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CfP Disinformation-for-Hire and Click Farming (Social Media + Society Special Issue)
by Rafael Grohmann 06 Oct '21

06 Oct '21

Colleagues, Please consider submitting your abstract. https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sms/collections/cfp On August 18th, 1:30PM EST, Jonathan and I will do a livestream featuring the call for papers. We will send you more information soon. And help us spread the word. Disinformation-for-Hire and Click Farming around the World: Identities, Incentives, Infrastructures Special collection of Social Media + Society (Open Access Journal) Abstract submission deadline: October 15, 2021 Full paper submission deadline: March 1, 2022 Special Issue Editors: Rafael Grohmann (Unisinos University, Brazil) and Jonathan Corpus Ong (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA) From state-sponsored propagandists using paid troll armies, to commercially motivated data analytics firms selling their toolkits to politicians, and platform workers producing memes for overseas clients, the global industry of disinformation production has only professionalized and diversified. This special issue for Social Media + Society aims to deepen understanding about the social identities, work arrangements, and political and commercial motivations of an emerging class of digital disinformation workers. We are interested in critical and interdisciplinary research that examines the political economy, specifically the digital and creative industries that propel and produce disinformation. The special issue’s focus on business models and disinformation worker identities in global context aims to expand on disinformation studies’ analysis of “fake news” and hate speech as content that require better policing or fact-checking. It also aims to expand platform studies’ research agenda and consider the range of digital professionals and entrepreneurs who buy and sell engagement on social media–with pernicious political consequences especially in contexts where dissenting voices are suppressed. Thus, we solicit submissions that discuss the diverse worker hierarchies and conditions, outsourced gig arrangements, money politics, and/or regulatory loopholes in the promotional industries that enable the strategic production of disinformation. We are interested in interdisciplinary and ethnographic research that engages with the deep stories of workers in “dark PR” firms (Silverman, Lytyvenko & Kung 2020; Verwey & Muir 2019), data analytics firms (Briant 2021), Latin American and Indonesian Instagram click farms (Lindquist 2021), and “propaganda secretary” offices (Hassan & Hitchen 2019). We are also interested in normative discussions about complicity and collusion in digital industries as well as scholarly self-reflection about the challenges of doing engaged research about disinformation (Ong 2020). We are especially interested in submissions that shed light across these themes: * ethnographic portraits of paid trolls, meme producers, click farm workers, and political strategists * precarity, aspiration, and the tactics of resistance of digital workers / disinformation producers * the ethics of representing perpetrators; whistleblowers as unreliable narrators * participatory disinformation (Starbird 2021) and networked disinformation * the infrastructure, materiality, and “platform trees” (van Dijck 2020) of click farm platforms with mainstream social media * moral justifications of disinformation producers (Ong & Cabañes 2019) * the complicity of advertising and public relations to “organized lying” (Edwards 2021) * legitimacy, respectability, and plausible deniability; the role of intermediaries or brokers in the disinformation industries * mental health of workers in digital shadow economies * the social proximities between content moderators and paid trolls in the global South * regulatory loopholes in political marketing and PR; experiments with self-regulation and codes of ethics in digital campaigning (Udupa 2019) * auto-ethnographic reflections of engaged scholars about their experiences working with governments, platforms, workers, and journalists to shed light on disinformation shadow economies The special issue will include an interview with ProPublica's Craig Silverman and a response to the contributions from Dr Joan Donovan. Timeline 300- to 500-word abstracts should be emailed to rafaelgrohmann(a)unisinos.br and jcong(a)umass.edu by October 15, 2021. The abstract should articulate: 1) the issue or research question to be discussed, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, and 3) the expected findings or conclusions. Feel free to consult with the Special Issue Editors about your article ideas and potential angles or approaches. Decisions will be communicated to the authors by November 1, 2021. Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by March 1, 2022. References Briant, E. (2021). Lessons from the Cambridge Analytica Crisis: Confronting Today’s (Dis)information Challenges. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 3(3), 125–127. https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v3i3.2775 Edwards. L. (2021). Organised Lying and Professional Legitimacy: Public Relations’ Accountability in the Disinformation Debate. European Journal of Communication, 36(2), 168–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120966851 Hassan, I. & Hitchen, J. (2019, April 18). Nigeria’s Propaganda Secretaries. Mail & Guardian. https://mg.co.za/article/2019-04-18-00-nigerias-propaganda-se cretaries/ Lindquist, J. (2021). Good Enough Imposters: The Market for Instagram Followers in Indonesia and Beyond. In: Woolgar, S. et al (eds). The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans. Bristol University Press. Ong, J.C. (2020). "Limits and Luxuries of Slow Research in Times of Radical War: How Should We Represent Perpetrators?" Journal of Digital War 1(1): 1-6. Ong, J. C., & Cabañes, J. V. A. (2019). When Disinformation Studies Meets Production Studies: Social Identities and Moral Justifications in the Political Trolling Industry. International Journal of Communication, 13, 5771–5790. Silverman, C., Lytyvenko, J. & Kung, W. (2020, January 6). Disinformation for Hire: How a New Breed of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online. Buzzfeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/disinformatio n-for-hire-black-pr-firms Starbird, K. (2021, May 6). Participatory Disinformation: The Big Lie during the 2020 Election and the January 6, 2021 Attack on the US Capitol. Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1390408145428643842 Udupa, S. (2019, January 31). India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech. Engage. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/election-2019-india-n eeds-fresh-strategy-totackle-new- digital-tools. Van Dijck, J. (2020) Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Visualizing Platformization and Its Governance. New Media & Society, 1-19. Online First. Verwey, S., & Muir, C. (2019). Bell Pottinger and the Dark Art of Public Relations: Ethics of individuality Versus Ethics of Communality. Communicare: Journal for Communication Sciences in Southern Africa, 38(1), 96-116.

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Speakers Announced for The 17th Annual Social Informatics Research Symposium and the 3rd Annual Information Ethics and Policy Workshop
by Colin Rhinesmith 06 Oct '21

06 Oct '21

Dear colleagues, The Planning Committee for The 17th Annual Social Informatics Research Symposium and the 3rd Annual Information Ethics and Policy Workshop: Sociotechnical Perspectives on Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (SIG-SI and SIG-IEP) are excited to share the speakers and schedule for the joint SIG-SI and SIG-IEP Workshop on Sociotechnical Perspectives on Equity, Inclusion, and Justice on Friday, October 29th, 2021 from 8:00am-12:00 MDT. Our speakers will discuss research related to policy, training, AI and diversity and inequality. In this half-day workshop, a range of scholarly sociotechnical inquiries alongside ethical, practical, and policy perspectives across a range of disciplines and sectors will be presented and discussed. The workshop will provide a virtual space to share and exchange experiences and ideas or suggest theories and directions for future work among international SI researchers and practitioners. This workshop will facilitate collaboratively producing short- and long-term research agendas, addressing pressing critical and diversity concerns around technology, sharing research that supports empirically driven policy making, ethical decision-making, and practice for social justice and well-being with pervasive and emerging sociotechnical systems. The speakers and topics are as follows: Tien-I Tsai and Hui-Yun Sung. Towards an Inclusive and Sustainable Knowledge Society for Everyone: Development of a National Policy for Public Libraries in Taiwan. (virtual) Nga Than, Abhishek Gupta, and Ameen Jauhar. Critical Analysis of "Responsible AI #AIforAll: Approach Document for India" (virtual) Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan. Game based training as a model for skill enhancement in bias mitigation efforts. (virtual) Dania Bilal and Jessica Barfield. Increasing Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Design and Use of Voice Digital Assistants. (virtual) Lindsay Poirier. Grappling with the Representational Inequities in NYC 311 Data. (virtual) Lala Hajibayova. In Search for Cuteness: Interactive Discovery and Play in Times of Pandemic. (virtual) Hengyi Fu and Yao Lyu. How People Experience Facial Recognition in an Organizational Setting: An Organizational Justice Perspective. (virtual) Elliott Hauser. Action in light of information: What robots can teach us about algorithms. (in-person) Additional registration fee applies. All of the workshop descriptions can be found on the ASIS&T Annual Meeting website. To register for this workshop, whether attending online or in-person, you can visit Registration and Workshop Rates. If you have not already done so, please register for the Annual Meeting here: https://www.asist.org/am21/registration/ <https://www.asist.org/am21/registration/> We look forward to seeing you there! Best, Colin — Colin Rhinesmith (pronouns: he/him) Associate Professor and Director Community Informatics Lab School of Library and Information Science Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Scholarship and Research Simmons University http://crhinesmith.com Senior Faculty Research Fellow Benton Institute for Broadband & Society https://benton.org

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Feb 2022: International Winter School: Taming the iMonster: Regulating digital platforms
by Katja Mayer 06 Oct '21

06 Oct '21

Dear colleagues, We are pleased to announce that the Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices <https://digigov.univie.ac.at/> (University of Vienna) will host an *interdisciplinary and international winter school*: */Taming the iMonster: Regulating digital platforms/* Digital platforms, understood as the technical and social infrastructure for the collection, storage, curation, analysis, distribution or commercialisation of digital data, are frequently compared to a Leviathan <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-04363-6_2>: A “monster” that people submit their natural freedoms to in order to receive something back that they consider essential. In the case of the platform-Leviathan, it is not physical security and the protection of their property that people receive in return, but the possibility to communicate across time and space, to connect different groups to buy and sell goods in a faster and more convenient manner, or to look for rides, jobs, houses, partners. Especially during and after Covid-19, submitting to the iMonster has been a necessary condition for many people to be able to do the things they need to do to hold a job or two and run their families. How do we best regulate digital platforms? This is the question that this interdisciplinary Winter School will focus on. *When: * 14 – 25 February 2021 | Mon-Fr 3-6pm Central European Time *Where:* online (Zoom) *Speakers include:* José van Dijck <https://www.uu.nl/staff/jftmvandijck>, /t.b.c./ (Universiteit Utrecht) Jonathan Gray <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-jonathan-gray> (King’s College London & Public Data Lab) Alex Hanna <https://alex-hanna.com/> (Google) Jürgen Pfeffer <https://www.sites.hfp.tum.de/css/team/prof-dr-juergen-pfeffer/> (Technical University Munich) Jean-Christophe Plantin <https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/people/academic-staff/jean-c…> (LSE) *Participants:* mainly early-stage researchers (PhD students and post-docs), but open to colleagues from all disciplines with an interest in the topic */Participation is free, but places are limited./* If you would like to participate, please send a short outline of your motivation to participate, and a brief summary of the project(s) you are working on (1 page max.), to natalia.kancelova(a)univie.ac.at <mailto:natalia.kancelova@univie.ac.at> by *15 November 2021* at the latest. The members and affiliates of the Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices <https://digigov.univie.ac.at/team/> look forward to hearing from you! */For more info visit: https://digigov.univie.ac.at/teaching/winter-school/ <https://digigov.univie.ac.at/teaching/winter-school/>/*

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Inclusive Games Group
by Kat Schrier Shaenfield 06 Oct '21

06 Oct '21

Hello all- I am inviting anyone interested to join a new group related to inclusive games. We are holding our first meeting on *October 7 (Thursday) at 8 pm ET (virtual), *and our second meeting on *October 14th (Thursday) at 10 am ET (virtual).* We are exploring things like... --Developing an "unconference" on inclusive games --Creating whitepapers/open access books on inclusive games --Connecting with each other and with organizations that are supporting inclusion in games --Finding collaborators for grants, research, and scholarship --Finding collaborators for games and other projects --Creating a cozy, inclusive, caring community --& MORE! Please email me if you want more details about the group and our meeting. Take care, Kat ----------------------------------------- Dr. Karen (Kat) Schrier http://www.karenschrier.com www.twitter.com/drgamermom Associate Professor & Director, Games & Emerging Media program, Marist College Author, *We the Gamers* <https://gamesforcivics.com/> (Oxford University Press) Author, *Knowledge Games <https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/knowledge-games>* (Johns Hopkins University Press) Editor, *Learning, Education, & Games <https://gamesforgrowing.com/> book *series (ETC Press/Carnegie Mellon) Author, Designing Ourselves <https://www.adl.org/media/13011/download> (Center for Technology & Society)

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Nate Persily drafts legislation that would require large online platforms to share data with outside researchers
by Joly MacFie 05 Oct '21

05 Oct '21

Tweet https://twitter.com/persily/status/1445409819486216203 Draft https://www.dropbox.com/s/5my9r1t9ifebfz1/Persily%20proposed%20legislation%… WaPo https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/05/facebook-research-data-ha… The current situation — platforms controlling all their data and deciding what information the public deserves to know — is unsustainable. So, too, would it be a mistake for Congress to regulate the Internet based on folk theories or misguided conventional wisdom regarding the harms caused by these new technologies. We need good information. -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- -

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Opportunity to be included in a new article collection, Deep Learning for IoT Security
by Paudel, Ramesh 05 Oct '21

05 Oct '21

Dear All, As a Associate Guest Editor I would like to invite you to submit high quality papers in our Special Issue on “Deep Learning for IoT Security” https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/24532/deep-learning-for-iot-sec… in Frontiers in Big Data If you decide to submit a manuscript within our collection, your contribution will be peer-reviewed and judged on originality, interest, clarity, relevance, correctness, language, and presentation by our editorial board members. Immediately upon publication, your paper will be free to read for everyone, increasing visibility and citations. We encourage authors to submit abstracts ahead of the full manuscript submission. See the message below for more information, as well as the links to either accept or decline this Call for Participation. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to write to the journal team at bigdata(a)frontiersin.org. Would you be interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic? Please let me know by clicking on the links below: YES – I would like to participate https://research-topic-management-app.frontiersin.org/manage/contributor-co… NO – I am unable to participate in this project https://research-topic-management-app.frontiersin.org/manage/contributor-de… Information on the Publishing Fees can be found on the following link: https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees. <https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees> Kindly note that we are committed to ensuring that fees do not become a barrier to scientific publishing and solutions are available. You are welcome to explore this on our fees page. If you have any questions or if you require any special considerations, please do let me know. I hope you consider contributing to this exciting project. Kind Regards, Ramesh Paudel Topic Editor, Cybersecurity and Privacy Section, Frontiers in Big Data

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New book: AI for Everyone? Critical Perspectives
by Pieter Verdegem 05 Oct '21

05 Oct '21

Verdegem, P. (ed.) 2021. AI for Everyone? Critical Perspectives. London: University of Westminster Press. 310 pages The book is published open access and available via: https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/e/10.16997/book55/ We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is debate that asks and answers fundamental questions about power. This book brings together critical interrogations of what constitutes AI, its impact and its inequalities in order to offer an analysis of what it means for AI to deliver benefits for everyone. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1, AI: Humans vs. Machines, presents critical perspectives on human-machine dualism. Part 2, Discourses and Myths About AI, excavates metaphors and policies to ask normative questions about what is ‘desirable’ AI and what conditions make this possible. Part 3, AI Power and Inequalities, discusses how the implementation of AI creates important challenges that urgently need to be addressed. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and regional contexts, this book offers a vital intervention on one of the most hyped concepts of our times. CHAPTERS: Introduction: Why We Need Critical Perspectives on AI Pieter Verdegem Artificial Intelligence (AI): When Humans and Machines Might Have to Coexist Andreas Kaplan Digital Humanism: Epistemological, Ontological and Praxiological Foundations Wolfgang Hofkirchner An Alternative Rationalisation of Creative AI by De-Familiarising Creativity: Towards an Intelligibility of Its Own Terms Jenna Ng Post-Humanism, Mutual Aid Dan McQuillan The Language Labyrinth: Constructive Critique on the Terminology Used in the AI Discourse Rainer Rehak AI Ethics Needs Good Data Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann The Social Reconfiguration of Artificial Intelligence: Utility and Feasibility James Steinhoff Creating the Technological Saviour: Discourses on AI in Europe and the Legitimation of Super Capitalism Benedetta Brevini AI Bugs and Failures: How and Why to Render AI-Algorithms More Human? Alkim Almila Akdag Salah Primed Prediction: A Critical Examination of the Consequences of Exclusion of the Ontological Now in AI Protocol Carrie O’Connell and Chad Van de Wiele Algorithmic Logic in Digital Capitalism Jernej A. Prodnik 'Not Ready for Prime Time': Biometrics and Biopolitics in the (Un)Making of California’s Facial Recognition Ban Asvatha Babu and Saif Shahin Beyond Mechanical Turk: The Work of Brazilians on Global AI Platforms Rafael Grohmann and Willian Fernandes Araújo Towards Data Justice Unionism? A Labour Perspective on AI Governance Lina Dencik The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW. This message and its attachments are private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and remove it and its attachments from your system.

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Job Alert: Oxford Associate Professor of AI & Society (social sciences)
by Victoria Nash 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

Dear AOIR friends, I wanted to bring to your attention that the Oxford Internet Institute and Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford are seeking to appoint an Associate Professor of AI & Society, in association with a Senior Research Fellowship at Wadham College. The successful candidate will conduct outstanding empirical research related to the ethics and social impact of AI, broadly construed, and will play an integral part in the activities of the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. This post is available from 1 March 2022, or as soon as possible thereafter. This is a permanent appointment (subject to initial probation). The position is open to candidates from a variety of social science disciplines, including political science, sociology, communications, public policy, anthropology, psychology, development or geography. The successful candidate will be expected to engage in innovative empirical research that will advance normative or ethical debate about the impacts of AI, machine learning and new information technologies, using quantitative or qualitative social science methods, and must be able to provide research-led teaching and supervision at the graduate level. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research expertise addresses public policy-relevant topics such as social injustice and inequality, barriers to information access, algorithmic bias and discrimination, and the role of diversity in the development and application of AI. Applications are particularly welcomed from women and black and minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts in Oxford. Further details are available on the University’s vacancies list<https://my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.display_form?p_c…>. The closing date is 19th October. If you have any questions, do feel free to reach out to me directly (victoria.nash(a)oii.ox.ac.uk<mailto:victoria.nash@oii.ox.ac.uk>). Warm wishes, Vicki Dr Victoria Nash Associate Professor & Senior Policy Fellow Director, Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford T: 01865 287231 Tw: @VickiNashOII Do note that as I juggle work and family life I may resort to working on evenings or weekends. Please don’t feel any pressure to respond out of usual working hours.

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ACM WSDM Cup Tasks Announced
by Ugur Kursuncu 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

WSDM Cup 2022 is a machine learning competition-style event co-located with the leading WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining) conference. Task Competitions Start: October 15, 2021 Task Competitions End: January 24, 2022 Winner Reports Submitted: February 15, 2022 WSDM Cup’22 Conference Event: February 21-25, 2022 We are excited to announce the following confirmed tasks for the WSDM Cup 2022. Task sponsor: IQIYI Task focus: User Retention Score Prediction Task abstract: iQIYI is the world's leading movie and video streaming platform, with nearly 8 billion hours spent on iQIYI app each month and over 500 million monthly active users <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_…>. It features highly popular original content, as well as a comprehensive library of other professionally-produced content and user-generated content. iQIYI app uses deep-learning AI algorithms and massive user data, to produce content that caters to various user tastes, and to deliver superior entertainment experience to them. User retention is a key indicator to measure the users' satisfaction. It uses a retention score for the next N days to evaluate the retention. For example, a user having retention score 3 for the next 7 days means this user would launch the iQIYI app in 3 separate days during the period. It is very challenging to predict the retention score. It not only depends on the individual, but also on the trends of the entertainment, e.g., the number of daily users fluctuates severely when some blockbuster original contents are released. The task’s goal is to predict user retention scores using deep models. ----- Task sponsor: Intel / Amazon Task focus: Temporal Link Prediction Task abstract: Real world datasets can often be expressed as graphs, with entities as nodes and interactions as edges. Examples include user-user interaction in social networks, user-item interactions in recommender systems, etc. Moreover, these graphs are often in practice temporal, with new edges coming in with timestamps. Contrary to link prediction which asks if an edge exists between two nodes on a partially observed graph, temporal link prediction asks if an edge will exist between two nodes within a given time span. It is more useful than traditional link prediction as one can then build multiple applications around the model, such as forecasting the demand of customers in E-commerce, or forecasting what event will happen in a social network, etc. We are expecting a single model that can handle two kinds of data simultaneously: a dynamic event graph with entities as nodes and events as edges, and a user-item graph with users and items as nodes and various interactions as edges. The task will be predicting whether an edge of a given type will exist between two given nodes before a given timestamp. ----- Task sponsor: University of Amsterdam / University of Massachusetts Amherst / Amazon Task focus: Cross-market Recommendation Task abstract: E-commerce companies often operate across markets; for instance Amazon has expanded their operations and sales to 18 markets (i.e. countries) around the globe. The cross-market recommendation concerns the problem of recommending relevant products to users in a target market (e.g., a resource-scarce market) by leveraging data from similar high-resource markets, e.g. using data from the U.S. market to improve recommendations in a target market. The key challenge, however, is that data, such as user interaction data with products (clicks, purchases, reviews), convey certain biases of the individual markets. Therefore, the algorithms trained on a source market are not necessarily effective in a different target market. Despite its significance, small progress has been made in cross-market recommendation, mainly due to a lack of experimental data for the researchers. In this WSDM Cup challenge, we provide user purchase and rating data on various markets, enriched with review data in different languages, with a considerable number of shared item subsets. The goal is to improve individual recommendation systems in these target markets by leveraging data from similar auxiliary markets. — Ugur Kursuncu, Ph.D. Publicity Co-Chair, WSDM 2022 Assistant Professor Georgia State University

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Updated 2-minutes on loading spreadsheets
by Stuart Shulman 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

Uploading Spreadsheets into DiscoverText (updated today) https://vimeo.com/622539257 Free web tool for all academics. Free training. Free advice. A better scientific collaboration framework. Better measurements. Better ML. No risk. No code. No R. No Python. Publish, do not perish in the weeds. Dr. Stuart ShulmanU.S. Soccer Federation C-Licensed Coach

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