David Casacuberta - Conclusions of the conference by CEPS Projectes Socials

Resetting social networks: how to use the conclusions from the ‘Digital Discrimination & Social Networks Conference’.

[text based on the conclusions by David Casacuberta]

Ten years ago we were at the same place, presenting the conclusions of another European project, El4EI : E-‐learning for E-‐Incorporation. At that time, the difficulty was to transfer the importance of Internet and social networks to the third sector, to show that there were a whole series of possibilities, of transformations, of actions and also a series of threats and issues to resolve. Ten years later, the situation has changed a lot and is has been marvellous to see at the ICUD conference the quantity of proposals, variety of groups and innovative approaches to this topic. If we could choose a term to cover the different offers that have been given here, and attach definitions to all this variety, I believe that it would be the idea of visibility and invisibility. Danah Boyd marked it from the beginning of the conference, commenting on how social networks, the web, are basically a mirror of the things that happen in the physical world: we can find all things good, bad or regular. The problem is for example not so much cyberbullying in itself, but the bullying that already existed before the digital networks. When we will have the semantic web we will have the semantic bullying, the big data will bring the big bullying and all these type of issues. At the same time, as Joan Pedregosa was commenting also in the introduction, the social networks amplify these phenomena, it gives them more force and renders invisible other aspects, often the most poignant. We may start, for example, at the origin of the World Wide Web: one of the first problems that appeared was racist speech and hate speech. But who were the first ones in finding potential for spreading problematic contents on the Internet? For example the neo-‐Nazi groups who took advantage of the lack of international legislation to promote revisionist texts, denying the Holocaust. The first things that started spreading a lot on the Internet, and to be

This material has been produced with the financial support of the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union. The contents of this material are the sole responsibility of its author and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission. Project code: JUST/2011/FRAC/AG/2638

discussed and that generated conflicts, were the websites of Ernst Zundel, with sensationalist arguments to deny the Holocaust. Furthermore the response, in general, is censorship, but actually it turns out to be counter-‐productive: the more a text wants to be censured, the more people are interested in it and the more it is promoted. If we pay attention to all the presentations during the two-‐day ICUD conference, we will see that, far from being solved, the problem has worsened. From the ‘simple’ texts of Holocaust denial we have come to all kinds of insults, threats, bullying and many more problems. The solution is not easy and I will try to address it briefly at the end. It turns out that it could be interesting to concentrate on the invisible things, since the visible things are already well known. I would like to remind some points that have been said about invisible or hidden discrimination. Danica Radovanovic, for example, has mentioned that the same web can be invisible for a teenager who believes that Facebook is the web and Google is used punctually to consult some things, and s/he is not

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A recurring subject has been that the victims wish to be invisible. It has been commented in more than one panel, that silence and silencing is often an answer to situations of bullying, to threats, etc. The result is that perpetrators gain strength under a mantel of invisibility. Facebook, Google and company are very unwilling to close problematic pages and only after a lot of pressure they decided to do so. We have heard in Gavan Titley's presentation, how the act of expressing oneself can render invisible the fact that an expression involves an action and can generate a series of problems. Following the same line of thought, we imagine that putting a text on the Internet is a neutral act and people do not think that it could have consequences. And, especially, we have seen how this applies to the mass media, as they can amplify the most harmful trends, attempts and insults, promoting them and giving them mass coverage. From this point of view, a peculiar interaction arises between the digital means and the means of the masses, and other ones that are helping in a very complex process.

Shanjay Sharma's has shown that beyond the explosions of hatred that we can observe in a more or less regular form on social networks, and that are covered regularly by the press, there is something hidden, this concealed discrimination is most worrying, and it has been defined as ‘ambient noise’. Many seemingly banal conversations in social networks are loaded with discrimination. It has been very interesting to see how this secret phenomenon can arise from the analysis of a simple hash tag like #notracist. I imagine that as these kinds of studies advance, we will find more and more phenomena and will render more visible a whole series of invisible issues and problems, which we currently do not discuss openly. Even though detecting these invisible processes is important, it is even better to propose solutions. We have seen at the ICUD conference some very interesting ones, which I will attempt to summarize. The first one and most important, which has been mentioned several times, is to admit that the problem is not in the technology, it is not due to the networks, but it surfaces there. If we manage to expel cyberbullying from twitter, the only thing that we will achieve is that cyberbullying will resurface in another place. Just with prohibition we are not going to solve anything. We need to change the mentalities of the people and not only the technologies. But when focusing on social networks we have to think from the inside what solutions can appear. A generic one, underlined by Dolors Reig, is the idea of a comprehensive education. The way of solving discrimination is training and forming everyone. It is for example not simply the responsibility of girls to not post inappropriate selfies online, but also to teach anyone, including boys, not to share and forward these types of content. David Dueñas's has shown us that it is complex to change the mentality of xenophobes, racists and homophobes… but it is much easier to address the person who, without reflection, forwards discriminatory content without engaging with the implications that it carries. Sometimes, if a person is made aware about the damage that s/he is going to cause to the persons who are ridiculed, it can be stopped. This is one effective intervention to address problems on social networks: implicating the individual.

Finally, I would like to dedicate some thoughts to the question about the future of social networks. What is going to happen and how can we prepare before they get more powerful? If we believe in the press, the important term just now is ‘Big Data’, the idea of this enormous quantity of information that can be processed and from which to obtain information. A while ago, sociologists defended in a study that they had discovered a very simple algorithm to detect, with a high probability, the sexual preferences of a person from his friends on Facebook. You could analyse the amount of friends that declared themselves heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals etc. and from there you could establish the sexuality of a person. It is not perfect and surely there will be better tricks, but every time it turns

out to be easier to define how we are and which are our preferences. Let's think about everything that Amazon knows about those who buy books online, or domestic appliances, music etc. The information that Amazon obtains from us is increasing every day. Danah Boyd has talked about the great invisible algorithms behind the big companies of Internet: Google, the system that Facebook uses to detect some inputs over others, the personalized online systems, the profiles that companies like Amazon have of us etc. These are spaces where we have no control and they are generating already problems of discrimination. My intuition is that these problems will increase. I believe that there are two big problems that deserve our immediate attention: The first one is the ostracism, which means, there is a whole invisible web that is not applying certain demographic patterns, contents, offers ... and it remains hidden to the online browsers. They are there, like the pages that have millions of visits, but remain unknown to the public eye. And behind these demographic studies there are, clearly, discriminatory processes. They bear certain type of individuals in mind and not others, because they do not fit with the commercial interests of a given company. Another problem is the bubble of filters. Let's suppose that I enter Amazon and decide to buy a Leni Riefenstahl movie about Nazi Germany. It is very ‘normal’ for Amazon to recommend to me “Mein Kampf”, “Holocaust lie” ... and a whole series of fascist material because the majority of people who have bought Riefenstahl's movie have done so. It is very easy in these systems that a person who starts taking following a curiosity to come upon more radical material on the same topic and finding much 4

stronger positions, which can lead to the adoption of a radical position. If one is a bit misogynous and enters misogynistic' forums he will discover that there are ‘many like him’ and find his thoughts and opinions reaffirmed, and even learn more extreme behaviours. It can be worse when the person is a teenager, still forming opinions and positions, who can end up believing that a certain opinion is the norm and thus acceptable, because the ‘whole world’ in the forum behaves in the same way. Online browsers promote this behaviour and the social networks promote it, because they tend to gather persons of the same type of interests for their own advantage. But here we have civil society and the third sector that can react and counteract to make a difference. As Danica Radovanovic said, it is an imperative that these systems are open source code, with free software, so we can all know how they work and be able to ask for reviews of these filters to render the hidden visible. Videos and details about the presentations can be found at: http://digitaldiscrimination.eu/conference/