THE INTERNET DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE
Recent Publications
Internet Democracy Initiative affiliates conduct research at the intersection of technology, media, and politics.
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November 2023
CHECK
Meg Heckman, Rahul Bhargavaa, and Emily Boardman Ndulue
This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughly 17,000 stories published online between August 2020 and April 2021 by news organizations we categorized along a binary axis of partisanship between Republican and Democrat. Our findings show that sexist, racialized coverage of Harris is most prevalent in news sources shared by mostly Republican voters. Coverage in news sources shared by registered Democratic voters, meanwhile, tended to treat Harris as a celebrity, often fixating on her wardrobe and personal life. We ponder implications for both gender equity in civic life and future feminist media scholarship.
September 2023
FIX
Avantika Velho, Pedro Cruz, David Banks-Richardson, Gabrielle Armin, Ying Zhang, Keisuke Inomura, and Katia Zolotovsky
Microbial plankton play a critical role in global biogeochemical cycling, and while a vast amount of genomics data has been collected from microbial communities throughout the ocean, there remains a gap in connecting this data to ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. One key question is how different genotypes influence an organism’s environmental impact? Here, we scientists and designers have collaborated to develop an interactive visual tool that helps to better understand the relationships between microbial ecosystems and global biogeochemical cycling.
May 2023
Adapting Transformer Language Models for Predictive Typing in Brain-Computer Interfaces
Shijia Liu and David A. Smith
Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are an important mode of alternative and augmentative communication for many people. Unlike keyboards, many BCI systems do not display even the 26 letters of English at one time, let alone all the symbols in more complex systems. Using language models to make character-level predictions, therefore, can greatly speed up BCI typing (Ghosh and Kristensson, 2017). While most existing BCI systems employ character n-gram models or no LM at all, this paper adapts several wordpiece-level Transformer LMs to make character predictions and evaluates them on typing tasks. GPT-2 fares best on clean text, but different LMs react differently to noisy histories. We further analyze the effect of character positions in a word and context lengths.
April 2023
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous, but little attention has been paid to how they may incorporate dark patterns despite consumer protections and privacy concerns arising from their unique access to intimate spaces and always-on capabilities. This paper conducts a systematic investigation of dark patterns in 57 popular, diverse smart home devices. We update manual interaction and annotation methods for the IoT context, then analyze dark pattern frequency across device types, manufacturers, and interaction modalities. We find that dark patterns are pervasive in IoT experiences, but manifest in diverse ways across device traits. Speakers, doorbells, and camera devices contain the most dark patterns, with manufacturers of such devices (Amazon and Google) having the most dark patterns compared to other vendors. We investigate how this distribution impacts the potential for consumer exposure to dark patterns, discuss broader implications for key stakeholders like designers and regulators, and identify opportunities for future dark patterns study..
April 2023
Propaganda Política Pagada: Exploring U.S. Political Facebook Ads en Español
Bruno Coelho, Tobias Lauinger, Laura Edelson, Ian Goldstein, and Damon McCoy
In 2021, the U.S. Hispanic population totaled 62.5 million people, 68% of whom spoke Spanish in their homes. To date, it is unclear which political advertisers address this audience in their preferred language, and whether they do so differently than for English-speaking audiences. In this work, we study differences between political Facebook ads in English and Spanish during 2020, the latest U.S. presidential election. Political advertisers spent $ 1.48 B in English, but only $ 28.8 M in Spanish, disproportionately little compared to the share of Spanish speakers in the population. We further find a lower proportion of election-related advertisers (which additionally are more liberal-leaning than in the English set), and a higher proportion of government agencies in the set of Spanish ads. We perform multilingual topic classification, finding that the most common ad topics in English were also present in Spanish, but to a different extent, and with a different composition of advertisers. Thus, Spanish speakers are served different types of ads from different types of advertisers than English speakers, and in lower amounts; these results raise the question of whether political communication through Facebook ads may be inequitable and effectively disadvantaging the sizeable minority of Spanish speakers in the U.S. population.
“The Ends of Artificial Intelligence” in The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences
The powers and possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) are boundless, as computer scientists and philosophers formalize novel cognitive and moral capabilities, progressively expanding the boundaries of our imaginations. This monumental technological revolution will disrupt the global order and social hierarchies, and generate winners and losers among those who steer the telos of AI to either protect vested interests or uphold social justice. Our greatest challenge as a species in wielding—or yielding to—these new intelligent systems will be to stipulate the establishment of ethical governance structures which prioritize and protect freedom and fairness. What’s at stake is nothing less than the future of humanity—one in which software code and ethical codes fight for supremacy to shape our lives.