Close

Bots for Civic Engagement

Panel Description

From SmarterChild to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon to Horse_ebooks, humans have relationships of varying quality with bots. Mostly it’s commercial spam. But sometimes it’s less benign: for instance, the 2012 Mexican elections saw thousands of Twitter bots published by one candidate’s side denouncing the opposition with a flood of messages. There are countless examples of bots used for nefarious purposes, in America, Iran and elsewhere. What would a future look like where instead we see a proliferation of bots for positive civic engagement? Could we automate the distribution of civic information and education? Manipulate information flows to improve our welfare? Engineer reverse-Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks? Should we? This panel takes a critical look at the discourse around, and architecture of, information overload to facilitate an important and timely debate around the engineering, usefulness, and ethics of bots for civic engagement.

Audio

Coverage

Mapping an Arab Ecosystem (or two)

Panel Description

(via the MIT Center for Civic Media)

This session looks beyond platforms to explore the concept of media ecosystems. How do we understand, map, visualize, and ultimately shape the flow of texts across an increasingly diverse and complex media ecosystem? What are the relationships between professional and citizen, participatory and broadcast media? How do we understand what people are encountering, both in terms of supply (tools like Media Cloud that examine what’s published) and demand (tracking/logging efforts that look at individual or group consumption?

Slides

http://www.scribd.com/embeds/76380144/content?start_page=1&view_mode=slideshow&access_key=key-1dq3y6k6jefszy0xrwr1&secret_password=gnw26lpey4wpax51psl(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)0; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Coverage

The Revolutions Were Tweeted

Link

http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1246

Abstract

This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. We differentiate between these user types and analyze patterns of sourcing and routing information among them. We describe the symbiotic relationship between media outlets and individuals and the distinct roles particular user types appear to play. Using this analysis, we discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe.

Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter

Link

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/afghanistan-and-its-election-on-twitter-the-macro-picture/

Summary

  • 111,741 tweets about Afghanistan and its presidential election posted between August 11, 2009 and September 9, 2009
  • 11,255 tweets on August 20, 2009, the day of the election
  • 29,642 users talked about Afghanistan in our dataset
  • Top 10% of tweeters contributed 65% of tweets (same as Iran Election)
  • Number of retweets for a user was not correlated to their tweeting volume (same as Iran Election)
  • 483 hashtags were used at least 3 times
  • No single, dominant hashtag (differs from Iran Election)
  • 3 most used hashtags: #Afghan09, #Afghanistan, and #AfghanElection