In the journal’s inaugural issue, founding Editor-in-Chief Helen Margetts outlined what are essentially two central premises behind Policy & Internet’s launch. The first is that “we cannot understand, analyze or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet” (Margetts 2009, 1). It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society. The second premise is that the rise of the Internet is associated with shifts in how policy itself is made. In particular, she proposed that impacts of Internet adoption would be felt in the tools through which policies are effected, and the values that policy processes embody.

The purpose of the Policy and Internet journal was to take up these two challenges: the public policy implications of Internet-related social change, and Internet-related changes in policy processes themselves. In recognition of the inherently multi-disciplinary nature of policy research, the journal is designed to act as a meeting place for all kinds of disciplinary and methodological approaches. Helen predicted that methodological approaches based on large-scale transactional data, network analysis, and experimentation would turn out to be particularly important for policy and Internet studies. Driving the advancement of these methods was therefore the journal’s third purpose. Today, the journal has reached a significant milestone: over one hundred high-quality peer-reviewed articles published. This seems an opportune moment to take stock of what kind of research we have published in practice, and see how it stacks up against the original vision.

At the most general level, the journal’s articles fall into three broad categories: the Internet and public policy (48 articles), the Internet and policy processes (51 articles), and discussion of novel methodologies (10 articles). The first of these categories, “the Internet and public policy,” can be further broken down into a number of subcategories. One of the most prominent of these streams is fundamental rights in a mediated society (11 articles), which focuses particularly on privacy and freedom of expression. Related streams are children and child protection (six articles), copyright and piracy (five articles), and general e-commerce regulation (six articles), including taxation. A recently emerged stream in the journal is hate speech and cybersecurity (four articles). Of course, an enduring research stream is Internet governance, or the regulation of technical infrastructures and economic institutions that constitute the material basis of the Internet (seven articles). In recent years, the research agenda in this stream has been influenced by national policy debates around broadband market competition and network neutrality (Hahn and Singer 2013). Another enduring stream deals with the Internet and public health (eight articles).

Looking specifically at “the Internet and policy processes” category, the largest stream is e-participation, or the role of the Internet in engaging citizens in national and local government policy processes, through methods such as online deliberation, petition platforms, and voting advice applications (18 articles). Two other streams are e-government, or the use of Internet technologies for government service provision (seven articles), and e-politics, or the use of the Internet in mainstream politics, such as election campaigning and communications of the political elite (nine articles). Another stream that has gained pace during recent years, is online collective action, or the role of the Internet in activism, ‘clicktivism,’ and protest campaigns (16 articles). Last year the journal published a special issue on online collective action (Calderaro and Kavada 2013), and the next forthcoming issue includes an invited article on digital civics by Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, with commentary from prominent scholars of Internet activism. A trajectory discernible in this stream over the years is a movement from discussing mere potentials towards analyzing real impacts—including critical analyses of the sometimes inflated expectations and “democracy bubbles” created by digital media (Shulman 2009; Karpf 2012; Bryer 2012).

The final category, discussion of novel methodologies, consists of articles that develop, analyze, and reflect critically on methodological innovations in policy and Internet studies. Empirical articles published in the journal have made use of a wide range of conventional and novel research methods, from interviews and surveys to automated content analysis and advanced network analysis methods. But of those articles where methodology is the topic rather than merely the tool, the majority deal with so-called “big data,” or the use of large-scale transactional data sources in research, commerce, and evidence-based public policy (nine articles). The journal recently devoted a special issue to the potentials and pitfalls of big data for public policy (Margetts and Sutcliffe 2013), based on selected contributions to the journal’s 2012 big data conference: Big Data, Big Challenges? In general, the notion of data science and public policy is a growing research theme.

This brief analysis suggests that research published in the journal over the last five years has indeed followed the broad contours of the original vision. The two challenges, namely policy implications of Internet-related social change and Internet-related changes in policy processes, have both been addressed. In particular, research has addressed the implications of the Internet’s increasing role in social and political life. The journal has also furthered the development of new methodologies, especially the use of online network analysis techniques and large-scale transactional data sources (aka ‘big data’).

As expected, authors from a wide range of disciplines have contributed their perspectives to the journal, and engaged with other disciplines, while retaining the rigor of their own specialisms. The geographic scope of the contributions has been truly global, with authors and research contexts from six continents. I am also pleased to note that a characteristic common to all the published articles is polish; this is no doubt in part due to the high level of editorial support that the journal is able to afford to authors, including copyediting. The justifications for the journal’s establishment five years ago have clearly been borne out, so that the journal now performs an important function in fostering and bringing together research on the public policy implications of an increasingly Internet-mediated society.

And what of my own research interests as an editor? In the inaugural editorial, Helen Margetts highlighted work, finance, exchange, and economic themes in general as being among the prominent areas of Internet-related social change that are likely to have significant future policy implications. I think for the most part, these implications remain to be addressed, and this is an area that the journal can encourage authors to tackle better. As an editor, I will work to direct attention to this opportunity, and welcome manuscript submissions on all aspects of Internet-enabled economic change and its policy implications. This work will be kickstarted by the journal’s 2014 conference (26-27 September), which this year focuses on crowdsourcing and online labor.

Our published articles will continue to be highlighted here in the journal’s blog. Launched last year, we believe this blog will help to expand the reach and impact of research published in Policy and Internet to the wider academic and practitioner communities, promote discussion, and increase authors’ citations. After all, publication is only the start of an article’s public life: we want people reading, debating, citing, and offering responses to the research that we, and our excellent reviewers, feel is important, and worth publishing.

Read the full editorial:  Lehdonvirta, V. (2014) Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies. Policy & Internet 6(2): 109-114.

References

Bryer, T.A. (2011) Online Public Engagement in the Obama Administration: Building a Democracy Bubble? Policy & Internet 3 (4).

Calderaro, A. and Kavada, A. (2013) Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change. Policy & Internet (5) 1.

Hahn, R. and Singer, H. (2013) Is the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Broken? Policy & Internet 5 (3) 340-363.

Karpf, D. (2012) Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism. Policy & Internet 2 (4) 7-41.

Margetts, H. (2009) The Internet and Public Policy. Policy and Internet 1 (1).

Margetts, H. and Sutcliffe, D. (2013) Addressing the Policy Challenges and Opportunities of ‘Big Data.’ Policy & Internet 5 (2) 139-146.

Shulman, S.W. (2009) The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in U.S. Federal Rulemaking. Policy & Internet 1 (1) 23-53.

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the potential of social media as a means to understand public opinion. Driven by an interest in the potential of so-called “big data”, this development has been fuelled by a number of trends. Governments have been keen to create techniques for what they term “horizon scanning”, which broadly means searching for the indications of emerging crises (such as runs on banks or emerging natural disasters) online, and reacting before the problem really develops. Governments around the world are already committing massive resources to developing these techniques. In the private sector, big companies’ interest in brand management has fitted neatly with the potential of social media monitoring. A number of specialised consultancies now claim to be able to monitor and quantify reactions to products, interactions or bad publicity in real time.

It should therefore come as little surprise that, like other research methods before, these new techniques are now crossing over into the competitive political space. Social media monitoring, which in theory can extract information from tweets and Facebook posts and quantify positive and negative public reactions to people, policies and events has an obvious utility for politicians seeking office. Broadly, the process works like this: vast datasets relating to an election, often running into millions of items, are gathered from social media sites such as Twitter. These data are then analysed using natural language processing software, which automatically identifies qualities relating to candidates or policies and attributes a positive or negative sentiment to each item. Finally, these sentiments and other properties mined from the text are totalised, to produce an overall figure for public reaction on social media.

These techniques have already been employed by the mainstream media to report on the 2010 British general election (when the country had its first leaders debate, an event ripe for this kind of research) and also in the 2012 US presidential election. This growing prominence led my co-author Mike Jensen of the University of Canberra and myself to question: exactly how useful are these techniques for predicting election results? In order to answer this question, we carried out a study on the Republican nomination contest in 2012, focused on the Iowa Caucus and Super Tuesday. Our findings are published in the current issue of Policy and Internet.

There are definite merits to this endeavour. US candidate selection contests are notoriously hard to predict with traditional public opinion measurement methods. This is because of the unusual and unpredictable make-up of the electorate. Voters are likely (to greater or lesser degrees depending on circumstances in a particular contest and election laws in the state concerned) to share a broadly similar outlook, so the electorate is harder for pollsters to model. Turnout can also vary greatly from one cycle to the next, adding an additional layer of unpredictability to the proceedings.

However, as any professional opinion pollster will quickly tell you, there is a big problem with trying to predict elections using social media. The people who use it are simply not like the rest of the population. In the case of the US, research from Pew suggests that only 16 per cent of internet users use Twitter, and while that figure goes up to 27 per cent of those aged 18-29, only 2 per cent of over 65s use the site. The proportion of the electorate voting for within those categories, however, is the inverse: over 65s vote at a relatively high rate compared to the 18-29 cohort. furthermore, given that we know (from research such as Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy) that the only a very small proportion of people online actually create content on politics, those who are commenting on elections become an even more unusual subset of the population.

Thus (and I can say this as someone who does use social media to talk about politics!) we are looking at an unrepresentative sub-set (those interested in politics) of an unrepresentative sub-set (those using social media) of the population. This is hardly a good omen for election prediction, which relies on modelling the voting population as closely as possible. As such, it seems foolish to suggest that a simply culmination of individual preferences can simply be equated to voting intentions.

However, in our article we suggest a different way of thinking about social media data, more akin to James Surowiecki’s idea of The Wisdom of Crowds. The idea here is that citizens commenting on social media should not be treated like voters, but rather as commentators, seeking to understand and predict emerging political dynamics. As such, the method we operationalized was more akin to an electoral prediction market, such as the Iowa Electronic Markets, than a traditional opinion poll.

We looked for two things in our dataset: sudden changes in the number of mentions of a particular candidate and also words that indicated momentum for a particular candidate, such as “surge”. Our ultimate finding was that this turned out to be a strong predictor. We found that the former measure had a good relationship with Rick Santorum’s sudden surge in the Iowa caucus, although it did also tend to disproportionately-emphasise a lot of the less successful candidates, such as Michelle Bachmann. The latter method, on the other hand, picked up the Santorum surge without generating false positives, a finding certainly worth further investigation.

Our aim in the paper was to present new ways of thinking about election prediction through social media, going beyond the paradigm established by the dominance of opinion polling. Our results indicate that there may be some value in this approach.

Read the full paper: Michael J. Jensen and Nick Anstead (2013) Psephological investigations: Tweets, votes, and unknown unknowns in the republican nomination process. Policy and Internet 5 (2) 161–182.

Dr Nick Anstead was appointed as a Lecturer in the LSE’s Department of Media and Communication in September 2010, with a focus on Political Communication. His research focuses on the relationship between existing political institutions and new media, covering such topics as the impact of the Internet on politics and government (especially e-campaigning), electoral competition and political campaigns, the history and future development of political parties, and political mobilisation and encouraging participation in civil society.

Dr Michael Jensen is a Research Fellow at the ANZSOG Institute for Governance (ANZSIG), University of Canberra. His research spans the subdisciplines of political communication, social movements, political participation, and political campaigning and elections. In the last few years, he has worked particularly with the analysis of social media data and other digital artefacts, contributing to the emerging field of computational social science.

Protesters in Libya called for their own ‘day of rage’ on February 17, 2011, marked by violent protests in several major cities, including the capitol Tripoli. As they transformed from ‘protestors’ to ‘Opposition forces’ they began pushing information onto Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, reporting their firsthand experiences of what had turned into a civil war virtually overnight. The evolving humanitarian crisis prompted the United Nations to request the creation of the Libya Crisis Map, which was made public on March 6, 2011. Other, more focused crisis maps followed, and were widely distributed on Twitter.

While the map was initially populated with humanitarian information pulled from the media and online social networks, as the imposition of an internationally enforced No Fly Zone (NFZ) over Libya became imminent, information began to appear on it that appeared to be of a tactical military nature. While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable.

How useful was this information, though? Agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community convert raw data into useable information (incorporated into finished intelligence) by utilizing some form of the Intelligence Process. As outlined in the U.S. military’s joint intelligence manual, this consists of six interrelated steps all centered on a specific mission. It is interesting that many Twitter users, though perhaps unaware of the intelligence process, replicated each step during the Libyan civil war; producing finished intelligence adequate for consumption by NATO commanders and rebel leadership.

It was clear from the beginning of the Libyan civil war that very few people knew exactly what was happening on the ground. Even NATO, according to one of the organization’s spokesmen, lacked the ground-level informants necessary to get a full picture of the situation in Libya. There is no public information about the extent to which military commanders used information from crisis maps during the Libyan civil war. According to one NATO official, “Any military campaign relies on something that we call ‘fused information’. So we will take information from every source we can… We’ll get information from open source on the internet, we’ll get Twitter, you name any source of media and our fusion centre will deliver all of that into useable intelligence.”

The data in these crisis maps came from a variety of sources, including journalists, official press releases, and civilians on the ground who updated blogs and/or maintaining telephone contact. The @feb17voices Twitter feed (translated into English and used to support the creation of The Guardian’s and the UN’s Libya Crisis Map) included accounts of live phone calls from people on the ground in areas where the Internet was blocked, and where there was little or no media coverage. Twitter users began compiling data and information; they tweeted and retweeted data they collected, information they filtered and processed, and their own requests for specific data and clarifications.

Information from various Twitter feeds was then published in detailed maps of major events that contained information pertinent to military and humanitarian operations. For example, as fighting intensified, @LibyaMap’s updates began to provide a general picture of the battlefield, including specific, sourced intelligence about the progress of fighting, humanitarian and supply needs, and the success of some NATO missions. Although it did not explicitly state its purpose as spreading mission-relevant intelligence, the nature of the information renders alternative motivations highly unlikely.

Interestingly, the Twitter users featured in a June 2011 article by the Guardian had already explicitly expressed their intention of affecting military outcomes in Libya by providing NATO forces with specific geographical coordinates to target Qadhafi regime forces. We could speculate at this point about the extent to which the Intelligence Community might have guided Twitter users to participate in the intelligence process; while NATO and the Libyan Opposition issued no explicit intelligence requirements to the public, they tweeted stories about social network users trying to help NATO, likely leading their online supporters to draw their own conclusions.

It appears from similar maps created during the ongoing uprisings in Syria that the creation of finished intelligence products by crisis mappers may become a regular occurrence. Future study should focus on determining the motivations of mappers for collecting, processing, and distributing intelligence, particularly as a better understanding of their motivations could inform research on the ethics of crisis mapping. It is reasonable to believe that some (or possibly many) crisis mappers would be averse to their efforts being used by military commanders to target “enemy” forces and infrastructure.

Indeed, some are already questioning the direction of crisis mapping in the absence of professional oversight (Global Brief 2011): “[If] crisis mappers do not develop a set of best practices and shared ethical standards, they will not only lose the trust of the populations that they seek to serve and the policymakers that they seek to influence, but (…) they could unwittingly increase the number of civilians being hurt, arrested or even killed without knowing that they are in fact doing so.”

Read the full paper: Stottlemyre, S., and Stottlemyre, S. (2012) Crisis Mapping Intelligence Information During the Libyan Civil War: An Exploratory Case Study. Policy and Internet 4 (3-4).

Many of the conference papers are available on the conference website; the conference special issue on big data will be published in the journal Policy and Internet in 2013.