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Social Media Transparency is Key for Our Democracy

Paul Waters

August 11, 2020

According to the Pew Research Center, one in five Americans rely primarily on social media for their political news and information. This means a small handful of companies have enormous control over what a broad swath of America sees, reads, and hears. Now that the coronavirus has moved even more of our lives online, companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have more influence than ever before. And yet, we know remarkably little about how these social media platforms operate. We don’t know the answers to questions like:

How does information flow across these networks?
Who sees what and when?
How do algorithms drive media consumption?
How are political ads targeted?
Why does hate and abuse proliferate?

Without answers to questions like these, we can’t guard against digital voter suppression, coronavirus misinformation, and the rampant harassment of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) online. That means we won’t be able to move closer to the open and just democracy we need.

A pattern of resisting oversight

The platforms have strong incentives to remain opaque to public scrutiny. Platforms profit from running ads — some of which are deeply offensive — and by keeping their algorithms secret and hiding data on where ads run they avoid accountability — circumventing advertiser complaints, user protests, and congressional inquiries. Without reliable information on how these massive platforms operate and how their technologies function, there can be no real accountability.

When complaints are raised, the companies frequently deny or make changes behind the scenes. Even when platforms admit something has gone wrong, they claim to fix problems without explaining how, which makes it impossible to verify the effectiveness of the “fix.” Moreover, these fixes are often just small changes that only paper over fundamental problems, while leaving the larger structural flaws intact. This trend has been particularly harmful for BIPOC who already face significant barriers to participation in the public square.

Another way platforms avoid accountability is via legal mechanisms like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and intellectual property law, including trade secrets, patents, and copyright protections. This allows platforms to keep their algorithms secret, even when those algorithms dictate social outcomes protected under civil rights law.

Platforms have responded to pressure to release data in the past — but the results have fallen far short of what they promised. Following the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook announced projects intended to release vast amounts of new data about their operations to researchers. The idea was to provide a higher level of transparency and understanding about the role of these platforms in that election. However, in nearly every case, those transparency efforts languished because the platforms did not release the data they had committed they would provide. Facebook’s reticence to divulge data almost a year after announcing the partnership with the Social Science Research Council is just one example of this type of foot-dragging.

The platforms’ paltry transparency track record demonstrates their failure to self-regulate in the public interest and reinforces the need for active and engaged external watchdogs who can provide oversight.

How watchdog researchers and journalists have persisted despite the obstacles

Without meaningful access to data from the platforms, researchers and journalists have had to reverse engineer experiments that can test how platforms operate and develop elaborate efforts merely to collect their own data about platforms.

Tools like those developed by NYU’s Online Political Transparency Project have become essential. While Facebook created a clearinghouse that was promoted as a tool that would serve as a compendium of all the political ads being posted to the social media platform, NYU’s tool has helped researchers independently verify the accuracy and comprehensiveness of Facebook’s archive and spot issues and gaps. As we head into the 2020 election, researchers continue to push for data, as they raise the alarm about significant amounts of mis/disinformation spread through manipulative political groups, advertisers, and media websites.

Watchdog journalists are also hard at work. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal built a side-by-side Facebook feed to examine how liberals and conservatives experience news and information on the platform differently. Journalists with The Markup have been probing Google’s search and email algorithms. ProPublica has been tracking discriminatory advertising practices on Facebook.

Because of efforts like these, we have seen some movement. The recent House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee hearing with CEOs from Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon was evidence of a bipartisan desire to better understand how the human choices and technological code that shape these platforms also shape society. However, the harms these companies and others have caused are not limited to economics and market power alone.

How we’re taking action

At Democracy Fund, we are currently pushing for greater platform transparency and working to protect against the harms of digital voter suppression, coronavirus misinformation, and harassment of BIPOC by:

Funding independent efforts to generate data and research that provides insight regarding the platforms’ algorithms and decision making;
Supporting efforts to protect journalists and researchers in their work to uncover platform harms;
Demanding that platforms provide increased transparency on how their algorithms work and the processes they have in place to prevent human rights and civil rights abuses; and
Supporting advocates involved in campaigns that highlight harms and pressure the companies to change, such as Change the Terms and Stop Hate for Profit.

Demanding transparency and oversight have a strong historical precedent in American media. Having this level of transparency makes a huge difference for Americans — and for our democracy. Political ad files from radio and television broadcasters (which have been available to the public since the 1920s) have been invaluable to journalists reporting on the role of money in elections. They have fueled important research about how broadcasters work to meet community information needs.

The public interest policies in broadcasting have been key to communities of color who have used them to challenge broadcaster licenses at the Federal Communications Commission when they aren’t living up to their commitments. None of these systems are perfect, as many community advocates will tell you, but even this limited combination of transparency and media oversight doesn’t exist on social media platforms.

Tech platforms should make all their ads available in a public archive. They should be required to make continually-updated, timely information available in machine-readable formats via an API or similar means. They should consult public interest experts on standards for the information they disclose, including standardized names and formats, unique IDs, and other elements that make the data accessible for researchers.

Bottomline, we need new policy frameworks to enforce transparency, to give teeth to oversight, and to ensure social media can enable and enhance our democracy. Without it, the open and just democracy we all deserve is at real risk.

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Blog

It’s Time for an Internet That Supports Our Democracy

Paul Waters

June 15, 2020

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google play an essential role in our democracy. They provide a way for communities to organize and speak directly to politicians. They enable companies to find customers and allow customers, in turn, to pressure companies to live up to higher standards. And they allow news outlets to reach households and create venues for friends and family to discuss current events.

But, far too often, these same platforms provide cover to unlawful practices and malicious actors that harm people and weaken our democracy, because the algorithms they run on are designed and managed without any public oversight. These algorithms are weaponized by foreign governments to inflame hatred and suppress voter turnout. They’re used by hate groups to create online mobs that harass and intimidate people of color and women. And they allow conspiracy theories to go viral. This kind of discrimination and manipulation would be unacceptable for other basic services we rely on, like telecommunications, electricity, or voting systems.

These are just a few of the harms inflicted through social media, and they stem from one fatal flaw: platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are not accountable to the public. Their unchecked power also extends far beyond their own platforms, as they have acquired countless other companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube and have spread their tracking software across the web.

It doesn’t have to be like this. At Democracy Fund, we believe that the digital tools and platforms we all rely on can support democratic systems and protect human rights, rather than undermining them. This belief is at the core of our Digital Democracy Initiative, which funds advocacy, research, and innovations that work towards three concrete goals:

Improve civil and human rights practices online
Strengthen public interest journalism
Reduce inauthentic and coordinated disinformation campaigns

For these goals to become a reality, we must see specific actions from policymakers to adopt a civil and human rights framework — a way of thinking that puts the needs of people first — focused on changing the terms of service to better support people of color online and serve community information needs.

To achieve these goals, Democracy Fund partners with civil rights groups, technologists, university researchers, and policy organizations working to improve our public square. Some use policy and litigation to protect people of color and hold platforms accountable to the public interest. Others, like Data for Black Lives, mobilize networks of grassroots activists to develop policies to protect users. And organizations like Free Press work to increase funding for news outlets, track and debunk misinformation, and strengthen and diversify news outlets. In particular, the Digital Democracy Initiative supports efforts led by or serving the people most frequently harmed online: people of color and women.

The 2016 US presidential election made clear the power of social media on our politics when the Russian-controlled Internet Research Agency flooded social media with fake groups and posts to divide, harass, and confuse the American public. But this was only the most high-profile case. For years, white supremacists and other hate groups have tested and developed tactics to disrupt our democracy, using the platforms’ tools for targeting individual users based on characteristics like race, gender, political affiliation, or economic status. All the while, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have expanded their reach into nearly every area of life with little to no oversight. Less obvious issues like algorithmic discrimination have led to civil rights violations, like real estate companies excluding people of color from seeing their online ads for housing. Journalists and academics need new tools and transparency laws to help them track and expose these hidden harms, just as they did with the great issues of prior generations, from segregation and Jim Crow to pesticides and big tobacco.

The pattern is now clear. Every few months, another problem with the platforms makes headlines. At first, the companies deny it or announce minor changes. Company leaders promise the public and Congress that they will do better. But once the headlines fade, little has changed.

We aim to keep the pressure on by supporting a wide range of efforts with diverse focus areas, leadership, and strategies. The platforms must enact strong policies that uphold democratic norms and prioritize quality information over misleading content and opaque systems. And in the meantime, users need tools to protect themselves and expose bad actors while navigating online spaces and discussions.

It’s time that we reclaim the digital tools and spaces that shape our democracy. Our elections, our lives, and our liberty depend on it.

If you’re interested in learning more about our work, contact Paul Waters, associate director, Public Square Program.

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Systems Map

Digital Democracy Initiative Core Story

Paul Waters

May 15, 2020

Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens that are all connected in countless ways. Every attempt to influence and improve some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions. To identify the root causes of problems we want to address, find intervention points, and design strategies to affect positive change, we use a methodology called systems mapping. We create systems maps in collaboration with broad and inclusive sets of stakeholders, and use them to design and then assess our grantmaking strategies. They are intended to provide a shared language, creating new opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and ideas that can improve the health of our democracy.

This systems map describes how digital tools and technologies have transformed our public square in recent years for better and for worse. The flow of news, information and civic discourse is now largely governed by five major companies: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Following numerous high-profile scandals, the public has grown concerned about issues of discrimination, mis/disinformation, online hate and harassment, lack of transparency, voter suppression, and foreign interference in our elections through the platforms. The platforms’ lackluster response to these crises suggests that we need to build a strong movement to force the platforms to become accountable not just to their shareholders, but to the public.

The map consists of three interlocking loops.

Platform Power & Profitability describes how the platforms have come to dominate digital communications at the expense of the public square’s overall health and transparency.
Discriminatory Targeting lays out the ways in which platform tools have been used to weaken our democracy, spread hateful content and disinformation, and have exacerbated longstanding racial, economic, and gender inequalities.
The Decline of Commercial News shows why and how news publishers have been unable to compete with platforms for attention and profits in the digital age, and what the loss of journalism means for the public square.

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Democracy Fund and Omidyar Network Support Independent Analysis of Facebook’s Role in Elections

Tom Glaisyer

April 9, 2018

Today Facebook announced a new initiative which will provide independent researchers access to Facebook data to study the impact the social network has on our elections and our democracy. Democracy Fund, along with the Omidyar Network, Hewlett Foundation and several other leading foundations have come together to support the research efforts that will be enabled through this program. We believe that independent funding of this research is critical, and hope that the program will help the public and policymakers better understand how Facebook is shaping our elections, social fabric, and democratic life.

This announcement comes amidst a firestorm of attention focused on the social media giant’s role in allowing vast amounts of personal data to be released, data which was then used to target shady and divisive political ads at Americans. Last week Facebook revealed that tens of thousands more people were affected by that breach than was first reported. As a foundation fundamentally concerned with the health of our democracy, we have been following this story closely.

In fact, Democracy Fund and the Omidyar Network have been raising the alarm about these issues for sometime. Late last year, the organizations published an in-depth paper asking, “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” and identifying six ways in which digital platforms pose direct challenges to our democratic ideals. We have signed on to support this research initiative, but are realistic about the complexities and risks of supporting this effort and are approaching it as one part of a multipronged strategy to create a safer, stronger and more meaningful digital public square.

We are deeply committed to working on meaningful solutions that help rebuild trustworthy spaces for communities to connect, share information and participate in our democracy. We currently fund a range of efforts focused on combating hyper-partisanship, ensuring the integrity of our elections, and fostering a robust fourth estate locally and nationally.

Grantees like Prof. Zeynep Tufekci and ProPublica are doing powerful work on algorithmic accountability. Prof. Young Mie Kim tracked political ads on Facebook in 2016 and Politifact is helping sort truth from fiction on the platform. The German Marshall Fund is tracking Russian misinformation and Free Press is organization diverse communities around the rights to connect and communicate. The Center for Democracy and Technology is helping strengthen election cybersecurity, and spreading best practices for data privacy in voter registration databases and campaign data. Launched in 2017, the Social Science Research Center’s Media & Democracy program encourages academic research, practitioner reflection, and public debate on all aspects of the close relationship between media and democracy, including how changes in the political landscape, such as increasing polarization, have affected the media.

However, in our work with activists, organizations, and scholars in the field we have consistently heard that we can’t address what we don’t know. Through this new research effort Facebook says it will give researchers unpresented access to its data in ways it never has before. The research will be driven by a diverse coalition of scholars. Research projects will have to go through relevant university Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews, will be rigorously peer reviewed, and may be vetted to ensure Facebook lives up to its legal and ethical commitments to users. Crucially, the research results themselves will not be subject to approval by Facebook

The emphasis of this first announcement is on Facebook’s role in elections, but the committee is also expected to address how Facebook’s systems influence viral deceptions, polarization, and civic engagement. Democracy Fund believes the American people must have effective ways to understand and be a part of the democratic process. As the internet transforms political life, it opens exciting new pathways for public engagement but has also created a fertile ground for abuse, harassment and manipulation that hurt our communities and our society. As this research is planned Democracy Fund will pay special attention to ensuring that the voices and the priorities of those disproportionately harmed by social media are included.

The flood of news about bad actors gaming the system have revealed a troubling disregard for the critical responsibility social media companies have had over our personal privacy and public debate. Facebook, and other platforms, need to acknowledge the oversized role they play in our society and truly prioritize privacy, embrace transparency, and accept accountability. We are realistic about the complexities here, but see this research partnership as a key step towards that goal. Through this program, and in separate endeavors, we are deeply committed to working on meaningful solutions that help rebuild trustworthy spaces for communities to connect, share information and participate in our democracy.

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Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?

Tom Glaisyer

October 4, 2017

Today The Omidyar Group released a paper co-authored by me and two colleagues at Omidyar Network on the role of social media platforms on democracy and the public square. This paper – called “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” – comes at a moment when there is new scrutiny on the role Facebook, Google, and Twitter played in spreading misinformation and divisive propaganda during the 2016 election. Those debates loom large, however, our analysis goes well beyond any one election to try and understand how social platforms are disrupting core elements of a democratic society.

In June 2017 Facebook raised the question “Is social media good for democracy?” Like them, we have been wrestling with these questions for some time, and while we do not take for granted how these networks provide value to civic life, we are also deeply troubled by the dangers they pose. Their algorithms and their vast storehouses of data gives them fundamentally new capacities abilities to shape discourse, media, and civic and democratic life in American.

As my co-authors – Stacy Donohue and Anamitra Deb – and I reviewed the research of leading voices on this set of issues, we identified six key ways social media is threatening democracy:

Exacerbating the polarization of civil society via echo chambers and filter bubbles
Rapidly spreading mis- and dis-information and amplifying the populist and illiberal wave across the globe
Creating competing realities driven by their algorithms’ intertwining of popularity and legitimacy
Being vulnerable to political capture and voter manipulation through enabling malevolent actors to spread dis-information and covertly influence public opinion
Capturing unprecedented amounts of data that can be used to manipulate user behavior
Facilitating hate speech, public humiliation, and the targeted marginalization of disadvantaged or minority voices

There are no easy answers to the challenges represented above, and any group of potential solutions must account for the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders if we are going to have the public square we deserve. As our founder, ebay creator Pierre Omidyar, wrote today in The Washington Post, “Just as new regulations and policies had to be established for the evolving online commerce sector, social media companies must now help navigate the serious threats posed by their platforms and help lead the development and enforcement of clear industry safeguards. Change won’t happen overnight, and these issues will require ongoing examination, collaboration and vigilance to effectively turn the tide.”

For our part, at Democracy Fund, the potential effects of social media on democracy are closely tied to many lines of our work. This includes longstanding investments on issues ranging from combating hyperpartisanship with constructive dialogue to developing digital election administration tools, and from understanding the impact of fact checking to supporting communities often targeted online. A few examples of this work include:

Politifact, one of the nation’s leading fact checking organizations, has partnered with Facebook to combat the spread of misinformation on the platform.
The Center for Media Engagement, formerly the Engaging News Project, works with newsrooms, social platforms and the public to develop and test ways to make trusted online information more engaging and impactful.
The Coral Project builds open-source tools focused on helping newsrooms build safe, secure and vibrant online communities.

In addition, we supported the Knight Prototype Fund on misinformation earlier this year, which focused on many of these issues. The full list of 20 projects can be found here, but the four projects we funded are:

Viz Lab — Developing a dashboard to track how misinformation spreads through images and memes to aid journalists and researchers in understanding the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed across social media.
Hoaxy Bot-o-Meter is a tool created by computer scientists at the Center for Complex Networks to uncover attempts to use Internet bots to boost the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. The tool aims to reveal how this information is generated and broadcasted, how it becomes viral, its overall reach, and how it competes with accurate information for placement on user feeds.
The Documenters Project by City Bureau creates a network of citizen “documenters” who receive training in the use of journalistic ethics and tools, attend public civic events, and produce trustworthy reports on social media platforms.
The American Library Association is collaborating with the Center for News Literacy to develop an adult media literacy program in five public libraries, focused on how to be a savvy digital citizen in a platform world.

We are going to continue to ask hard questions and support people and organizations who are working to create a robust public square that serves our democracy. We look forward to continuing this work alongside these and other partners. Please email the authors at inquiries@omidyargroup.com if you’d like to discuss how we might work together.

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News Integrity Initiative: Building a More Trustworthy Public Square

Paul Waters

April 4, 2017

Josh Stearns co-authored this piece with Paul Waters.

At the Democracy Fund we believe that a healthy democracy depends on a vibrant and trustworthy public square. At a time of deep partisanship and threats to democratic ideals and institutions, media have a powerful role to play informing the public and helping bridge the differences we face in our communities, and our nation. However, the erosion of trust in journalism raises profound challenges for a democracy that depends on an open marketplace of ideas, vibrant civil debate, and a press that holds all leaders accountable.

We joined the News Integrity Initiative because we understand that trust is a complex issue and that it demands a diversity of approaches.

The News Integrity Initiative, a project by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, is focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online. By funding applied research and convening meetings with industry experts, the Initiative will work to advance news literacy, increase trust in journalism around the world, and better inform the public conversation.

We are excited to join others in supporting a range of people, practices, and ideas to rebuild new kinds of relationships between communities and newsrooms. There is no silver bullet to solve all concerns around trust in media, but we want to roll up our sleeves and work with others who are committed to asking hard questions and seeking out workable solutions to complicated problems.

At the Democracy Fund, we bring to this work a deep commitment to local news, community engagement, and diversity in media. We know that trust looks different in different communities, and that trust is often nuanced, contextual, and shifting. Part of how we got here today is through self-inflicted wounds by an industry that hasn’t always served the needs of everybody in America. And we are aware that issues of trust in media are not new for many communities who have been left out, misrepresented, and hurt by media coverage throughout our nation’s history. We want to work with people in big cities and small rural communities, on the coasts and in the heartland, and in red and blue states across the country.

While these issues have been in the spotlight recently, the erosion of trust in journalism is part of broader shifts in how people relate to institutions across our democracy. The ongoing economic challenges facing the press today demand new ideas about the role the public in supporting and sustaining the press. We are encouraged by the News Integrity Initiative’s emphasis on putting people at the center of the discussion about trust.

Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY, which will administer the fund, wrote that he wants “to explore this issue from a public perspective ,” arguing that news literacy shouldn’t be “just about getting the public to read our news but more about getting media to listen to the public.” To that end, we need newsrooms that are deeply engaged with their communities and we need active citizens who are equipped and empowered as creators, consumers, and collaborators.

We look forward to working with the News Integrity Initiative and organizations across the country to catalyze efforts to put people at the center of American journalism and do the hard work of building a more trustworthy public square for all.

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Announcing a New Fund to Fight Misinformation

Tom Glaisyer

March 12, 2017

Misinformation, hoaxes, and propaganda are nothing new, but the internet and new technology have made it easier than ever to create and share viral deceptions. The spread of fake information and false stories erodes trust in our democratic institutions and fans the flames of hyper-partisanship.

However, those same tools also give us new opportunities to combat and debunk bad information, and help deliver accurate and trustworthy journalism to more people than ever.

That is why today a coalition of foundations including Democracy Fund, Knight and Rita Allen Foundations are launching a joint fund to support creative ideas to address the question: how might we improve the flow of accurate information?

Democracy Fund is committed to supporting innovative people and ideas that help combat viral deception and reinvigorate trust in the press. We hope this prototype fund sparks creativity and collaboration to ensure our political system is able to deliver on its promise to the American people. We expect to award up to $1 million in grants with an average size of about $50,000. Each grant comes with a two-day training on building and evolving ideas through prototyping.

We understand that these are profoundly complex issues and that people negotiate trust, navigate information, and seek out context in very different ways. We don’t believe there is any one silver-bullet, but instead want to engage a diverse set of stakeholders around these problems. We welcome early stage projects from engineers and educators, librarians and lawyers, and reporters and researchers, and more. Good ideas can come from anywhere so we’ll be reaching out to communities and local newsrooms all across the country—in both rural and urban areas, through red states and blue states, on the coasts and from the middle of the country.

The deadline is April 3rd at 5pm ET. Click here to read a FAQ for more information or apply today.

In the press release today our partner foundations write: “The call is seeking diverse ideas on topics ranging from, but not limited to, the role of algorithms in news consumption, methods for separating facts from fiction, building bridges across ideological divides and strategies for ensuring journalism organizations are authentic to the communities they serve.”

Democracy Fund is particularly interested in ideas from diverse communities and local newsrooms around the country, where people are exploring how engagement, transparency, and context are helping sort fact from fiction. Those peddling in misinformation have used the Internet to their advantage, but everyday people show that the web can be a powerful tool for truth as well. It’s time to turn the tables.