In their Policy & Internet article “Does the Internet Encourage Political Participation? Use of an Online Platform by Members of a German Political Party,” Katharina Gerl, Stefan Marschall, and Nadja Wilker examine the German Greens’ online collaboration platform to ask why only some party members and supporters use it. The platform aims improve the inclusion of party supporters and members in the party’s opinion-formation and decision-making process, but it has failed to reach inactive members. Instead, those who have already been active in the party also use the online platform. It also seems that classical resources such as education and employment status do not (directly) explain differences in participation; instead, participation is motivated by process-related and ideological incentives.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: You say “When it comes to explaining political online participation within parties, we face a conceptual and empirical void” .. can you explain briefly what the offline models are, and why they don’t work for the Internet age?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: According to Verba et al. (1995) the reasons for political non-participation can be boiled down to three factors: (1) citizens do not want to participate, (2) they cannot, (3) nobody asked them to. Speaking model-wise we can distinguish three perspectives: Citizens need certain resources like education, information, time and civic skills to participate (resource model and civic voluntarism model). The social psychological model looks at the role of attitudes and political interest that are supposed to increase participation. In addition to resources and attitudes, the general incentives model analyses how motives, costs and benefits influence participation.

These models can be applied to online participation as well, but findings for the online context indicate that the mechanisms do not always work like in the offline context. For example, age plays out differently for online participation. Generally, the models have to be specified for each participation context. This especially applies for the online context as forms of online participation sometimes demand different resources, skills or motivational factors. Therefore, we have to adapt and supplemented the models with additional online factors like internet skills and internet sophistication.

Ed.: What’s the value to a political party of involving its members in policy discussion? (i.e. why go through the bother?)

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Broadly speaking, there are normative and rational reasons for that. At least for the German parties, intra-party democracy plays a crucial role. The involvement of members in policy discussion can serve as a means to strengthen the integration and legitimation power of a party. Additionally, the involvement of members can have a mobilizing effect for the party on the ground. This can positively influence the linkage between the party in central office, the party on the ground, and the societal base. Furthermore, member participation can be a way to react on dissatisfaction within a party.

Ed.: Are there any examples of successful “public deliberation” — i.e. is this maybe just a problem of getting disparate voices to usefully engage online, rather than a failure of political parties per se?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: This is definitely not unique to political parties. The problems we observe regarding online public deliberation in political parties also apply to other online participation platforms: political participation and especially public deliberation require time and effort for participants, so they will only be willing to engage if they feel they benefit from it. But the benefits of participation may remain unclear as public deliberation – by parties or other initiators – often takes place without a clear goal or a real say in decision-making for the participants. Initiators of public deliberation often fail to integrate processes of public deliberation into formal and meaningful decision-making procedures. This leads to disappointment for potential participants who might have different expectations concerning their role and scope of influence. There is a risk of a vicious circle and disappointed expectations on both sides.

Ed.: Based on your findings, what would you suggest that the Greens do in order to increase participation by their members on their platform?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Our study shows that the members of the Greens are generally willing to participate online and appreciate this opportunity. However, the survey also revealed that the most important incentive for them is to have an influence on the party’s decision-making. We would suggest that the Greens create an actual cause for participation, meaning to set clear goals and to integrate it into specific and relevant decisions. Participation should not be an end in itself!

Ed.: How far do political parties try to harness deliberation where it happens in the wild e.g. on social media, rather than trying to get people to use bespoke party channels? Or might social media users see this as takeover by the very “establishment politics” they might have abandoned, or be reacting against?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: Parties do not constrain their online activities to their own official platforms and channels but also try to develop strategies for influencing discourses in the wild. However, this works much better and has much more authenticity as well as credibility if it isn’t parties as abstract organizations but rather individual politicians such as members of parliament who engage in person on social media, for example by using Twitter.

Ed.: How far have political scientists understood the reasons behind the so-called “crisis of democracy”, and how to address it? And even if academics came up with “the answer” — what is the process for getting academic work and knowledge put into practice by political parties?

Katharina / Stefan / Nadja: The alleged “crisis of democracy” is in first line seen as a crisis of representation in which the gap between political elites and the citizens has widened drastically within the last years, giving room to populist movements and parties in many democracies. Our impression is that facing the rise of populism in many countries, politicians have become more and more attentive towards discussions and findings in political science which have been addressing the linkage problems for years. But perhaps this is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Read the full article: Gerl, K., Marschall, S., and Wilker, N. (2016) Does the Internet Encourage Political Participation? Use of an Online Platform by Members of a German Political Party. Policy & Internet doi:10.1002/poi3.149

Katharina Gerl, Stefan Marschall, and Nadja Wilker were talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Easy availability of Twitter data links nicely to a key goal of computational social science. If researchers can find ways to impute user characteristics from social media, then the capabilities of computational social science would be greatly extended. However few papers consider the digital divide among Twitter users. But the question of who uses Twitter has major implications for research attempts to use the content of tweets for inference about population behaviour. Do Twitter users share identical characteristics with the population interest? For what populations are Twitter data actually appropriate?

A new article by Grant Blank published in Social Science Computer Review provides a multivariate empirical analysis of the digital divide among Twitter users, comparing Twitter users and nonusers with respect to their characteristic patterns of Internet activity and to certain key attitudes. It thereby fills a gap in our knowledge about an important social media platform, and it joins a surprisingly small number of studies that describe the population that uses social media.

Comparing British (OxIS survey) and US (Pew) data, Grant finds that generally, British Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than other Internet users, who in turn are younger, wealthier, and better educated than the offline British population. American Twitter users are also younger and wealthier than the rest of the population, but they are not better educated. Twitter users are disproportionately members of elites in both countries. Twitter users also differ from other groups in their online activities and their attitudes.

Under these circumstances, any collection of tweets will be biased, and inferences based on analysis of such tweets will not match the population characteristics. A biased sample can’t be corrected by collecting more data; and these biases have important implications for research based on Twitter data, suggesting that Twitter data are not suitable for research where representativeness is important, such as forecasting elections or gaining insight into attitudes, sentiments, or activities of large populations.

Read the full article: Blank, G. (2016) The Digital Divide Among Twitter Users and Its Implications for Social Research. Social Science Computer Review. DOI: 10.1177/0894439316671698

We caught up with Grant to explore the implications of the findings:

Ed.: Despite your cautions about lack of representativeness, you mention that the bias in Twitter could actually make it useful to study (for example) elite behaviours: for example in political communication?

Grant: Yes. If you want to study elites and channels of elite influence then Twitter is a good candidate. Twitter data could be used as one channel of elite influence, along with other online channels like social media or blog posts, and offline channels like mass media or lobbying. There is an ecology of media and Twitter is one part.

Ed.: You also mention that Twitter is actually quite successful at forecasting certain offline, commercial behaviours (e.g. box office receipts).

Grant: Right. Some commercial products are disproportionately used by wealthier or younger people. That certainly would include certain forms of mass entertainment like cinema. It also probably includes a number of digital products like smartphones, especially more expensive phones, and wearable devices like a Fitbit. If a product is disproportionately bought by the same population groups that use Twitter then it may be possible to forecast sales using Twitter data. Conversely, products disproportionately used by poorer or older people are unlikely to be predictable using Twitter.

Ed.: Is there a general trend towards abandoning expensive, time-consuming, multi-year surveys and polling? And do you see any long-term danger in that? i.e. governments and media (and academics?) thinking “Oh, we can just get it off social media now”.

Grant: Yes and no. There are certainly people who are thinking about it and trying to make it work. The ease and low cost of social media is very seductive. However, that has to be balanced against major weaknesses. First the population using Twitter (and other social media) is unclear, but it is not a random sample. It is just a population of Twitter users, which is not a population of interest to many.

Second, tweets are even less representative. As I point out in the article, over 40% of people with a Twitter account have never sent a tweet, and the top 15% of users account for 85% of tweets. So tweets are even less representative of any real-world population than Twitter users. What these issues mean is that you can’t calculate measures of error or confidence intervals from Twitter data. This is crippling for many academic and government uses.

Third, Twitter’s limited message length and simple interface tends to give it advantages on devices with restricted input capability, like phones. It is well-suited for short, rapid messages. These characteristics tend to encourage Twitter use for political demonstrations, disasters, sports events, and other live events where reports from an on-the-spot observer are valuable. This suggests that Twitter usage is not like other social media or like email or blogs.

Fourth, researchers attempting to extract the meaning of words have 140 characters to analyze and they are littered with abbreviations, slang, non-standard English, misspellings and links to other documents. The measurement issues are immense. Measurement is hard enough in surveys when researchers have control over question wording and can do cognitive interviews to understand how people interpret words.

With Twitter (and other social media) researchers have no control over the process that generated the data, and no theory of the data generating process. Unlike surveys, social media analysis is not a general-purpose tool for research. Except in limited areas where these issues are less important, social media is not a promising tool.

Ed.: How would you respond to claims that for example Facebook actually had more accurate political polling than anyone else in the recent US Election? (just that no-one had access to its data, and Facebook didn’t say anything)?

Grant: That is an interesting possibility. The problem is matching Facebook data with other data, like voting records. Facebook doesn’t know where people live. Finding their location would not be an easy problem. It is simpler because Facebook would not need an actual address; it would only need to locate the correct voting district or the state (for the Electoral College in US Presidential elections). Still, there would be error of unknown magnitude, probably impossible to calculate. It would be a very interesting research project. Whether it would be more accurate than a poll is hard to say.

Ed.: Do you think social media (or maybe search data) scraping and analysis will ever successfully replace surveys?

Grant: Surveys are such versatile, general purpose tools. They can be used to elicit many kinds information on all kinds of subjects from almost any population. These are not characteristics of social media. There is no real danger that surveys will be replaced in general.

However, I can see certain specific areas where analysis of social media will be useful. Most of these are commercial areas, like consumer sentiments. If you want to know what people are saying about your product, then going to social media is a good, cheap source of information. This is especially true if you sell a mass market product that many people use and talk about; think: films, cars, fast food, breakfast cereal, etc.

These are important topics to some people, but they are a subset of things that surveys are used for. Too many things are not talked about, and some are very important. For example, there is the famous British reluctance to talk about money. Things like income, pensions, and real estate or financial assets are not likely to be common topics. If you are a government department or a researcher interested in poverty, the effect of government assistance, or the distribution of income and wealth, you have to depend on a survey.

There are a lot of other situations where surveys are indispensable. For example, if the OII wanted to know what kind of jobs OII alumni had found, it would probably have to survey them.

Ed.: Finally .. 1400 Twitter articles in .. do we actually know enough now to say anything particularly useful or concrete about it? Are we creeping towards a Twitter revelation or consensus, or is it basically 1400 articles saying “it’s all very complicated”?

Grant: Mostly researchers have accepted Twitter data at face value. Whatever people write in a tweet, it means whatever the researcher thinks it means. This is very easy and it avoids a whole collection of complex issues. All the hard work of understanding how meaning is constructed in Twitter and how it can be measured is yet to be done. We are a long way from understanding Twitter.

Read the full article: Blank, G. (2016) The Digital Divide Among Twitter Users and Its Implications for Social Research. Social Science Computer Review. DOI: 10.1177/0894439316671698

Grant Blank was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

This was probably the nastiest Presidential election in recent memory: awash with Twitter bots and scandal, polarisation and filter bubbles, accusations of interference by Russia and the Director of the FBI, and another shock result. We have written about electoral prediction elsewhere: instead, here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy — the problems, but also potential ways forward.

1. James Williams: The Clickbait Candidate

10 October 2016 / 2700 words / 13 minutes

“Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivize, relentless competition for our attention […] Like clickbait or outrage cascades, Donald Trump is merely the sort of informational packet our media environment is designed to select for.”

James Williams says that now is probably the time to have that societal conversation about the design ethics of the attention economy — because in our current media environment, attention trumps everything.

2. Sam Woolley, Philip Howard: Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election [Wired]

15 May 2016 / 850 words / 4 minutes

“Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras […] each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto aren’t people. They’re bots.”

It’s no surprise that automated spam accounts (or bots) are creeping into election politics, say Sam Woolley and Philip Howard. Demanding bot transparency would at least help clean up social media — which, for better or worse, is increasingly where presidents get elected.

3. Phil Howard: Is Social Media Killing Democracy?

15 November 2016 / 1100 words / 5 minutes

“This is the big year for computational propaganda — using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits […] these technologies permit too much fake news, encourage our herding instincts, and aren’t expected to provide public goods.”

Phil Howard discusses ways to address fake news, audit social algorithms, and deal with social media’s “moral pass” — social media is damaging democracy, he says, but can also be used to save it.

4. Helen Margetts: Don’t Shoot the Messenger! What part did social media play in 2016 US e­lection?

15 November 2016 / 600 words / 3 minutes

“Rather than seeing social media solely as the means by which Trump ensnared his presidential goal, we should appreciate how they can provide a wealth of valuable data to understand the anger and despair that the polls missed, and to analyse political behaviour and opinion in the times ahead.”

New social information and visibility brings change to social behaviour, says Helen Margetts — ushering in political turbulence and unpredictability. Social media made visible what could have remain a country’s dark secret (hatred of women, rampant racism, etc.), but it will also underpin any radical counter-movement that emerges in the future.

5. Helen Margetts: Of course social media is transforming politics. But it’s not to blame for Brexit and Trump

9 January 2017 / 1700 words / 8 minutes

“Even if political echo chambers were as efficient as some seem to think, there is little evidence that this is what actually shapes election results. After all, by definition echo chambers preach to the converted. It is the undecided people who (for example) the Leave and Trump campaigns needed to reach. And from the research, it looks like they managed to do just that.”

Politics is a lot messier in the social media era than it used to be, says Helen Margetts, but rather than blaming social media for undermining democracy, we should be thinking about how we can improve the (inevitably major) part that it plays.

The Authors

James Williams is an OII doctoral candidate, studying the ethics of attention and persuasion in technology design.

Sam Woolley is a Research Assistant on the OII’s Computational Propaganda project; he is interested in political bots, and the intersection of political communication and automation.

Philip Howard is the OII’s Professor of Internet Studies and PI of the Computational Propaganda project. He investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world.

Helen Margetts is the OII’s Director, and Professor of Society and the Internet. She specialises in digital era government, politics and public policy, and data science and experimental methods. Her most recent book is Political Turbulence (Princeton).

Coming up .. Fake news and filter bubbles / It’s the economy, stupid / Augmented reality and ambient fun / The platform economy / Power and development / Internet past and future / Government / Labour rights / The disconnected / Ethics / Staying critical

#5OIIPieces

Attention has focused on echo chambers, with many arguing that social media users exist in ideological filter bubbles, narrowly focused on their own preferences, prey to fake news and political bots, reinforcing polarization and leading voters to turn away from the mainstream. Mark Zuckerberg has responded with the strange claim that his company (built on $5 billion of advertising revenue) does not influence people’s decisions.

So what role did social media play in the political events of 2016?

Political turbulence and the new populism

There is no doubt that social media has brought change to politics. From the waves of protest and unrest in response to the 2008 financial crisis, to the Arab spring of 2011, there has been a generalized feeling that political mobilization is on the rise, and that social media had something to do with it.

Our book investigating the relationship between social media and collective action, Political Turbulence, focuses on how social media allows new, “tiny acts” of political participation (liking, tweeting, viewing, following, signing petitions and so on), which turn social movement theory around. Rather than identifying with issues, forming collective identity and then acting to support the interests of that identity – or voting for a political party that supports it – in a social media world, people act first, and think about it, or identify with others later, if at all.

These tiny acts of participation can scale up to large-scale mobilizations, such as demonstrations, protests or campaigns for policy change. But they almost always don’t. The overwhelming majority (99.99%) of petitions to the UK or US governments fail to get the 100,000 signatures required for a parliamentary debate (UK) or an official response (US).

The very few that succeed do so very quickly on a massive scale (petitions challenging the Brexit and Trump votes immediately shot above 4 million signatures, to become the largest petitions in history), but without the normal organizational or institutional trappings of a social or political movement, such as leaders or political parties – the reason why so many of the Arab Spring revolutions proved disappointing.

This explosive rise, non-normal distribution and lack of organization that characterizes contemporary politics can explain why many political developments of our time seem to come from nowhere. It can help to understand the shock waves of support that brought us the Italian Five Star Movement, Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and most recently Brexit and Trump – all of which have campaigned against the “establishment” and challenged traditional political institutions to breaking point.

Each successive mobilization has made people believe that challengers from outside the mainstream are viable – and that is in part what has brought us unlikely results on both sides of the Atlantic. But it doesn’t explain everything.

We’ve had waves of populism before – long before social media (indeed many have made parallels between the politics of 2016 and that of the 1930s). While claims that social media feeds are the biggest threat to democracy, leading to the “disintegration of the general will” and “polarization that drives populism” abound, hard evidence is more difficult to find.

The myth of the echo chamber

The mechanism that is most often offered for this state of events is the existence of echo chambers or filter bubbles. The argument goes that first social media platforms feed people the news that is closest to their own ideological standpoint (estimated from their previous patterns of consumption) and second, that people create their own personalized information environments through their online behaviour, selecting friends and news sources that back up their world view.

Once in these ideological bubbles, people are prey to fake news and political bots that further reinforce their views. So, some argue, social media reinforces people’s current views and acts as a polarizing force on politics, meaning that “random exposure to content is gone from our diets of news and information”.

Really? Is exposure less random than before? Surely the most perfect echo chamber would be the one occupied by someone who only read the Daily Mail in the 1930s – with little possibility of other news – or someone who just watches Fox News? Can our new habitat on social media really be as closed off as these environments, when our digital networks are so very much larger and more heterogeneous than anything we’ve had before?

Research suggests not. A recent large-scale survey (of 50,000 news consumers in 26 countries) shows how those who do not use social media on average come across news from significantly fewer different online sources than those who do. Social media users, it found, receive an additional “boost” in the number of news sources they use each week, even if they are not actually trying to consume more news. These findings are reinforced by an analysis of Facebook data, where 8.8 billion posts, likes and comments were posted through the US election.

Recent research published in Science shows that algorithms play less of a role in exposure to attitude-challenging content than individuals’ own choices and that “on average more than 20% of an individual’s Facebook friends who report an ideological affiliation are from the opposing party”, meaning that social media exposes individuals to at least some ideologically cross-cutting viewpoints: “24% of the hard content shared by liberals’ friends is cross-cutting, compared to 35% for conservatives” (the equivalent figures would be 40% and 45% if random).

In fact, companies have no incentive to create hermetically sealed (as I have heard one commentator claim) echo chambers. Most of social media content is not about politics (sorry guys) – most of that £5 billion advertising revenue does not come from political organizations. So any incentives that companies have to create echo chambers – for the purposes of targeted advertising, for example – are most likely to relate to lifestyle choices or entertainment preferences, rather than political attitudes.

And where filter bubbles do exist they are constantly shifting and sliding – easily punctured by a trending cross-issue item (anybody looking at #Election2016 shortly before polling day would have seen a rich mix of views, while having little doubt about Trump’s impending victory).

And of course, even if political echo chambers were as efficient as some seem to think, there is little evidence that this is what actually shapes election results. After all, by definition echo chambers preach to the converted. It is the undecided people who (for example) the Leave and Trump campaigns needed to reach.

And from the research, it looks like they managed to do just that. A barrage of evidence suggests that such advertising was effective in the 2015 UK general election (where the Conservatives spent 10 times as much as Labour on Facebook advertising), in the EU referendum (where the Leave campaign also focused on paid Facebook ads) and in the presidential election, where Facebook advertising has been credited for Trump’s victory, while the Clinton campaign focused on TV ads. And of course, advanced advertising techniques might actually focus on those undecided voters from their conversations. This is not the bottom-up political mobilization that fired off support for Podemos or Bernie Sanders. It is massive top-down advertising dollars.

Ironically however, these huge top-down political advertising campaigns have some of the same characteristics as the bottom-up movements discussed above, particularly sustainability. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s dictum that candidates “campaign in poetry and govern in prose” may need an update. Barack Obama’s innovative campaigns of online social networks, micro-donations and matching support were miraculous, but the extent to which he developed digital government or data-driven policy-making in office was disappointing. Campaign digitally, govern in analogue might be the new mantra.

Chaotic pluralism

Politics is a lot messier in the social media era than it used to be – whether something takes off and succeeds in gaining critical mass is far more random than it appears to be from a casual glance, where we see only those that succeed.

In Political Turbulence, we wanted to identify the model of democracy that best encapsulates politics intertwined with social media. The dynamics we observed seem to be leading us to a model of “chaotic pluralism”, characterized by diversity and heterogeneity – similar to early pluralist models – but also by non-linearity and high interconnectivity, making liberal democracies far more disorganized, unstable and unpredictable than the architects of pluralist political thought ever envisaged.

Perhaps rather than blaming social media for undermining democracy, we should be thinking about how we can improve the (inevitably major) part that it plays.

Within chaotic pluralism, there is an urgent need for redesigning democratic institutions that can accommodate new forms of political engagement, and respond to the discontent, inequalities and feelings of exclusion – even anger and alienation – that are at the root of the new populism. We should be using social media to listen to (rather than merely talk at) the expression of these public sentiments, and not just at election time.

Many political institutions – for example, the British Labour Party, the US Republican Party, and the first-past-the-post electoral system shared by both countries – are in crisis, precisely because they have become so far removed from the concerns and needs of citizens. Redesign will need to include social media platforms themselves, which have rapidly become established as institutions of democracy and will be at the heart of any democratic revival.

As these platforms finally start to admit to being media companies (rather than tech companies), we will need to demand human intervention and transparency over algorithms that determine trending news; factchecking (where Google took the lead); algorithms that detect fake news; and possibly even “public interest” bots to counteract the rise of computational propaganda.

Meanwhile, the only thing we can really predict with certainty is that unpredictable things will happen and that social media will be part of our political future.

Discussing the echoes of the 1930s in today’s politics, the Wall Street Journal points out how Roosevelt managed to steer between the extremes of left and right because he knew that “public sentiments of anger and alienation aren’t to be belittled or dismissed, for their causes can be legitimate and their consequences powerful”. The path through populism and polarization may involve using the opportunity that social media presents to listen, understand and respond to these sentiments.

This piece draws on research from Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2016), by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri.

It is cross-posted from the World Economic Forum, where it was first published on 22 December 2016.

A second ingredient in his success has been populism, which rails against dominant political elites (including the Republican party) and the ‘biased’ media. Populism also rests on the notion of an ‘authentic’ people — by implication excluding ‘others’ such as immigrants and foreign powers like the Chinese — to whom the leader appeals directly. The paper makes parallels with the strength of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party which, in a similar way, has been able to appeal to its following via social media and online newspapers, again bypassing mainstream media with its populist message.

There is a difference, however: in the US, commercial media compete for audience share, so Trump’s controversial tweets have been eagerly embraced by journalists seeking high viewership and readership ratings. In Sweden, where public media dominate and there is far less of the ‘horserace’ politics of American politics, the Sweden Democrats have been more locked out of the mainstream media and of politics. In short, Twitter plus populism has led to Trump. I argue that dominating the mediated attention space is crucial. One outcome of how this story ends will be known in November. But whatever the outcome, it is already clear that the role of the media in politics, and how they can be circumvented by new media, requires fundamental rethinking.

Ralph Schroeder is Professor and director of the Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. Before coming to Oxford University, he was Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (Sweden). Recent books include Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007) and, co-authored with Eric T. Meyer, Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press 2015).

On 23rd June 2016, a majority of the British public voted in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union. The Leave or so-called #Brexit option was victorious, with a margin of 52% to 48% across the country, although Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and some towns voted to remain. The result was a shock to both leave and remain supporters alike. US readers might note that when the polls closed, the odds on futures markets of Brexit (15%) were longer than those of Trump being elected President.

Political scientists are reeling with the sheer volume of politics that has been packed into the month after the result. From the Prime Minister’s morning-after resignation on 24th June the country was mired in political chaos, with almost every political institution challenged and under question in the aftermath of the vote, including both Conservative and Labour parties and the existence of the United Kingdom itself, given Scotland’s resistance to leaving the EU. The eventual formation of a government under a new prime minister, Teresa May, has brought some stability. But she was not elected and her government has a tiny majority of only 12 Members of Parliament. A cartoon by Matt in the Telegraph on July 2nd (which would work for almost any day) showed two students, one of them saying ‘I’m studying politics. The course covers the period from 8am on Thursday to lunchtime on Friday.’

All these events – the campaigns to remain or leave, the post-referendum turmoil, resignations, sackings and appointments – were played out on social media; the speed of change and the unpredictability of events being far too great for conventional media to keep pace. So our book, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action, can provide a way to think about the past weeks. The book focuses on how social media allow new, ‘tiny acts’ of political participation (liking, tweeting, viewing, following, signing petitions and so on), which turn social movement theory around. Rather than identifying with issues, forming collective identity and then acting to support the interests of that identity – or voting for a political party that supports it – in a social media world, people act first, and think about it, or identify with others later – if at all.

These tiny acts of participation can scale up to large-scale mobilizations, such as demonstrations, protests or petitions for policy change. These mobilizations normally fail – 99.9% of petitions to the UK or US governments fail to get the 100,000 signatures required for a parliamentary debate (UK) or an official response (US). The very few that succeed usually do so very quickly on a massive scale, but without the normal organizational or institutional trappings of a social or political movement, such as leaders or political parties. When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff asked to speak to the leaders of the mass demonstrations against the government in 2014 organised entirely on social media with an explicit rejection of party politics, she was told ‘there are no leaders’.

This explosive rise, non-normal distribution and lack of organization that characterizes contemporary politics as a chaotic system, can explain why many political mobilizations of our times seem to come from nowhere. In the US and the UK it can help to understand the shock waves of support that brought Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn (elected leader of the Labour party in 2015) and Brexit itself, all of which have challenged so strongly traditional political institutions. In both countries, the two largest political parties are creaking to breaking point in their efforts to accommodate these phenomena.

The unpredicted support for Brexit by over half of voters in the UK referendum illustrates these characteristics of the movements we model in the book, with the resistance to traditional forms of organization. Voters were courted by political institutions from all sides – the government, all the political parties apart from UKIP, the Bank of England, international organizations, foreign governments, the US President himself and the ‘Remain’ or StrongerIn campaign convened by Conservative, Labour and the smaller parties. Virtually every authoritative source of information supported Remain. Yet people were resistant to aligning themselves with any of them. Experts, facts, leaders of any kind were all rejected by the rising swell of support for the Leave side. Famously, Michael Gove, one of the key leave campaigners said ‘we have had enough of experts’. According to YouGov polls, over 2/3 of Conservative voters in 2015 voted to Leave in 2016, as did over one third of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters.

Instead, people turned to a few key claims promulgated by the two Leave campaigns Vote Leave(with key Conservative Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Liam Fox) and Leave.EU, dominated by UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage, bankrolled by the aptly named billionaire Arron Banks. This side dominated social media in driving home their simple (if largely untrue) claims and anti-establishment, anti-elitist message (although all were part of the upper echelons of both establishment and elite). Key memes included the claim (painted on the side of a bus) that the UK gave £350m a week to the EU which could instead be spent on the NHS; the likelihood that Turkey would soon join the EU; and an image showing floods of migrants entering the UK via Europe. Banks brought in staff from his own insurance companies and political campaign firms (such as Goddard Gunster) and Leave.EU created a massive database of leave supporters to employ targeted advertising on social media.

While Remain represented the status-quo and a known entity, Leave was flexible to sell itself as anything to anyone. Leave campaigners would often criticize the Government but then not offer specific policy alternatives stating, ‘we are a campaign not a government.’ This ability for people to coalesce around a movement for a variety of different (and sometimes conflicting) reasons is a hallmark of the social-media based campaigns that characterize Political Turbulence. Some voters and campaigners argued that voting Leave would allow the UK to be more global and accept more immigrants from non-EU countries. In contrast, racism and anti-immigration sentiment were key reasons for other voters. Desire for sovereignty and independence, responses to austerity and economic inequality and hostility to the elites in London and the South East have all figured in the torrent of post-Brexit analysis. These alternative faces of Leave were exploited to gain votes for ‘change,’ but the exact change sought by any two voters could be very different.

The movement‘s organization illustrates what we have observed in recent political turbulence – as in Brazil, Hong Kong and Egypt; a complete rejection of mainstream political parties and institutions and an absence of leaders in any conventional sense. There is little evidence that the leading lights of the Leave campaigns were seen as prospective leaders. There was no outcry from the Leave side when they seemed to melt away after the vote, no mourning over Michael Gove’s complete fall from grace when the government was formed – nor even joy at Boris Johnson’s appointment as Foreign Secretary. Rather, the Leave campaigns acted like advertising campaigns, driving their points home to all corners of the online and offline worlds but without a clear public face. After the result, it transpired that there was no plan, no policy proposals, no exit strategy proposed by either campaign. The Vote Leave campaign was seemingly paralyzed by shock after the vote (they tried to delete their whole site, now reluctantly and partially restored with the lie on the side of the bus toned down to £50 million), pickled forever after 23rd June. Meanwhile, Teresa May, a reluctant Remain supporter and an absent figure during the referendum itself, emerged as the only viable leader after the event, in the same way as (in a very different context) the Muslim Brotherhood, as the only viable organization, were able to assume power after the first Egyptian revolution.

In contrast, the Leave.Eu website remains highly active, possibly poised for the rebirth of UKIP as a radical populist far-right party on the European model, as Arron Banks has proposed. UKIP was formed around this single policy – of leaving the EU – and will struggle to find policy purpose, post-Brexit. A new party, with Banks’ huge resources and a massive database of Leave supporters and their social media affiliations, possibly disenchanted by the slow progress of Brexit, disaffected by the traditional parties – might be a political winner on the new landscape.

The act of voting in the referendum will define people’s political identity for the foreseeable future, shaping the way they vote in any forthcoming election. The entire political system is being redrawn around this single issue, and whichever organizational grouping can ride the wave will win. The one thing we can predict for our political future is that it will be unpredictable.

Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorized in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet?

Josh: I think that is right – many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US).. A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing!

Ed: So do you think that concepts like proportionality and justification need to be updated for online spaces?

Josh: I think that at a very basic level they are still useful. People know what we mean when we talk about something being necessary and proportionate, and about the importance of having oversight. I think we also have a good idea about what it means to be non-discriminatory when applying the law, though this is one of those areas that can quickly get quite tricky. Consider the use of online data sources to identify people. On the one hand, the Internet is ‘blind’ in that it does not automatically codify social demographics. In this sense it is not possible to profile people in the same way that we can offline. On the other hand, it is in some ways the complete opposite. It is very easy to directly, and often invisibly, create really firm systems of discrimination – and, most problematically, to do so opaquely.

This is particularly challenging when we are dealing with extremism because, as we pointed out in the report, extremists are generally pretty unremarkable in terms of demographics. It perhaps used to be true that extremists were more likely to be poor or to have had challenging upbringings, but many of the people going to fight for the Islamic State are middle class. So we have fewer demographic pointers to latch onto when trying to find these people. Of course, insofar as there are identifiers they won’t be released by the government. The real problem for society is that there isn’t very much openness and transparency about these processes.

Ed: Governments are increasingly working with the private sector to gain access to different types of information about the public. For example, in Australia a Telecommunications bill was recently passed which requires all telecommunication companies to keep the metadata – though not the content data – of communications for two years. A lot of people opposed the Bill because metadata is still very informative, and as such there are some clear concerns about privacy. Similar concerns have been expressed in the UK about an Investigatory Powers Bill that would require new Internet Connection Records about customers, online activities.  How much do you think private corporations should protect people’s data? And how much should concepts like proportionality apply to them?

Ian: To me the distinction between metadata and content data is fairly meaningless. For example, often just knowing when and who someone called and for how long can tell you everything you need to know! You don’t have to see the content of the call. There are a lot of examples like this which highlight the slightly ludicrous nature of distinguishing between metadata and content data. It is all data. As has been said by former US CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, “we kill people based on metadata.”

One issue that we identified in the report is the increased onus on companies to monitor online spaces, and all of the legal entanglements that come from this given that companies might not be based in the same country as the users. One of our interviewees called this new international situation a ‘very different ballgame’. Working out how to deal with problematic online content is incredibly difficult, and some huge issues of freedom of speech are bound up in this. On the one hand, there is a government-led approach where we use the law to take down content. On the other hand is a broader approach, whereby social networks voluntarily take down objectionable content even if it is permissible under the law. This causes much more serious problems for human rights and the rule of law.

Read the full report: Brown, I., and Cowls, J., (2015) Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Publications.

Ian Brown is Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the OII. His research is focused on surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Internet regulation.

Josh Cowls is a a student and researcher based at MIT, working to understand the impact of technology on politics, communication and the media.

Josh and Ian were talking to Blog Editor Bertie Vidgen.

*please note that the views given here do not necessarily reflect the content of the report, or those of the lead author, Ian Brown.

Ed: Josh, could you let us know the purpose of the report, outline some of the key findings, and tell us how you went about researching the topic?

Josh: Sure. In the report we take a step back from the ground-level question of ‘what are the police doing?’ and instead ask, ‘what are the ethical and political boundaries, rationale and justifications for policing the web for these kinds of activity?’ We used an international human rights framework as an ethical and legal basis to understand what is being done. We also tried to further the debate by clarifying a few things: what has already been done by law enforcement, and, really crucially, what the perspectives are of all those involved, including lawmakers, law enforcers, technology companies, academia and many others.

We derived the insights in the report from a series of workshops, one of which was held as part of the EU-funded VOX-Pol network. The workshops involved participants who were quite high up in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, the tech industry civil society, and academia. We followed these up with interviews with other individuals in similar positions and conducted background policy research.

Ed: You highlight that many extremist groups (such as Isis) are making really significant use of online platforms to organize, radicalize people, and communicate their messages.

Josh: Absolutely. A large part of our initial interest when writing the report lay in finding out more about the role of the Internet in facilitating the organization, coordination, recruitment and inspiration of violent extremism. The impact of this has been felt very recently in Paris and Beirut, and many other places worldwide. This report pre-dates these most recent developments, but was written in the context of these sorts of events.

Given the Internet is so embedded in our social lives, I think it would have been surprising if political extremist activity hadn’t gone online as well. Of course, the Internet is a very powerful tool and in the wrong hands it can be a very destructive force. But other research, separate from this report, has found that the Internet is not usually people’s first point of contact with extremism: more often than not that actually happens offline through people you know in the wider world. Nonetheless it can definitely serve as an incubator of extremism and can serve to inspire further attacks.

Ed: In the report you identify different groups in society that are affected by, and affecting, issues of extremism, privacy, and governance – including civil society, academics, large corporations and governments

Josh: Yes, in the later stages of the report we do divide society into these groups, and offer some perspectives on what they do, and what they think about counter-extremism. For example, in terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. There is this idea that ISIS are really good at social media, and that that is how they are powering a lot of their support; but one of the people that we spoke to said that it is not the case that ISIS are really good, it is just that governments are really bad!

We shouldn’t ask government to participate in the social network: bureaucracies often struggle to be really flexible and nimble players on social media. In contrast, civil society groups tend to be more engaged with communities and know how to “speak the language” of those who might be vulnerable to radicalization. As such they can enter that dialogue in a much more informed and effective way.

The other tension, or paradigm, that we offer in this report is the distinction between whether people are ‘at risk’ or ‘a risk’. What we try to point to is that people can go from one to the other. They start by being ‘at risk’ of radicalization, but if they do get radicalized and become a violent threat to society, which only happens in the minority of cases, then they become ‘a risk’. Engaging with people who are ‘at risk’ highlights the importance of having respect and dialogue with communities that are often the first to be lambasted when things go wrong, but which seldom get all the help they need, or the credit when they get it right. We argue that civil society is particularly suited for being part of this process.

Ed: It seems like the things that people do or say online can only really be understood in terms of the context. But often we don’t have enough information, and it can be very hard to just look at something and say ‘This is definitely extremist material that is going to incite someone to commit terrorist or violent acts’.

Josh: Yes, I think you’re right. In the report we try to take what is a very complicated concept – extremist material – and divide it into more manageable chunks of meaning. We talk about three hierarchical levels. The degree of legal consensus over whether content should be banned decreases as it gets less extreme. The first level we identified was straight up provocation and hate speech. Hate speech legislation has been part of the law for a long time. You can’t incite racial hatred, you can’t incite people to crimes, and you can’t promote terrorism. Most countries in Europe have laws against these things.

The second level is the glorification and justification of terrorism. This is usually more post-hoc as by definition if you are glorifying something it has already happened. You may well be inspiring future actions, but that relationship between the act of violence and the speech act is different than with provocation. Nevertheless, some countries, such as Spain and France, have pushed hard on criminalising this. The third level is non-violent extremist material. This is the most contentious level, as there is very little consensus about what types of material should be called ‘extremist’ even though they are non-violent. One of the interviewees that we spoke to said that often it is hard to distinguish between someone who is just being friendly and someone who is really trying to persuade or groom someone to go to Syria. It is really hard to put this into a legal framework with the level of clarity that the law demands.

There is a proportionality question here. When should something be considered specifically illegal? And, then, if an illegal act has been committed what should the appropriate response be? This is bound to be very different in different situations.

Ed: Do you think that there are any immediate or practical steps that governments can take to improve the current situation? And do you think that there any ethical concerns which are not being paid sufficient attention?

Josh: In the report we raised a few concerns about existing government responses. There are lots of things beside privacy that could be seen as fundamental human rights and that are being encroached upon. Freedom of association and assembly is a really interesting one. We might not have the same reverence for a Facebook event plan or discussion group as we would a protest in a town hall, but of course they are fundamentally pretty similar.

The wider danger here is the issue of mission creep. Once you have systems in place that can do potentially very powerful analytical investigatory things then there is a risk that we could just keep extending them. If something can help us fight terrorism then should we use it to fight drug trafficking and violent crime more generally? It feels to me like there is a technical-military-industrial complex mentality in government where if you build the systems then you just want to use them. In the same way that CCTV cameras record you irrespective of whether or not you commit a violent crime or shoplift, we need to ask whether the same panoptical systems of surveillance should be extended to the Internet. Now, to a large extent they are already there. But what should we train the torchlight on next?

This takes us back to the importance of having necessary, proportionate, and independently authorized processes. When you drill down into how rights privacy should be balanced with security then it gets really complicated. But the basic process-driven things that we identified in the report are far simpler: if we accept that governments have the right to take certain actions in the name of security, then, no matter how important or life-saving those actions are, there are still protocols that governments must follow. We really wanted to infuse these issues into the debate through the report.

Read the full report: Brown, I., and Cowls, J., (2015) Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Publications.

Josh Cowls is a a student and researcher based at MIT, working to understand the impact of technology on politics, communication and the media.

Josh Cowls was talking to Blog Editor Bertie Vidgen.

Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilize online communities to achieve specific organizational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear.

In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate on the website was used by about 7% of the users; the rest were only passive readers or supported initiatives made by others. Nevertheless, Avoin Ministeriö has been instrumental in creating support for several of the most successful initiatives during the period, showing that the website has been a key actor during the introductory phase of the Citizens’ initiative in Finland.

We study how developments in political attitudes were affected by outcome satisfaction and process satisfaction. Outcome satisfaction concerns whether the participants get their preferred outcome through their involvement, and this has been emphasized by proponents of direct democracy. Since citizens get involved to achieve a specific outcome, their evaluation of the experience hinges on whether or not they achieve this outcome. Process satisfaction, on the other hand, is more concerned with the perceived quality of decision making. According to this perspective, what matters is that participants find that their concerns are given due consideration. When people find the decision making to be fair and balanced, they may even accept not getting their preferred outcome. The relative importance of these two perspectives remains disputed in the literature.

The research design consisted of two surveys administered to the users of Avoin Ministeriö before and after the decision of the Finnish Parliament on the first citizens’ initiative in concerning a ban on the fur-farming industry in Finland. This allowed us to observe how involvement in the crowdsourcing process shaped developments in central political attitudes among the users of Avoin Ministeriö and what factors determined the developments in subjective political legitimacy. The first survey was conducted in fall 2012, when the initiators were gathering signatures in support of the initiative to ban fur-farming, while the second survey was conducted in summer 2013 when Parliament rejected the initiative. Altogether 421 persons filled in both surveys, and thus comprised the sample for the analyses.

The study yielded a number of interesting findings. First of all, those who were dissatisfied with Parliament rejecting the initiative experienced a significantly more negative development in political trust compared to those who did not explicitly support the initiative. This shows that the crowdsourcing process had a negative impact on political legitimacy among the initiative’s supporters, which is in line with previous contributions emphasizing the importance of outcome legitimacy. It is worth noting that this also affected trust in the Finnish President, even if he has no formal powers in relation to the Citizens’ initiative in Finland. This shows that negative effects on political legitimacy could be more severe than just a temporary dissatisfaction with the political actors responsible for the decision.

Nevertheless, the outcome may not be the most important factor for determining developments in political legitimacy. Our second major finding indicated that those who were dissatisfied with the way Parliament handled the initiative also experienced more negative developments in political legitimacy compared to those who were satisfied. Furthermore, this effect was more pervasive than the effect for outcome satisfaction. This implies that the procedures for handling non-binding initiatives may play a strong role in citizens’ perceptions of representative institutions, which is in line with previous findings emphasising the importance of procedural aspects and evaluations for judging political authorities.

We conclude that there is a beneficial impact on political legitimacy if crowdsourced citizens’ initiatives have broad appeal so they can be passed in Parliament. However, it is important to note that positive effects on political legitimacy do not hinge on Parliament approving citizens’ initiatives. If the MPs invest time and resources in the careful, transparent and publicly justified handling of initiatives, possible negative effects of rejecting initiatives can be diminished. Citizens and activists may accept an unfavourable decision if the procedure by which it was reached seems fair and just. Finally, the results give reason to be hopeful about the role of crowdsourcing in restoring political legitimacy, since a majority of our respondents felt that the possibility of crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives clearly improved Finnish democracy.

While all hopes may not have been fulfilled so far, crowdsourcing legislation therefore still has potential to help rebuild political legitimacy.

Read the full article: Christensen, H., Karjalainen, M., and Nurminen, L., (2015) Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland. Policy and Internet 7 (1) 25–45.

Henrik Serup Christensen is Academy Research Fellow at SAMFORSK, Åbo Akademi University.

Maija Karjalainen is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science and Contemporary History in the University of Turku, Finland.

Laura Nurminen is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at Helsinki University, Finland.

Counts of public Facebook posts mentioning any of the party leaders’ surnames. Data generated by social media can be used to understand political behaviour and institutions on an ongoing basis.[/caption]‘Congratulations to my friend @Messina2012 on his role in the resounding Conservative victory in Britain’ tweeted David Axelrod, campaign advisor to Miliband, to his former colleague Jim Messina, Cameron’s strategy adviser, on May 8th. The former was Obama’s communications director and the latter campaign manager of Obama’s 2012 campaign. Along with other consultants and advisors and large-scale data management platforms from Obama’s hugely successful digital campaigns, Conservative and Labour used an arsenal of social media and digital tools to interact with voters throughout, as did all the parties competing for seats in the 2015 election.

The parties ran very different kinds of digital campaigns. The Conservatives used advanced data science techniques borrowed from the US campaigns to understand how their policy announcements were being received and to target groups of individuals. They spent ten times as much as Labour on Facebook, using ads targeted at Facebook users according to their activities on the platform, geo-location and demographics. This was a top down strategy that involved working out was happening on social media and responding with targeted advertising, particularly for marginal seats. It was supplemented by the mainstream media, such as the Telegraph for example, which contacted its database of readers and subscribers to services such as Telegraph Money, urging them to vote Conservative. As Andrew Cooper tweeted after the election, ‘Big data, micro-targeting and social media campaigns just thrashed “5 million conversations” and “community organizing”’.

He has a point. Labour took a different approach to social media. Widely acknowledged to have the most boots on the real ground, knocking on doors, they took a similar ‘ground war’ approach to social media in local campaigns. Our own analysis at the Oxford Internet Institute shows that of the 450K tweets sent by candidates of the six largest parties in the month leading up to the general election, Labour party candidates sent over 120,000 while the Conservatives sent only 80,000, no more than the Greens and not much more than UKIP. But the greater number of Labour tweets were no more productive in terms of impact (measured in terms of mentions generated: and indeed the final result).

Both parties’ campaigns were tightly controlled. Ostensibly, Labour generated far more bottom-up activity from supporters using social media, through memes like #votecameron out, #milibrand (responding to Miliband’s interview with Russell Brand), and what Miliband himself termed the most unlikely cult of the 21st century in his resignation speech, #milifandom, none of which came directly from Central Office. These produced peaks of activity on Twitter that at some points exceeded even discussion of the election itself on the semi-official #GE2015 used by the parties, as the figure below shows. But the party remained aloof from these conversations, fearful of mainstream media mockery.

The Brand interview was agreed to out of desperation and can have made little difference to the vote (partly because Brand endorsed Miliband only after the deadline for voter registration: young voters suddenly overcome by an enthusiasm for participatory democracy after Brand’s public volte face on the utility of voting will have remained disenfranchised). But engaging with the swathes of young people who spend increasing amounts of their time on social media is a strategy for engagement that all parties ought to consider. YouTubers like PewDiePie have tens of millions of subscribers and billions of video views – their videos may seem unbelievably silly to many, but it is here that a good chunk the next generation of voters are to be found.

Only one of the leaders had a presence on social media that managed anything like the personal touch and universal reach that Obama achieved in 2008 and 2012 based on sustained engagement with social media – Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP’s use of social media, developed in last September’s referendum on Scottish independence had spawned a whole army of digital activists. All SNP candidates started the campaign with a Twitter account. When we look at the 650 local campaigns waged across the country, by far the most productive in the sense of generating mentions was the SNP; 100 tweets from SNP local candidates generating 10 times more mentions (1,000) than 100 tweets from (for example) the Liberal Democrats.

Scottish Labour’s failure to engage with Scottish peoples in this kind of way illustrates how difficult it is to suddenly develop relationships on social media – followers on all platforms are built up over years, not in the short space of a campaign. In strong contrast, advertising on these platforms as the Conservatives did is instantaneous, and based on the data science understanding (through advertising algorithms) of the platform itself. It doesn’t require huge databases of supporters – it doesn’t build up relationships between the party and supporters – indeed, they may remain anonymous to the party. It’s quick, dirty and effective.

The pollsters’ terrible night

So neither of the two largest parties really did anything with social media, or the huge databases of interactions that their platforms will have generated, to generate long-running engagement with the electorate. The campaigns were disconnected from their supporters, from their grass roots.

But the differing use of social media by the parties could lend a clue to why the opinion polls throughout the campaign got it so wrong, underestimating the Conservative lead by an average of five per cent. The social media data that may be gathered from this or any campaign is a valuable source of information about what the parties are doing, how they are being received, and what people are thinking or talking about in this important space – where so many people spend so much of their time. Of course, it is difficult to read from the outside; Andrew Cooper labeled the Conservatives’ campaign of big data to identify undecided voters, and micro-targeting on social media, as ‘silent and invisible’ and it seems to have been so to the polls.

Many voters were undecided until the last minute, or decided not to vote, which is impossible to predict with polls (bar the exit poll) – but possibly observable on social media, such as the spikes in attention to UKIP on Wikipedia towards the end of the campaign, which may have signaled their impressive share of the vote. As Jim Messina put it to msnbc news following up on his May 8^th tweet that UK (and US) polling was ‘completely broken’ – ‘people communicate in different ways now’, arguing that the Miliband campaign had tried to go back to the 1970s.

Surveys – such as polls — give a (hopefully) representative picture of what people think they might do. Social media data provide an (unrepresentative) picture of what people really said or did. Long-running opinion surveys (such as the Ipsos MORI Issues Index) can monitor the hopes and fears of the electorate in between elections, but attention tends to focus on the huge barrage of opinion polls at election time – which are geared entirely at predicting the election result, and which do not contribute to more general understanding of voters. In contrast, social media are a good way to track rapid bursts in mobilization or support, which reflect immediately on social media platforms – and could also be developed to illustrate more long running trends, such as unpopular policies or failing services.

As opinion surveys face more and more challenges, there is surely good reason to supplement them with social media data, which reflect what people are really thinking on an ongoing basis – like, a video in rather than the irregular snapshots taken by polls. As a leading pollster João Francisco Meira, director of Vox Populi in Brazil (which is doing innovative work in using social media data to understand public opinion) put it in conversation with one of the authors in April – ‘we have spent so long trying to hear what people are saying – now they are crying out to be heard, every day’. It is a question of pollsters working out how to listen.

Political big data

Analysts of political behaviour – academics as well as pollsters — need to pay attention to this data. At the OII we gathered large quantities of data from Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube in the lead-up to the election campaign, including mentions of all candidates (as did Demos’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Media). Using this data we will be able, for example, to work out the relationship between local social media campaigns and the parties’ share of the vote, as well as modeling the relationship between social media presence and turnout.

We can already see that the story of the local campaigns varied enormously – while at the start of the campaign some candidates were probably requesting new passwords for their rusty Twitter accounts, some already had an ongoing relationship with their constituents (or potential constituents), which they could build on during the campaign. One of the candidates to take over the Labour party leadership, Chuka Umunna, joined Twitter in April 2009 and now has 100K followers, which will be useful in the forthcoming leadership contest.

Election results inject data into a research field that lacks ‘big data’. Data hungry political scientists will analyse these data in every way imaginable for the next five years. But data in between elections, for example relating to democratic or civic engagement or political mobilization, has traditionally been woefully short in our discipline. Analysis of the social media campaigns in #GE2015 will start to provide a foundation to understand patterns and trends in voting behaviour, particularly when linked to other sources of data, such as the actual constituency-level voting results and even discredited polls — which may yet yield insight, even having failed to achieve their predictive aims. As the OII’s Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri have argued, we need ‘a theory-informed model to drive social media predictions, that is based on an understanding of how the data is generated and hence enables us to correct for certain biases’

A political data science

Parties, pollsters and political analysts should all be thinking about these digital disconnects in #GE2015, rather than burying them with their hopes for this election. As I argued in a previous post, let’s use data generated by social media to understand political behaviour and institutions on an ongoing basis. Let’s find a way of incorporating social media analysis into polling models, for example by linking survey datasets to big data of this kind. The more such activity moves beyond the election campaign itself, the more useful social media data will be in tracking the underlying trends and patterns in political behavior.

And for the parties, these kind of ways of understanding and interacting with voters needs to be institutionalized in party structures, from top to bottom. On 8th May, the VP of a policy think-tank tweeted to both Axelrod and Messina ‘Gentlemen, welcome back to America. Let’s win the next one on this side of the pond’. The UK parties are on their own now. We must hope they use the time to build an ongoing dialogue with citizens and voters, learning from the success of the new online interest group barons, such as 38 degrees and Avaaz, by treating all internet contacts as ‘members’ and interacting with them on a regular basis. Don’t wait until 2020!

Helen Margetts is the Director of the OII, and Professor of Society and the Internet. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, investigating political behaviour, digital government and government-citizen interactions in the age of the internet, social media and big data. She has published over a hundred books, articles and major research reports in this area, including Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (with Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, 2015).

Scott A. Hale is a Data Scientist at the OII. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in the social sciences. He is particularly interested in the area of human-computer interaction and the spread of information between speakers of different languages online and the roles of bilingual Internet users. He is also interested in collective action and politics more generally.

This may well make Twitter particularly well suited to political debate and activity. Yet important questions emerge in terms of the patterns of conduct and engagement. Chief among them: are users mainly seeking to reinforce their own viewpoints and link with likeminded persons, or is there a basis for widening and thoughtful exposure to a variety of perspectives that may improve the collective intelligence of the citizenry as a result?

Conflict and Polarization

Political polarization often occurs in a so-called ‘echo chamber’ environment, in which individuals are exposed to only information and communities that support their own viewpoints, while ignoring opposing perspectives and insights. In such isolating and self-reinforcing conditions, ideas can become more engrained and extreme due to lack of contact with contradictory views and the exchanges that could ensue as a result.

On the web, political polarization has been found among political blogs, for instance. American researchers have found that liberal and conservative bloggers in the US tend to link to other bloggers who share their political ideology. For Kingwell, a prominent Canadian philosopher, the resulting dynamic is one that can be characterized by a decline in civility and a lessening ability for political compromise to take hold. He laments the emergence of a ‘shout doctrine’ that corrodes the civic and political culture, in the sense that divisions are accentuated and compromise becomes more elusive.

Such a dynamic is not the result of social media alone – but rather it reflects for some the impacts of the Internet generally and the specific manner by which social media can lend itself to broadcasting and sensationalism, rather than reasoned debate and exchange. Traditional media and journalistic organizations have thus become further pressured to act in kind, driven less by a patient and persistent presentation of all sides of an issue and more by near-instantaneous reporting online. In a manner akin to Kingwell’s view, one prominent television news journalist in the US, Ted Koppel, has lamented this new media environment as a danger to the republic.

Nonetheless, the research is far from conclusive as to whether the Internet increases political polarization. Some studies have found that among casual acquaintances (such as those that can typically be observed on Twitter), it is common to observe connections across ideological boundaries. In one such funded by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the National Science Foundation, findings suggest that people who often visit websites that support their ideological orientation also visit web sites that support divergent political views. As a result, greater sensitivity and empathy for alternative viewpoints could potentially ensue, improving the likelihood for political compromise – even on a modest scale that would otherwise not have been achievable without this heightened awareness and debate.

Early Evidence from Canada

The 2011 federal election in Canada was dubbed by some observers in the media as the country’s first ‘social media election’ – as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter became prominent sources of information for growing segments of the citizenry, and evermore strategic tools for political parties in terms of fundraising, messaging, and mobilizing voters. In examining Twitter traffic, our own intention was to ascertain the extent to which polarization or cross-pollinization was occurring across the portion of the electorate making use of this micro-blogging platform.

We gathered nearly 6000 tweets pertaining to the federal election made by just under 1500 people during a three-day period in the week preceding election day (this time period was chosen because it was late enough in the campaign for people to have an informed opinion, but still early enough for them to be persuaded as to how they should vote). Once the tweets were retrieved, we used social network analysis and content analysis to analyze patterns of exchange and messaging content in depth.

We found that overall people do tend to cluster around shared political views on Twitter. Supporters of each of the four major political parties identified in the study were more likely to tweet to other supporters of the same affiliation (this was particularly true of the ruling Conservatives, the most inwardly networked of the four major politically parties). Nevertheless, in a significant number of cases (36% of all interactions) we also observed a cross-ideological discourse, especially among supporters of the two most prominent left-of-centre parties, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC). The cross-ideological interactions among supporters of left-leaning parties tended to be agreeable in nature, but often at the expense of the party in power, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). Members from the NDP and Liberal formations were also more likely to share general information and updates about the election as well as debate various issues around their party platforms with each other.

By contrast, interactions between parties that are ideologically distant seemed to denote a tone of conflict: nearly 40% of tweets between left-leaning parties and the Conservatives tended to be hostile. Such negative interactions between supporters of different parties have shown to reduce enthusiasm about political campaigns in general, potentially widening the cleavage between highly engaged partisans and less affiliated citizens who may view such forms of aggressive and divisive politics as distasteful.

For Twitter sceptics, one concern is that the short length of Twitter messages does not allow for meaningful and in-depth discussions around complex political issues. While it is certainly true that expression within 140 characters is limited, one third of tweets between supporters of different parties included links to external sources such as news stories, blog posts, or YouTube videos. Such indirect sourcing can thereby constitute a means of expanding dialogue and debate.

Accordingly, although it is common to view Twitter as largely a platform for self-expression via short tweets, there may be a wider collective dimension to both users and the population at large as a steady stream of both individual viewpoints and referenced sources drive learning and additional exchange. If these exchanges happen across partisan boundaries, they can contribute to greater collective awareness and learning for the citizenry at large.

As the next federal election approaches in 2015, with younger voters gravitating online – especially via mobile devices, and with traditional polling increasingly under siege as less reliable than in the past, all major parties will undoubtedly devote more energy and resources to social media strategies including, perhaps most prominently, an effective usage of Twitter.

Partisan Politics versus Politics 2.0

In a still-nascent era likely to be shaped by the rise of social media and a more participative Internet on the one hand, and the explosion of ‘big data’ on the other hand, the prominence of Twitter in shaping political discourse seems destined to heighten. Our preliminary analysis suggests an important cleavage between traditional political processes and parties – and wider dynamics of political learning and exchange across a changing society that is more fluid in its political values and affiliations.

Within existing democratic structures, Twitter is viewed by political parties as primarily a platform for messaging and branding, thereby mobilizing members with shared viewpoints and attacking opposing interests. Our own analysis of Canadian electoral tweets both amongst partisans and across party lines underscores this point. The nexus between partisan operatives and new media formations will prove to be an increasingly strategic dimension to campaigning going forward.

More broadly, however, Twitter is a source of information, expression, and mobilization across a myriad of actors and formations that may not align well with traditional partisan organizations and identities. Social movements arising during the Arab Spring, amongst Mexican youth during that country’s most recent federal elections and most recently in Ukraine are cases in point. Across these wider societal dimensions – especially consequential in newly emerging democracies, the tremendous potential of platforms such as Twitter may well lie in facilitating new and much more open forms of democratic engagement that challenge our traditional constructs.

In sum, we are witnessing the inception of new forms of what can be dubbed ‘Politics 2.0’ that denotes a movement of both opportunities and challenges likely to play out differently across democracies at various stages of socio-economic, political, and digital development. Whether Twitter and other likeminded social media platforms enable inclusive and expansionary learning, or instead engrain divisive polarized exchange, has yet to be determined. What is clear however is that on Twitter, in some instances, birds of a feather do flock together as they do on political blogs. But in other instances, Twitter can play an important role to foster cross parties communication in the online political arenas.

Read the full article: Gruzd, A., and Roy, J. (2014) Investigating Political Polarization on Twitter: A Canadian Perspective. Policy and Internet 6 (1) 28-48.

Also read: Gruzd, A. and Tsyganova, K. Information wars and online activism during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine: Examining the social structures of Pro- and Anti-Maidan groups. Policy and Internet. Early View April 2015: DOI: 10.1002/poi3.91

Anatoliy Gruzd is Associate Professor in the Ted Rogers School of Management and Director of the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, Canada. Jeffrey Roy is Professor in the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management. His most recent book was published in 2013 by Springer: From Machinery to Mobility: Government and Democracy in a Participative Age.

Over the years, this debate has plodded steadily along, with scholars on both ends of the spectrum fighting furiously to establish a working understanding. Then, the Internet came along and drew up new battle lines. The Internet is at its best when it provides a home for the disenfranchised, an environment where like-minded individuals can wipe free the dust of societal disassociation and connect and share content. However, the Internet brought with it a shift in power, particularly in how individuals conceptualised society and their role within it. The Internet, in addition to this role, provided a plethora of new and customisable modes of political participation. From the onset, a lot of these new forms of engagement were extensions of existing forms, broadening the everyday citizen’s participatory repertoire. There was a move from voting to e-voting, petitions to e-petitions, face-to-face communities to online communities; the Internet took what was already there and streamlined it, removing those pesky elements of time, space and identity.

Yet, as the Internet continues to develop, and we move into the ultra-heightened communicative landscape of the social web, new and unique forms of political participation take root, drawing upon those customisable environments and organic cyber migrations. The most prominent of these is clicktivism, sometimes also, unfairly, referred to as slacktivism. Clicktivism takes the fundamental features of browsing culture and turns them into a means of political expression. Quite simply, clicktivism refers to the simplification of online participatory processes: one-click online petitions, content sharing, social buttons (e.g. Facebook’s ‘Like’ button) etc.

For the most part, clicktivism is seen in derogatory terms, with the idea that the streamlining of online processes has created a societal disposition towards feel-good, ‘easy’ activism. From this perspective, clicktivism is a lazy or overly-convenient alternative to the effort and legitimacy of traditional engagement. Here, individuals engaging in clicktivism may derive some sense of moral gratification from their actions, but clicktivism’s capacity to incite genuine political change is severely limited. Some would go so far as to say that clicktivism has a negative impact on democratic systems, as it undermines an individual’s desire and need to participate in traditional forms of engagement; those established modes which mainstream political scholars understand as the backbone of a healthy, functioning democracy.

This idea that clicktivism isn’t ‘legitimate’ activism is fuelled by a general lack of understanding about what clicktivism actually involves. As a recent development in observed political action, clicktivism has received its fair share of attention in the political participation literature. However, for the most part, this literature has done a poor job of actually defining clicktivism. As such, clicktivism is not so much a contested notion, as an ill-defined one. The extant work continues to describe clicktivism in broad terms, failing to effectively establish what it does, and does not, involve. Indeed, as highlighted, the mainstream political participation literature saw clicktivism not as a specific form of online action, but rather as a limited and unimportant mode of online engagement.

However, to disregard emerging forms of engagement such as clicktivism because they are at odds with long-held notions of what constitutes meaningful ‘political’ engagement is a misguided and dangerous road to travel. Here, it is important that we acknowledge that a political act, even if it requires limited effort, has relevance for the individual, and, as such, carries worth. And this is where we see clicktivism challenging these traditional notions of political participation. To date, we have looked at clicktivism through an outdated lens; an approach rooted in traditional notions of democracy. However, the Internet has fundamentally changed how people understand politics, and, consequently, it is forcing us to broaden our understanding of the ‘political’, and of what constitutes political participation.

The Internet, in no small part, has created a more reflexive political citizen, one who has been given the tools to express dissatisfaction throughout all facets of their life, not just those tied to the political arena. Collective action underpinned by a developed ideology has been replaced by project orientated identities and connective action. Here, an individual’s desire to engage does not derive from the collective action frames of political parties, but rather from the individual’s self-evaluation of a project’s worth and their personal action frames.

Simply put, people now pick and choose what projects they participate in and feel little generalized commitment to continued involvement. And it is clicktivism which is leading the vanguard here. Clicktivism, as an impulsive, non-committed online political gesture, which can be easily replicated and that does not require any specialized knowledge, is shaped by, and reinforces, this change. It affords the project-oriented individual an efficient means of political participation, without the hassles involved with traditional engagement.

This is not to say, however, that clicktivism serves the same functions as traditional forms. Indeed, much more work is needed to understand the impact and effect that clicktivist techniques can have on social movements and political issues. However, and this is the most important point, clicktivism is forcing us to reconsider what we define as political participation. It does not overtly engage with the political arena, but provides avenues through which to do so. It does not incite genuine political change, but it makes people feel as if they are contributing. It does not politicize issues, but it fuels discursive practices. It may not function in the same way as traditional forms of engagement, but it represents the political participation aspirations of the modern citizen. Clicktivism has been bridging the dualism between the traditional and contemporary forms of political participation, and in its place establishing a participatory duality.

Clicktivism, and similar contemporary forms of engagement, are challenging how we understand political participation, and to ignore them because of what they don’t embody, rather than what they do, is to move forward with eyes closed.

Read the full article: Halupka, M. (2014) Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic. Policy and Internet 6 (2) 115-132.

Max Halupka is a PhD candidate at the ANZOG Institute for Governance, University of Canberra. His research interests include youth political participation, e-activism, online engagement, hacktivism, and fluid participatory structures.

The question of how much influence the audience has in these decisions has always been ambiguous. While in theory we might expect journalists to be attentive to readers, journalism has also been characterized as a profession with a “deliberate…ignorance of audience wants” (Anderson, 2011b). This ‘anti-populism’ is still often portrayed as an important journalistic virtue, in the context of telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Recently, however, attention has been turning to the potential impact that online audience metrics are having on journalism’s “deliberate ignorance”. Online publishing provides a huge amount of information to editors about visitor numbers, visit frequency, and what visitors choose to read and how long they spend reading it. Online editors now have detailed information about what articles are popular almost as soon as they are published, with these statistics frequently displayed prominently in the newsroom.

The rise of audience metrics has created concern both within the journalistic profession and academia, as part of a broader set of concerns about the way journalism is changing online. Many have expressed concern about a ‘culture of click’, whereby important but unexciting stories make way for more attention grabbing pieces, and editorial judgments are overridden by traffic statistics. At a time when media business models are under great strain, the incentives to follow the audience are obvious, particularly when business models increasingly rely on revenue from online traffic and advertising. The consequences for the broader agenda-setting function of the news media could be significant: more prolific or earlier readers might play a disproportionate role in helping to select content; particular social classes or groupings that read news online less frequently might find their issues being subtly shifted down the agenda.

The extent to which such a populist influence exists has attracted little empirical research. Many ethnographic studies have shown that audience metrics are being captured in online newsrooms, with anecdotal evidence for the importance of traffic statistics on an article’s lifetime (Anderson 2011b, MacGregor, 2007). However, many editors have emphasised that popularity is not a major determining factor (MacGregor, 2007), and that news values remain significant in terms of placement of news articles.

In order to assess the possible influence of audience metrics on decisions made by political news editors, we undertook a systematic, large-scale study of the relationship between readership statistics and article lifetime. We examined the news cycles of five major UK news outlets (the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror) over a period of six weeks, capturing their front pages every 15 minutes, resulting in over 20,000 front-page captures and more than 40,000 individual articles. We measure article readership by capturing information from the BBC’s “most read” list of news articles (twelve percent of the articles were featured at some point on the ‘most read’ list, with a median time to achieving this status of two hours, and an average article life of 15 hours on the front page). Using the Cox Proportional Hazards model (which allows us to quantify the impact of an article’s appearance on the ‘most read’ list on its chance of survival) we asked whether an article’s being listed in a ‘most read’ column affected the length of time it remained on the front page.

We found that ‘most read’ articles had, on average, a 26% lower chance of being removed from the front page than equivalent articles which were not on the most read list, providing support for the idea that online editors are influenced by readership statistics. In addition to assessing the general impact of readership statistics, we also wanted to see whether this effect differs between ‘political’ and ‘entertainment’ news. Research on participatory journalism has suggested that online editors might be more willing to allow audience participation in areas of soft news such as entertainment, arts, sports, etc. We find a small amount of evidence for this claim, though the difference between the two categories was very slight.

Finally, we wanted to assess whether there is a ‘quality’ / ‘tabloid’ split. Part of the definition of tabloid style journalism lies precisely in its willingness to follow the demands of its audience. However, we found the audience ‘effect’ (surprisingly) to be most obvious in the quality papers. For tabloids, ‘most read’ status actually had a slightly negative effect on article lifetime. We wouldn’t argue that tabloid editors actively reject the wishes of their audience; however we can say that these editors are no more likely to follow their audience than the typical ‘quality’ editor, and in fact may be less so. We do not have a clear explanation for this difference, though we could speculate that, as tabloid publications are already more tuned in to the wishes of their audience, the appearance of readership statistics makes less practical difference to the overall product. However it may also simply be the case that the online environment is slowly producing new journalistic practices for which the tabloid / quality distinction will be of less usefulness.

So on the basis of our study, we can say that high-traffic articles do in fact spend longer in the spotlight than ones that attract less readership: audience readership does have a measurable impact on the lifespan of political news. The audience is no longer the unknown quantity it was in offline journalism: it appears to have a clear impact on journalistic practice. The question that remains, however, is whether this constitutes evidence of a new ‘populism’ in journalism; or whether it represents (as editors themselves have argued) the simple striking of a balance between audience demands and news values.

Read the full article: Bright, J., and Nicholls, T. (2014) The Life and Death of Political News: Measuring the Impact of the Audience Agenda Using Online Data. Social Science Computer Review 32 (2) 170-181.

References

Anderson, C. W. (2011) Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms. Journalism 12 (5) 550-566.

MacGregor, P. (2007) Tracking the Online Audience. Journalism Studies 8 (2) 280-298.

OII Resarch Fellow Jonathan Bright is a political scientist specialising in computational and ‘big data’ approaches to the social sciences. His major interest concerns studying how people get information about the political process, and how this is changing in the internet era.

Tom Nicholls is a doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research interests include the impact of technology on citizen/government relationships, the Internet’s implications for public management and models of electronic public service delivery.

The 2013 ICA Preconference “China and the New Internet World” (14 July 2013), organised by the OII in collaboration with many partners at collaborating universities, explored the issues raised by these developments, focusing on two main interrelated questions: how is the rise of China reshaping the global use and societal implications of the Internet? And in turn, how is China itself being reshaped by these regional and global developments?

As China has become more powerful, much attention has been focused on the number of Internet users: China now represents the largest group of Internet users in the world, with over half a billion people online. But how the Internet is used is also important; this group doesn’t just include passive ‘users’, it also includes authors, bloggers, designers and architects — that is, people who shape and design values into the Internet. This input will undoubtedly affect the Internet going forward, as Chinese institutions take on a greater role in shaping the Internet, in terms of policy, such as around freedom of expression and privacy, and practice, such as social and commercial uses, like shopping online.

Most discussion of the Internet tends to emphasise technological change and ignore many aspects of the social changes that accompany the Internet’s evolution, such as this dramatic global shift in the concentration of Internet users. The Internet is not just a technological artefact. In 1988, Deng Xiaoping declared that “science and technology are primary productive forces” that would be active and decisive factors in the new Chinese society. At the time China naturally paid a great deal of attention to technology as a means to lift its people out of poverty, but it may not have occurred to Deng that the Internet would not just impact the national economy, but that it would come to affect a person’s entire life — and society more generally — as well. In China today, users are more apt to shop online, but also to discuss political issues online than most of the other 65 nations across the world surveyed in a recent report [1].

The transformative potential of the Internet has challenged top-down communication patterns in China, by supporting multi-level and multi-directional flows of communication. Of course, communications systems reflect economic and political power to a large extent: the Internet is not a new or separate world, and its rules reflect offline rules and structures. In terms of the large ‘digital divide’ that exists in China (whose Internet penetration currently stands at a bit over 40%, meaning that 700 million people are still not online), we have to remember that this digital divide is likely to reflect other real economic and political divides, such as lack of access to other basic resources.

While there is much discussion about how the Internet is affecting China’s domestic policy (in terms of public administration, ensuring reliable systems of supply and control, the urban-rural divide and migration, and policy on things like anonymity and free speech), less time is spent discussing the geopolitics of the Internet. China certainly has the potential for great influence beyond its own borders, for example affecting communication flows worldwide and the global division of power. For such reasons, it is valuable to move beyond ‘single country studies’ to consider global shifts in attitudes and values shaping the Internet across the world. As a contested and contestable space, the political role of the Internet is likely to be a focal point for traditional discussions of key values, such as freedom of expression and assembly; remember Hilary Clinton’s 2010 ‘Internet freedom’ speech, delivered at Washington’s Newseum Institute. Contemporary debates over privacy and freedom of expression are indeed increasingly focused on Internet policy and practice.

Now is not the first time in the histories of the US and China that their respective foreign policies have been of great interest and importance to the other. However this might also be a period of anxiety-driven (rather than rational) policy making, particularly if increased exposure and access to information around the world leads to efforts to create Berlin walls of the digital age. In this period of national anxieties on the part of governments and citizens — who may feel that “something must be done” — there will inevitably be competition between the US, China, and the EU to drive national Internet policies that assert local control and jurisdiction. Ownership and control of the Internet by countries and companies is certainly becoming an increasingly politicized issue. Instead of supporting technical innovation and the diffusion of the Internet, nations are increasingly focused on controlling the flow of online content and exploiting the Internet as a means for gauging public sentiment and opinion, rather than as a channel to help shape public policy and social accountability.

For researchers, it is time to question a myopic focus on national units of analysis when studying the Internet, since many activities of critical importance take place in smaller regions, such as Silicon Valley, larger regions, such as the global South, and in virtual spaces that are truly global. We tend to think of single places: “the Internet” / “the world” / “China”: but as a number of conference speakers emphasized, there is more than one China, if we consider for example Taiwan, Hong Kong, rural China, and the factory zones — each with their different cultural, legal and economic dynamics. Similarly, there are a multitude of actors, for example corporations, which are shaping the Chinese Internet as surely as Beijing is. As Jack Qui, one of the opening panelists, observed: “There are many Internets, and many worlds.” There are also multiple histories of the Internet in China, and as yet no standard narrative.

The conference certainly made clear that we are learning a lot about China, as a rapidly growing number of Chinese scholars increasingly research and publish on the subject. The vitality of the Chinese Journal of Communication is one sign of this energy, but Internet research is expanding globally as well. Some of the panel topics will be familiar to anyone following the news, even if there is still not much published in the academic literature: smart censorship, trust in online information, human flesh search, political scandal, democratisation. But there were also interesting discussions from new perspectives, or perspectives that are already very familiar in a Western context: social networking, job markets, public administration, and e-commerce.

However, while international conferences and dedicated panels are making these cross-cultural (and cross-topic) discussions and conversations easier, we still lack enough published content about China and the Internet, and it can be difficult to find material, due to its recent diffusion, and major barriers such as language. This is an important point, given how easy it is to oversimplify another culture. A proper comparative analysis is hard and often frustrating to carry out, but important, if we are to see our own frameworks and settings in a different way.

One of the opening panelists remarked that two great transformations had occurred during his academic life: the emergence of the Internet, and the rise of China. The intersection of the two is providing fertile ground for research, and the potential for a whole new, rich research agenda. Of course the challenge for academics is not simply to find new, interesting and important things to say about a subject, but to draw enduring theoretical perspectives that can be applied to other nations and over time.

In returning to the framing question: “is China changing the Internet, or is the Internet changing China?” obviously the answer to both is “yes”, but as the Dean of USC Annenberg School, Ernest Wilson put it, we need to be asking “how?” and “to what degree?” I hope this preconference encouraged more scholars to pursue these questions.

Reference

[1] Bolsover, G., Dutton, W.H., Law, G. and Dutta, S. (2013) Social Foundations of the Internet in China and the New Internet World: A Cross-National Comparative Perspective. Presented at “China and the New Internet World”, International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, June 2013.

The OII’s Founding Director (2002-2011), Professor William H. Dutton is Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, he was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. His most recent books include World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities, co-edited with P. Jeffreys (MIT Press, 2011) and the Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013). Read Bill’s blog.