episode:

Nick Couldry at LSE: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/people/academic-staff/nick-couldry

0:50 MA Digital Media: Technology & Cultural Form

2:16 Media Rituals – A Critical Approach (Nick Couldry)

3:50 Critique of Everyday Life

5:35 Das Smartphone, ein Wächter (Thomas Bächle)

17:00 Data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject (Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias)

18:00 End of theory (Anderson)

19:10 The Costs of Connection (Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias)

The Mediated Construction of Reality (Nick Couldry & Andreas Hepp)

In this second inside episode, Wouter dives deeper into the universe of algorithms in order to clean up the mess of buzz words we are confronted with on a daily basis. Did you also wonder why certain videos pop up in your timeline that seem most unlikely you ever wanted to see them? How do computers recognise objects and animals on photos?

Nothing but statistics

In an insightful conversation with Wouter, HIIG director Björn Scheuermann tells us about his research as a computer scientist and in how far he trusts algorithm based machines.

Computer scientists should try much harder to explain what they are doing.

Sources

At the beginning of the episode Wouter shows how algorithms sound. Find the original idea and file here: http://panthema.net/2013/1024-Sound-of-Sorting-KIT-Informatik/.

Also listen to sounds being sorted by different algorithms here: http://www.caseyrule.com/projects/sounds-of-sorting/

Amélie Heldt studied French and German Law at the universities of Paris Ouest Nanterre and Potsdam. After passing the first state examination, she completed a supplementary training programme in Design Thinking at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam and worked in the legal department of a market-leading music label. She completed her two-year legal clerkship at the superior Court of Justice in Berlin and was working amongst others for the Stiftung Oper in Berlin (Berlin Opera Foundation), in the media and copyright area of the law firm Raue LLP and for the GIZ (German development agency) in Cambodia.

Since May 2017, she is a junior researcher and Ph.D. candidate within Research Programme 1 “Transformation of Public Communication” at the Hans-Bredow-Institute. In her Ph.D. project, Amélie Heldt focuses on the effect of the fundamental right on freedom of expression in the digital sphere.

Titled: "The difficulty of regulating fake news" and "Chers voisins d’outre-Rhin: A french NetzDG?" Amélie published two articles about the French regulatory situation regarding fake news, and one more on political micro-targeting which is all mentioned during the interview. (all articles are written in German)

Clara is a Public Law Doctoral Candidate at the Rio de Janeiro State University – UERJ. She holds a Master of Public Law diploma from the same University and an L.LM in IT, Media and Communications Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science. At the HIIG, she is focused on the regulation of online service providers, specifically regarding the combination of internet governance principles with regulatory strategies and rationales (the subject of her Doctoral thesis). She is also interested in e-governments, digital administrative law and the shaping of democratic institutions in the face of technology in general.

Clara wrote on the blog of the HIIG a detailed article on the fake news during the Brazilian elections.

Besides fake news, Clara and Amélie talk about media and information quality in an age of artificial intelligence. You can read more about this in an article from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Ever worried about not being able to put your video up on Youtube? More than hundred hours of videos are uploaded every minute. So how do platforms make sure people obey the rules? How to make sure this content is not stolen? They use automatic filters, which have caused some nasty side effects.

Rike Maier is copyright researcher and associated at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). Wouter Bernhardt interviewed Rike about her research and what upload filter exactly do.

More about what Rike does: https://www.hiig.de/staff/rike-maier/ and her thesis on remixes and copyright: http://bit.ly/2BnmZM4

This is Exploring Digital Spheres.

My name is Wouter Bernhardt and together with the HIIG and its researchers I’ll be diving deep into a world of coding, rating, nudging, and filtering. Asking questions on how our digital society works and what the future might look like.

In our first episodes you'll get to know…

All this and more, every two weeks on Exploring Digital Spheres. Check our website.