Vint Cerf: When I joined the company, Larry and Eric and Sergey said to me, “What title do you want?” And I said, “How about Archduke?” And they said, “You know, the previous Archduke was Ferdinand, and he was assassinated in 1914 and it started World War One. Why don’t you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?” When people ask me about this, I tell them I’m Geek Orthodox, because my intent is to spread the internet religion. The idea here is that people should be able to get access to information and collaborate with each other on a global scale. 

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor, and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society, and how society in turn is shaping the web. Today my guest is Vinton Cerf, who you just heard talking about taking on a leadership role at Google, where he contributes to global policy development and the continued standardization and spread of the internet. 

Vint is widely recognized as one of the fathers of the internet. He’s the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is a former member of the U.S. National Science Board and a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Technology, and the ACM Turing Award. Vint, thank you so very much for joining us.

Vint Cerf: Well thanks so much for inviting me to join the show, Noshir. This is a topic dear to my heart, which is, you know, what’s happening to the internet and the World Wide Web and how is it affecting our society? So let’s have a look at that.

Noshir Contractor: Absolutely. So let’s take us back to the early mid-70s, when you were working first as a PhD student at UCLA and then went on to be a faculty member at Stanford coming up with a design of something called the TCP/IP protocol. And you did this in collaboration with Bob Kahn. What do you think was remarkable about that moment, in coming up with a quote-unquote protocol? 

Vint Cerf: This is sort of like the question that says, describe the universe in 25 words or less, give three examples. First of all, the work at UCLA on the ARPANET was commissioned because the Defense Department was spending money on research and artificial intelligence way back then in the mid- to late-60s for as many as a dozen universities. Everybody kept asking for new computers every year. And ARPA said, “We can’t afford that, so we’re going to build a network and you can all share your computing resources.” So we built the ARPANET first as a resource sharing system and second as a test of a theory that packet switching would be suitable for computer communication. It worked extremely well. And somewhere around 1971, one of our colleagues at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Ray Tomlinson, came up with networked electronic mail. So we were early adopters of that technology. Bob Kahn came to visit me at my lab at Stanford in the spring of 73. He had worked on and been very key to the architecture of the ARPANET project. He then went to ARPA, and began working on a problem related to command and control. And that is, how do I use computers in that application? And of course, immediately recognized that in order for this to work, the computers would have to be in mobile vehicles and ships at sea and in aircrafts, in addition to fixed installations. So Bob shows up and he says, I’ve already started working on a mobile packet radio network and the packet satellite network, and we’ve already got the ARPANET. How are we going to hook them all together to make it all look uniform so that any computer on any network can talk to any other computer on any other network?  And within a period of about six months, we came up with a strategy for doing that. So by January of 1974, I was already working with a team of graduate students at Stanford to develop a detailed specification of the TCP protocol. And then by 1983, January of 83, we were able to turn the entire shebang on. So the internet begins operation on January 1 1983.

Noshir Contractor: The goal of the protocols that you’re describing was to provide interconnectivity between all kinds of networks, and these networks of networks came to be called as the internet as we now know it. Arguably a second-most famous protocol, besides TCP/IP, on the web is the HTTP protocol that we use. Why do you think that some of these protocols succeed and take off the way they did while others might be technically sound, but are unable to take off as much?

Vint Cerf: Well, several things influence those outcomes. The first thing is that Bob and I gave away the protocols. We basically published freely. Now others were pursuing similar ideas. But those were not open source, whereas TCP/IP was fully open, which led, of course, to commercial availability of routers executing the IP and the BGP, and the other protocols that make the Internet work. So Tim, emulating this release mechanism in December of 1991, announced the World Wide Web, released the protocols freely, and encouraged people to make use of them. The early browsers including Tim’s and others, like Netscape Communications, had property that you could ask the browser to show what the HTML source code was that produced the web page that you were looking at. So that meant you could copy other people’s web pages and change them and explore and so on. This is super important from the standpoint of learning from other people. So there weren’t classes in webmasters. They were aggregations of people who were trying these things out and sharing what they knew and taking advantage of seeing what other people had done freely.

Noshir Contractor: Your next foray after DARPA was at MCI Mail. One of the things that I think I heard you say, and I just want you to clarify, is that the original idea of connecting these computers was to share computing resources and that email messaging was an afterthought that came about in that network.

Vint Cerf: That’s correct. People were leaving messages for each other on the same machine. And so the next step is to be able to leave messages for someone on a different machine that’s part of the same network. And so that’s what led to the internet or ARPANET email. So we all made heavy use of that plus remote access to the time sharing systems, terminal access, and also file transfers to move data back and forth. I was invited to come to MCI and build an electronic mail service for them. That was late 1982. Already, there existed email services. CompuServe, for example, had one, and I think General Electric had one. So we tried very hard to put the MCI Mail email system into a place where it invited interaction with other email services and other communication services. So we introduced into MCI Mail the ability to cause the email to be printed and mailed or printed and FedExed or sent through Telex, which is of course a 19th century, you know, invention. And eventually, we got it to send faxes, as well. And so I was very proud of the fact that we were able to design a system that was that general in order to bring people into the email world even before they had that capability.

Noshir Contractor: And at that time, giving access from MCI Mail to print, for example, which today might seem antiquated, must have been at least a way of getting some people into the email space.

Vint Cerf: That’s right. And, you know, there are situations where people want to deliver hardcopy. So MCI Mail is retired now. So I don’t have that ability anymore, now I still have to print things out and put them in envelopes and post them myself. And I’m kind of missing the capability that we invented 40 years ago.

Noshir Contractor: So now we come into the 21st century. You’ve been at Google as the Chief Internet Evangelist. I’ve heard of evangelists in other areas, such as religion, but you were the first person I heard of who had taken that title at a tech company.

Vint Cerf: It was not a title that I asked for. When I joined the company, Larry and Eric and Sergey said to me, “What title do you want?” And I said, “How about Archduke?” You know, that sounded like a fantastic title. And they said, “You know, the previous Archduke was Ferdinand, and he was assassinated in 1914 and it started World War One. Why don’t you be our Chief Internet Evangelist?” And I said, “Okay, I can do that.” When people asked me about this, I tell them I’m Geek Orthodox because my intent is to spread the internet religion. The idea here is that people should be able to get access to information, they should be able to find it, and share it, and make use of it, and collaborate with each other on a global scale. And of course, that’s what internet and some of its applications tried to do. And one of those applications, of course, is the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee introduced in late 1991. And he did so by putting another layer of protocol, HTTP, which you referenced earlier, on top of TCP/IP. It created a capability that had not existed before, except perhaps in the form of the online system that Douglas Engelbart developed in the mid 1960s. Tim certainly augmented much of that with video and audio as well as formatted text and imagery. It was an idea ready for its time, because now we see web pages in the billions and billions of users as well.

Noshir Contractor: As you worked now in this new role, one of the things that you have been at the forefront of is trying to help us get ready for the time when everything will have its own unique internet address. And a lot of that has now been referred to as the Internet of Things and the advent of the Internet Protocol version 6. 

Vint Cerf: When Bob and I did the original design, we actually asked ourselves, you know, how much address space should we plan for? And we did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations. So we allocated eight bits of address space for networks, which would allow for up to 256 networks. Then, very quickly, as the Ethernet took off as a commercial product, and as other networks started to emerge, the consumption of address space became very rapid. So we had to redesign the interpretation of the 32-bit address space. By 1992, it became very clear that we were going to run out of that 32-bit address space no matter how we sliced it up. So the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is the primary standards body for internet standards, devoted about four years of intense debate over what new version of the Internet Protocol should be adopted. And they ended up with something we now call IP version 6. So it had 128 bits of address space. It’s 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses, and I’m hoping we won’t run out until after I’m dead. Then it’s somebody else’s problem. 1996 is when the standardization happened. And I thought everybody would instantly recognize the intelligence value of switching over quickly to the larger address space, so we wouldn’t end up with a terrible transition problem. Well, unfortunately, 1996 was exactly in the middle of the dot boom. And so everybody was too busy throwing money at anything that looked like it had something to do with internet. And nobody had run out of IPv4 address space yet. And so there was no real motivation to implement it. And so here we are today, in 2021, when only about on the average 30 percent of the possible parties have IPv6 implemented. The Internet of Things is going to consume address space like crazy. Already, we have people who have anywhere from 10 to 50 devices at home that are consuming IP address space. So we’re going to need a lot more than can be provided by IP version 4.

Noshir Contractor: What would you suggest are some of the most compelling reasons why the world needs to switch over ASAP to IP 6?

Vint Cerf: If a device needs to communicate on the internet, it does need an IP address. I mean, that’s sort of a given. We’re starting to see a proliferation of programmable devices, including appliances, you know, things like the refrigerator and the microwave, and all these other things are increasingly driven by software. And the utility of having them online is that they can be serviced online, new programming can be provided, I mean, take a Tesla car as an example. It is, essentially, a computer on wheels. So making it do new things is a matter of downloading new software. That will be true for many, many devices. So having IP addresses is really a critical part of being able to interact, download new software, correct bugs, provide status information. One of the things that the pandemic has forced us to do is to explore remote medicine, because the doctors are saying “Don’t come into the office.” Well, that’s not a very satisfactory situation if they don’t have information about your blood pressure, and you know, your pulse rate and all the other things that might be important. So you can see medical instruments, and in fact, your mobiles becoming remote medicine devices, but they will need internet access in order to deliver the result to the doctor who can then evaluate it. So I’m anticipating that healthcare, in addition to security, in addition to device appliances and manufacturing plants, are all going to require internet address space in order to be part of this online environment.

Noshir Contractor: I’m also taken back to the comment you made about how the web was invented on the backbone of the internet in some ways. How do you see the relationship, symbiotic or otherwise, between the internet and the web?

Vint Cerf: Well, the web wouldn’t exist, I don’t think, without the internet, and the internet wouldn’t be nearly as useful without the web. And in fact, there’s one other technology that merits mention here. In 2007, you’ll recall that the iPhone was introduced by Apple. The project to develop a handheld mobile telephone was started in 1973. And that’s the same year that Bob and I started working on the internet. And then these two technologies kind of went along in parallel, you know, not interacting, particularly until Steve Jobs introduces a mobile telephone that is full up computing capability, has the ability to access the World Wide Web and the internet in addition to having a camera, and other sensors on board, I mean, the most astonishing and rich collection of enabling technology in a handheld device. And the result was that a mobile made the internet more accessible because you could get to it wherever you could get a mobile signal. The internet and the World Wide Web, these two technologies were mutually reinforcing. 

Noshir Contractor: Fascinating. You spoke a little bit about how the mobile phone increased the accessibility of the web to everyone. I want to talk about another aspect of accessibility. You and your wife Sigrid both had to deal with hearing deficiencies. You’ve become a leading advocate of accessibility. What grade would you give accessibility today in terms of the internet and the web?

Vint Cerf: Well, with a few exceptions, mostly C-minus, but to be fair, making things accessible for such a broad range of disabilities is hard. My biggest concern, honestly, is that too few people who are making applications in the web or on the Internet, are familiar with methods for making things accessible. If they don’t have real experience with those disabilities and the technologies to assist them, then their intuitions may not drive satisfactory design. And if I could add one other statistic, many people who argue in favor of making things accessible will quote a statistic that says there are a billion people in the world with disability of one kind or another, leaving you with the impression that investment in accessibility will help one eighth of the world’s population. What they’ve left out of that calculus is that every piece of assistive technology helps people who need to communicate with people with a disability. So this is an important investment for everyone in the world, not just for people who happen to have a specific disability need.

Noshir Contractor: That’s a very fair point. One of the things that you have recently raised concerns about are the risks of digital obsolescence. Tell us a little bit about what has made that a serious concern for us.

Vint Cerf: Well, there are several elements to this concern. I’ve been calling it a digital Dark Age. Here’s the problem: Digital media are not known to have significant lifetimes. You know, you think about a DVD, three-and-a-half inch floppy. You know you don’t have readers to read them anymore. That’s what triggers my big concern about digital preservation is that we will have a big pile of useless bits. Think of a spreadsheet or think of a video game. The software that makes those bits useful may not run on operating systems of the day 100 years from now or even 10 years from now. And things that you thought were important and should be of legacy interest to our descendants may not be accessible to them, because we didn’t take into account how to assure the longevity of interpretation of digital content.

Noshir Contractor: So you’re implying that we may have better records, going back centuries of materials that were on paper than we might have within the 20th and the 21st century.

Vint Cerf: That is correct. And if you think about it, there are no digital media that have anything close to the lifetime of even today’s crappy wood pulp paper, let alone the much higher quality rag content paper. And of course, if you want to go back further, you go to vellum, which is goatskin or calfskin, or lambskin or something. And that stuff lasts a couple of 1000 years. Now, I’m not proposing that we should switch to some kind of vellum, you know, calf-skin digital medium. But I do think a notion of digital vellum is important. And what that means is that whatever the medium is, and assuming that we’ve copied things into new media in order to provide longevity of the bits, that same digital vellum needs to have a software environment that makes it possible to correctly interpret content. 

Noshir Contractor: So alongside being a visionary of what happens to the internet and the web and digital content over time, you’ve also been a champion of looking at what happens to the internet and web over space. And here you are today consulting with NASA and being a visionary on an interplanetary network. Tell us about the challenges that that faces and the opportunities it presents as we decide to go back to the moon and on to Mars?

Vint Cerf: Well, first of all, I was so fortunate as a high school student to go to work for a company called Rocketdyne, which is part of what was then called North American Aviation. I ended up working on the statistical analysis of the F1 engines, which formed the booster phase for the Apollo spacecraft, the Saturn rocket in particular. So I had this early introduction, and considered it an absolute delight to find it later in life an opportunity to reengage. So when the Pathfinder landed on Mars in 1997, after 20 years of unsuccessful Mars landings, I flew out to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to meet with the team that was working on packet communications in space. And we sat around the table, asking ourselves, what should we be doing now that will be needed 25 years from now? And we concluded that we should think about how to design and build an interplanetary extension of the internet. And over the ensuing 23 years or so, we refined and standardized those protocols. They are in operation on the International Space Station. We have prototype software running on Mars since 2004 in order to support many of the Mars landers. And we anticipate application of these protocols in the Artemis and Gateway missions. There’s nothing magic about this. And it’s not necessarily visionary, it is simply recognizing that there will be a real need. The thing that’s the most interesting though is the question of how does this evolve in such a way that the commercialization of space happens? We’re asking questions like, well, gee, what’s the legal structure that should apply to this? Can people own anything in space? Can you buy an asteroid or claim an asteroid? And we don’t have answers to these questions yet. But we need to get them before they become pressing. 

Noshir Contractor: So amongst the challenges, obviously, for this interplanetary internet, is that there’s really long distances amongst these planets, and heavenly bodies. That clearly provides challenges not just for the transfer of data, but for voice interaction, which by definition would then become largely asynchronous. 

Vint Cerf: The standardized protocols for interplanetary internet are designed to take into account variable and lengthy delay as well as disruption. And that’s why we were forced to go design a whole new suite of interplanetary communication protocols to take these problems into account. So we have variably delayed and disrupted communication, which is a parametric space outside of the space in which the TCP/IP protocols were designed. But that’s exactly why this has been such an interesting exploration, because it’s Terra Incognita to sort of mess up a metaphor. So at this point, I’m very confident that we will see this emerge. The consultative committee for space data systems, which is an international organization made up of all the spacefaring nations, has already engaged in standardization, along with the Internet Engineering Task Force. So for me, this is the beginning of another adventure into the solar system. Now, we’ve even started thinking about interstellar communication.

Noshir Contractor: Well, what a tour we’ve had today from the start of the TCP/IP protocols, and here we are talking about interplanetary internet and the relationship and interdependencies between the internet and the web overall. Thank you so much, again, Vint for sharing your thoughts and your visions with us about all of this.

Vint Cerf: Your listeners will have to decide how to distinguish hallucination from vision. Hopefully I’ve succeeded. I always enjoy these chats. I really appreciate the invitation to join you. And of course, I’m eager to hear from your listeners if they have ideas that they’d like to pursue. 

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today, whether you are here on earth or via the interplanetary internet, in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

 

David Lazer: Facebook has this large pile of things it could show you. It chooses some and not others. If we’re trying to characterize the global emergent tendencies of those social algorithms in promoting some content versus others, what are those kinds of tendencies? On this new observatory, the objective of this is to create a large panel of subjects where we’ll both monitor their online behaviors as well as the behaviors of the platforms with which they are engaged.

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor, and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society, and how society in turn is shaping the web. Today, my guest is David Lazer, who you just heard talk about an effort he’s leading, funded by the National Science Foundation, to build an observatory to study online human behavior as well as the algorithmic strategies of social media platforms. 

David is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He’s among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation, with some of the most highly cited papers. His research, published in journals such as Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has received extensive coverage in the media. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Welcome, David.

David Lazer:  Thank you for having me, Noshir. It’s delightful to be here. 

Noshir Contractor: I want to start by trying to trace the ways in which you started out as a political scientist and then got interested in issues related to the web. 

David Lazer: Well, I was really interested in the role that the web and related technologies played in our political system and in how the government works. In the early years, I was interested in the notion that there were transformational effects of network technologies on both the organization of government – that is how it ran at odds with the hierarchical structures of government – but also could change the relationship between government and citizens. With colleagues, we did a number of online experiments, for example, of having citizen town halls where citizens met with their members of Congress online. This was back in 2006. These highlighted the potential for raising up the discourse about politics between citizens and their representatives. That was where we started or where I started, was thinking about how government could be rewired because of the web and related technologies.

Noshir Contractor: People in general, at the time, were still excited about the web, and all the potential good it could do.

David Lazer: I still actually have some fair degree of optimism. There was a 2018 session that Harvard was holding for all the newly elected members of Congress in 2018. And we gave literally every sitting member of Congress a copy of our book on the potential of the internet to change their relationships with their constituents in positive ways. 

Noshir Contractor: I imagine you’re talking about the book Politics with the People: Building Directly Representative Democracy that you published along with your co authors in 2018. 

David Lazer: It was explicitly a book about the potential transformation of our democracy. We did these experiments with constituents meeting with members of Congress, and they were full-blown, randomized, control treatment experiments, and so we could really make robust scientific inferences about the impact that these kinds of discussions had on individuals.

Noshir Contractor: For those who are uninitiated, what does an online experiment in this context look like? 

David Lazer: In these experiments with members of Congress, we used a survey firm to recruit a sample of people who said that they were willing to participate in an online discussion. And what the actual session was was a member of Congress having a discussion with them around a hot button issue, immigration. And we then randomly assigned people to participate or not participate. Comparing the people who participated in the sessions versus the people who didn’t, people who participated in the sessions did have a sort of shift in the direction of their members. And they were also more likely subsequently to vote. So we were able to look at voter data, and to see who voted and who didn’t vote. These are sort of administrative data that are generally available. The critical flavor here is we can actually take people from around the world and put them in the same virtual room, and then make that room structured in a way that enables certain kinds of communications, disables other kinds of communications. So in a sense, the web is the ultimate laboratory for studying human interaction, because it’s so malleable, and because so much of the world is readily accessible wherever they are. 

Noshir Contractor: And that web is a treasure trove both in terms of having digital traces, but as you point out now, also in providing a platform to collect data from individuals. 

David Lazer: One of my favorite quotes from one of the citizens coming out of it was, “Huh, policy is a lot more complicated than I thought it was.” Which is certainly the truth. I think that these sessions made me feel quite proud of our democracy and what our democracy could be. And so part of our commitment was to figure out how to translate those findings into actual democratic practice. And we actually wrote up a report, a guide on how politicians should and could use the web to support deliberative democracy. We’ve talked to politicians about this, to all the big tech companies. We did a speaking tour in Silicon Valley to talk about the role that these platforms could play in enabling democracy and not just disabling democracy.

Noshir Contractor: In addition to your own work in online platforms, you’ve actually helped develop platforms for other scientists to be able to conduct research. Talk a little bit about Volunteer Science and what hopes you have for that moving forward. 

David Lazer: So Volunteer Science is a platform we started building around 10 years ago. There are a lot of startup costs to doing an experiment. So you have to build all that infrastructure and so on, then you run your experiment, and then you stop running your experiment, and then it just sort of decays, it’s not replicable, or it’s expensive to replicate. And so the objective with volunteer science was to make it easier for experimenters to get experiments up and running quickly. The platform carries a lot of the weight. It allows you to rapidly instantiate versions of your experiment. So it basically lowers the startup costs of running an experiment quite a lot, and as well as the management costs of running an experiment as well as the management costs of running an experiment. And of course, you can also then recruit samples from around the world. We’ve done data collection where we’re trying to do the same kind of data collection for people who are participating from India and South America and North America. And so we’re able to recruit much, much more interesting and diverse samples, as well. These screens are almost literally like windows into people’s lives. And we can literally reach through those windows and say, “Please, participate in, in this experiment with us, help out science, volunteer for science.” And we get on the order of 100,000 people a year who come and volunteer to participate as subjects. 

Noshir Contractor: And you have spent a lot of time and been amongst the leading scholars looking at the use of big data to understand human behavior. Tell us about the article in 2014 in Science where you critique the Google Flu Trends. So tell us what the Google Flu Trends was and then how you critiqued it. 

David Lazer: So Google Flu Trends was a landmark paper published in Nature that examined the relationship between searches for the flu and prevalence of the flu. And in particular, it was aggregating flu related searches, or things that I should note are correlated with the prevalence of the flu. Being used at the time, was nowcasting, the idea that standard methods for evaluating prevalence of the flu involve a multiple week lag of collecting all the data, aggregating it, and then looking at how many cases there were two weeks ago. When a contagious disease is spreading, you’d like to know when and where it’s spiking, because that can direct both preventive measures, as well as measures that will mitigate the harm, like, you know, surge of capacity in hospitals and the like. And so the Nature paper was, I think, it asserted the fact that you could do this all much faster. It offered a method to do that by saying we have tons of searches on Google, and we can see how they correlate with the prevalence of the flu in the U.S. 

Noshir Contractor: So the assumption here is that when a flu is breaking out, people will go on the web and search for terms that are relevant to the flu like “fever.” And that list of search queries is then raw data that they put into a model to make a prediction about when and where the flu is spiking.

David Lazer: Exactly. Although, they looked at all search queries, including ones that were clearly not related to the flu, and then fit them to flu prevalence. Then what happened was it repeatedly stopped working well. You know, high school basketball turned out to be predictive of flu prevalence. Well, it’s because high school basketball has its peak of its season apparently at what is typically roughly the peak of the flu season. They said they looked at some and weeded them out by hand, which is not best methods. There was an offseason flu, I think was it H1N1 if I’m remembering correctly, that it then did very badly at predicting, and partly it’s because they had built something that was partially flu predictor and partially winter predictor. And so what we were doing was, in our critique that appeared in 2014, was not to sort of discredit the whole notion of what was being done in that Google Flu Trends paper, but to say that there are ways that if you’re not careful, that big data will lead you in the wrong places. And then in a follow up paper we proposed a new method, which involved what we called human computation, which involved humans looking at some of the search terms. Because we’re, humans are much better at interpreting what the intent was when someone searched, like, why did they search for this? Oh, I bet it’s because they were sick, right. And so we devised this sort of thing for human coders to come up with an evaluation like that. We were then able to fit it to a sample of people who had agreed to have their search terms evaluated. And we asked them whether they had the flu, and we were able to predict whether individuals had the flu, and then aggregate that upwards, nationally, and that showed a very different kind of methodology that in part leveraged the human interpretive abilities, in addition to the big data component. 

Noshir Contractor: So you got some ground truth data by actually collecting the search queries from the same individuals who then reported, whether they had the flu or not.

David Lazer: That’s right. Also the other thing we saw was that there are – and this is not shocking, but – there are real differences in how people search. And so we found, for example, very sizable gender differences in search tendencies. Women in our sample actually had higher levels of searching about the flu before flu season. And then when there was flu in the household, their search level didn’t go up that much. Men, on the other hand, had a baseline level of searching for flu information that was pretty darn close to zero, and then they’d freak out online when they had symptoms. And so what we’re really finding out when we look at these kinds of search queries, is how often men have the flu. Now, that actually may be fairly predictive of how often the population has the flu. There’s some perverted element to that in terms of where we’re getting signal. That’s obviously a more general concern in the social sciences is that who’s on the web, how much, from where is, is not representative of the general population. And even if it were, their behaviors may not be because there may be these very differentiated ways that those behaviors manifest.

Noshir Contractor: And of course, today, during the pandemic, we have really hastened and become much more focused on being able to get these data in as close to real time as possible so that the policies can be responsive to those. I want to switch our attention from pandemics to infodemics. Talk to us a little bit about what got you excited or intrigued or interested, or concerned about fake news? 

David Lazer: I was particularly concerned, as many people were after the election of 2016 in the United States, because it felt like there was a real breakdown in our information ecosystem. And so with a number of collaborators, we put on a major conference in February 2017 on the science of fake news. There were psychologists looking at this, there were political scientists looking at this, there were computer scientists looking at this. But rarely do they connect outside of their disciplinary silos. And we pulled together all the speakers from that conference, and out of that came a 2018 paper that appeared in Science, titled “The science of fake news,” and it was putting together a multidisciplinary perspective on misinformation and fake news. Fake news is a very narrow and specific thing, but misinformation is the more general thing. 

Noshir Contractor: Can you point to some insights that might not have been gleaned in “The science of fake news” were it not for having an interdisciplinary take on it.

David Lazer: I’ll point to another paper of mine from 2019 that also appeared in Science that examined the prevalence of fake news on Twitter. That paper was a collaboration among three computer scientists, a cognitive psychologist, and myself, a political scientist by training. From the social science perspective, it involved thinking about how do we build a high quality sample? So we said, “Well, we really care about humans.” And so how do we develop a large sample of humans? And the way we did that was we built these computational methods to disambiguate and match the Twitter data to voter data. And then we were able to then computationally extract from Twitter the prevalence of fake news as well as make certain inferences about what people were exposed to. There’s no way that just a team of social scientists could have done this. But also, there’s no way that team of computer scientists would have done it either. It required, I think, really the best elements of computer science and, and the social sciences.

Noshir Contractor: That’s an excellent example of why web science calls itself an interdiscipline, because it transcends specific disciplines that contribute to it. I want to touch on some of the recent efforts that you’ve just launched with a major grant from the National Science Foundation that picks up some of your earlier work back from 2013 on issues such as algorithmic auditing and online personalization. So, to begin with, what do you mean by algorithmic auditing?

David Lazer: So much of what we see on the web is mediated by platforms. You know, Facebook has this large pile of things it could show you. It chooses some and not others. And so what we really have are these computational curators. So Facebook is looking at your Facebook friends and saying, you know, that looks awfully boring, we’re not going to show it to you. You know, typically, we’ve described that curation process as being algorithmic. And really, it’s something that I’ve called and others have called the social algorithm. It’s this interplay of humans and computers that results in emergent behaviors in terms of what you see and what you don’t see. These algorithms are predictive models. We’re trying to optimize on some metrics. And that metric might be something like, what gets you to click on something? Because basically, what platforms are able to do is translate your time on platform into profits in various ways. And so the question when we talk about algorithmic bias – and this is a phrase that manifests not just about the web, but like everything from criminal justice to housing to credit decisions, and so on – if we’re trying to characterize the global emergent tendencies of those social algorithms in promoting some content versus others, what are those kinds of tendencies? And what are the kinds of patterns? So for example, to what extent do we see personalization? Like, if you’re searching for something on Google, do you see the same thing as I do? And the answer is, actually, generally you do. One of the things that Google does do is that they will geo locate some of your searches. If I search for pizza, it will show pizzas around Boston. It doesn’t do it with politics. So like, if you’re looking at my for my member of Congress, Google doesn’t geolocate that. So it’s making decisions as to how to treat different kinds of information, different kinds of queries. And there’s also a question of, like, what kinds of sources Google promotes. Do they promote misinformation sources? But then we could think of, does social media, we’re looking at Facebook, tend to promote more emotional content? Or does it tend to demote civic content. So we can imagine, like, auditing a platform like Facebook in terms of understanding what content it systematically promotes or demotes. So in any case, on this new observatory, the objective of this is to create a large panel of subjects, a very large panel of people of 10s of 1000s, where we’ll both monitor, all with consent, their, online behaviors, as well as the behaviors of the platforms with which they are engaged. And in that way, we’ll be able to get more of a handle on these algorithmic structures that are so, so very important in modern day society.

Noshir Contractor: So tell us what you expect you will be able to do once you have this web observatory up and running. What are the kinds of questions that you will be able to answer more definitively than we are able to do today?

David Lazer: I should note that this is really a communal resource. It’s not just a resource for me and my collaborators. The objective will be to set up an infrastructure that provides access to these data – analytic access – while guarding the security and privacy of people who are participating in it. And so the objective then is to understand everything from what kinds of content do different platforms promote? You know, do we see higher quality or lower quality information being promoted? Do we see biases in terms of what’s promoted? Do we see certain demographics being targeted? So really trying to understand how people get information, the role that the platforms play, and how the platforms play together. Our objective is to have a picture of the emergent and evolving web and people’s behaviors on the web.

Noshir Contractor: Wow, what a tour de force we have gone through today, going back to you being amongst the early people to see how web could change politics and journeyed all the way to now setting up this communal good as an observatory for studying online human and platform behavior, and as you pointed out, not just a single platform, but the ecosystem of platforms as they all interact with one another. David, such a pleasure to have you as my guest on this 30th episode of Untangling the Web. I look forward to continuing to see the research that comes out of this observatory and all of your other very exciting initiatives. And so thanks again very much for joining us today.

David Lazer: Noshir, it’s been a pleasure and an honor speaking with you.

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today, provided they are not demoted by the algorithms, in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

 

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Mark Zuckerberg, you know, the picture is where he’s focused. It has a lot to do with the vision that Google has, that Microsoft has, that Amazon has, that Apple has, to some degree. They are all in a race to become what I had called in my book “the operating system of our lives.” If any of these companies become dominant, that kind of concentration of power should make us all worried deeply.

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society, in turn, is shaping the web. 

My guest today is Siva Vaidhyanathan, who you just heard talking about how big tech companies have expanded to serve a much bigger purpose in our lives than they originally did.

Siva is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. The Center publishes the Virginia Quarterly Review and produces several podcasts including Democracy in Danger, which is now in its third season. Siva   is the author of The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry), published by University of California Press in 2011, as well as Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, first published by Oxford in 2018. He has written several other books, has also appeared in several documentary films, and written for many major periodicals. He is currently a regular columnist for The Guardian. In 2012, he was a keynote speaker at the annual ACM Web Science Conference. Welcome, Siva.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Oh, thank you, Nosh. It’s really good to reconnect with you and to be part of this conversation.

Noshir Contractor: Well, thank you again for joining us. It’s been a while since you connected and presented your work, back in 2012, to the ACM Web Science Conference, and that happened to be shortly after the publication of the book The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). In retrospect, 10 years later, that was pretty prescient. Tell us what got you interested in writing this book and what prompted you to use the phrase “the Googlization of everything.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan: You might remember back in 2004, there were pretty big headlines about Google’s effort to scan in the entire collection of the University of Michigan library and substantial portions of, like, six other libraries, including the Harvard’s library and Oxford’s library and Stanford’s library. 

Noshir Contractor: Yes. 

Siva Vaidhyanathan: That was the early version of what ultimately became Google Books. At that moment, Google was six years old. Google had been around for less time than Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had been married, and that didn’t last. And all of these libraries and major universities around the world were saying, by all means, take control of how we will encounter and discover centuries of knowledge and centuries of culture, and I thought this was bizarre, because remember, Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And that’s a lovely mission statement for Oxford University or for Harvard University or the University of Michigan. Why were those libraries not just outsourcing this project, but yielding control to a commercial service which violated, from my point of view, all of the ethics and norms and values of librarianship? There were going to be privacy issues, copyright issues. Now, like everybody else in 2004, I loved Google, I used Google constantly. But of course we all were learning quickly that there are biases built into the search process by virtue of the record of us using the search service, but also the algorithmic choices that Google’s engineers had made along the way and were constantly tweaking. This was going to be an opaque system, as every corporate system is. It was going to be without accountability. It was going to have tremendous power over what we think is true and beautiful and good. And I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s figure out what values we would want in a global digital library,” and, if so, ask ourselves, is Google the right agent? It started out of a conversation with librarians, who were immediately appalled by the fact that their bosses had signed these one-sided contracts. So the other question was, like, who knows what’s going to happen to Google? Why would you put this impressive, bold vision for the organization of the world’s knowledge on a company so young, so inexperienced, so locked in itself, so arrogant, when you have thousands of trained librarians and millions, maybe billions of dollars, if you collectively pursued a project. So I looked at, for instance, the Human Genome Project, which was a knowledge organization challenge that had really hit its peak around 2000. It was about who would map the human genome, and there was a company called Celera that had come in and said, we’ve got this shotgun method of examining the genome and we are going to do it faster than any of the publicly funded projects. The governments of the world, they set up a project that ended up tying Celera in the race. And I said to myself, why can’t we do that with all of the poetry, and all of the history, and all of the almanacs that sit in these libraries? But then I had to figure out, what does Google mean to us, like what does it do to us, how do we live through it. What happens if it becomes more important in our lives than it was in 2004? So ultimately, it came out of 2011 at a moment when people weren’t ready to start questioning Google. I was fortunate in the sense that I could raise some very crucial questions that now are part of everyday discourse.

Noshir Contractor: So today, as you look back, what is the one thing you regret not worrying about then that has now become a worry?

Siva Vaidhyanathan: YouTube. YouTube, which Google had bought a few years before I finished the book, was important, and yet it had not become the corrosive force that it is now. It had not yet clearly shown itself as a recruitment tool for extremism around the world. I also didn’t do much with Android. I didn’t foresee the notion that the Googlization of everything included the Googlization of our operating systems for most of the world, right, you step outside the United States and Western Europe, nobody uses iPhones, right they all use Android devices. An update for 2021, I think half of the book or more would have been about YouTube, and maybe a substantial chapter would have been on Android as well. It would have been a very different book, but similar themes, issues of concentration of power, both over knowledge and politics, issues of the ways algorithmic choices and values are baked in

Noshir Contractor: And after you had begun to till and plow the concerns with Googlization, in 2018, you published a book titled Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. What prompted the switch to Facebook?

Siva Vaidhyanathan: The election of 2016 came. The Trump campaign had exploited Facebook quite deftly and had done so under the radar of political journalists, who were used to following television buys, right, they would report weekly on what states Clinton and Trump were up, you know, the same story they had been writing since 1968. And I said to myself, they are missing what really happened, that the Trump campaign had no professional politicians working for it except for, you know, Paul Manafort. So if you’re dealing with amateurs, Trump is notoriously cheap, you’re hiring all these people from the Trump Organization, which is basically a Facebook ad scam company, and it’s been selling steaks and ties on Facebook for years. That’s what those people knew. They knew how to do Facebook marketing. They spent very little money, because you can do that on Facebook, and they precisely attach themselves to motivate voters who are otherwise unlikely to vote thus increasing turn out slightly for their own side, while using Facebook ads and targeted content to disengage voters who might otherwise have voted for Clinton. It only took a total of 80,000 votes  split over Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, to make Trump President. Now that’s the Trump story, but Narendra Modi had done the same thing two years earlier in India right and had done more with Facebook and done worse things on Facebook. And we saw in early 2016 in the Philippines Rodrigo Dutarte doing the same kind of campaign. It became clear to me that if you’re that kind of political candidate running that kind of movement that depends on inciting fears and passions, Facebook is the perfect system for you, because that’s what it amplifies. I wanted to make the claim that Facebook is undermining democracy, because when you look globally, it is creating or amplifying or increasing the coarseness of political discourse and crowding out any form of political discourse that can be rich and deliberative and humane, and while that’s a long and slow process and Facebook is but one actor in that process, it’s deadly to anybody who believes in the future of a democratic republic. 

Noshir Contractor: So, unlike The Googlization of Everything book, in the case of the anti-social media book you did provide an update in 2021. What was the takeaway from the update? 

Siva Vaidhyanathan: By 2018, by the time the book comes out, journalists had caught on to the story. They also dug deeper or helped me understand things deeper in other places, and we had extra stories. All of the sudden, by 2021, we can add Brazil, we can add Mexico, which a lot of people ignore the effect of Facebook and Whatsapp in Mexico and AMLO and his authoritarian tendencies as well, right, so now I have more data points to tell my own story. So I knew that there had to be factual updates about Facebook. For instance, we had gone from 2 billion users to nearly 3 billion users in the three years that I had written that book, so that had to change. And there was so much more to talk about in terms of the potential or at least interest in regulation. In 2018 I was very bullish on antitrust as a way we could reduce the power of Facebook and Google, but specifically Facebook, and I no longer think that. And I made those arguments in a series of articles that I’ve written making what are sort of counterintuitive arguments, like that quitting Facebook isn’t going to do any good and you might actually do more to limit the power Facebook by staying on it.

Noshir Contractor: Well let’s talk about some of those recent columns, so let’s focus on 2021. Back in January, as you mentioned, you wrote a column in the New Republic titled “Making sense of the Facebook menace: Can the largest media platform in the world ever be made safe for democracy?” In July, you wrote an article in WIRED magazine titled “What if regulating Facebook fails? It seems increasingly likely that antitrust and content moderation tools aren’t up to the task.” I see a more and more ominous sense from you, as we progress through your columns in 2021. Talk about this.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: As I watched both the tone and the substance of regulatory debates in Brussels, in London, in Ottawa, in the United States, and in New Delhi, I started to lose faith in any sense that a company as big and powerful and wealthy and embedded in our lives as Facebook could be sufficiently restrained by the toolkit we have brought forward from the 20th century. All the discussions were about employing 20th century means to address a company that didn’t exist in the 20th century. The best example of this is competition law in Europe or antitrust in the U.S., where you know you can fine Google or Facebook for anti-competitive behavior, and that takes them a week to make back. The notion that breaking up Facebook the way that Standard Royal was broken up in 1910, the way that AT&T was broken up in 1984, none of that tracked for me well. Facebook’s sins and crimes against competition are unlike those companies. You can’t make the case that Facebook is restricting or holding back innovation, which is an important economic argument one has to make within antitrust, you can’t make the case that advertising is more expensive or less effective since Facebook rose. I became dissatisfied also just with the notion that American public discourse can’t seem to grasp the idea that Facebook matters more in the world’s largest democracy than it matters in this democracy, the world’s largest economy. I am willing to bet that when Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and logs in in the morning, his first thought is about India, and his second thought is about the United States. India has nearly 300 million Facebook users and WhatsApp users. That’s only one third of its population. The potential for growth in India is astronomical, and clearly the future, if not the present of Facebook is India. You have to include Egypt, you have to include Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, one of the countries we tend to ignore. You think Facebook cares about its own image in the United States? Facebook already achieved the level of user penetration it was ever going to achieve back in 2010 or 2009 in this country. I wanted to make the case: we need to think bolder and more radically about regulation and we need to think more globally about what we are confronting. 

Noshir Contractor: You’re right that the number of users may have reached a plateau but the growth has come by the acquisition of other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: I mean, Zuckerberg knows what he’s doing when he buys platforms like that, and we have to add Oculus to that as well, right, the virtual reality platform. It’s also pretty clear to me that the next five years, we will see Instagram and WhatsApp and probably to some degree Oculus, folded into the Facebook experience in what they call in the company Blue – the standard Facebook interface that we use on our phones and on the web. And I think that’s really what Zuckerberg would like. He doesn’t like having this trifurcated experience. He would like there to be a meta company that he now calls Meta. 

Noshir Contractor: Well, speaking of which, in Slate in November of 2021, right after Facebook renamed itself, you had a column titled: “You don’t change your name to ‘Meta’ if you think anyone can stop you. Facebook’s rebranding isn’t a PR move. It’s a vision.” Tell us more about that.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: So in my observations of how Mark Zuckerberg works in the world, I think he is a supremely confident person. He has never let a scandal or an uproar or a problem significantly change his outlook, his agenda, or his company. All the changes he has made have been cosmetic. You know, the big picture is where he’s focused, and the big picture has been consistent probably since the day that Facebook went public, maybe sooner. It has a lot to do with the vision that Google has for its future, that Microsoft has, that Amazon has, that Apple has, to some degree. They are all in a race to become what I had called in my book “the operating system of our lives.” To be the company that most significantly manages, monitors, and monetizes the data that flow through our houses, our cars, our bodies, our refrigerators, our minds, our eyeglasses. Because, and to a lesser degree Apple, they already won the battle to be the operating system of our mobile devices: our phones. Microsoft, for the most part, won the battle globally to be the operating system of our computers that’s in our desks. And Facebook has won the race to manage our social lives. Google has won the race to manage knowledge and navigation. So all of these companies, you could envision them saying, we’ve carved out our lane. nobody’s coming close to us. Instead, they all have a much bolder vision. So Zuckerberg, he’s got this idea of the metaverse where our consciousness is embedded in flows of data, and flows of data are embedded in our consciousness and our bodies and our world, and there is no clear distinction among reality with a capital R, virtual reality, and augmented reality. What I see coming down is potentially much more dangerous than even Facebook, because if any of these companies become dominant in this world, that is a tremendous amount of power.  That kind of concentration of power should make us all worried deeply. How that power is exercised I can’t predict. The pattern has been that it’s exercised largely benevolently in intent but clumsily in execution, which allows for easy hijacking by nefarious forces. But one thing we know is that giving so much power to that industry has not made life richer, better, more peaceful, more satisfying, more humane. We’re living faster, we’re living more conveniently. I don’t have to leave this chair. What kind of life do we want to live? We can live a glorious life as human beings who are so easily connected, who have such access to information, but we can’t think of connectivity and information as ends in themselves. They are resources to be harnessed and used carefully toward a good life. 

Noshir Contractor: A lot of people who are trying to make sense of the Metaverse, some of them are critical and are talking about coining the phrase “not averse” as a way of looking against the Metaverse. These new developments, this is qualitatively different from what we’ve seen so far with Facebook or Google and represents the next intellectual challenge for web science, but civil society challenge for all of us.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Our scholarly community is engaged with these issues fully and has been for decades. Katie Pierce at the University of Washington has been writing about the ways that authoritarian dictators exploit social media outside of the gaze of Western powers for 10 or 15 years, and had some reporter for the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN taken Katie’s work seriously, in 2011, 2013, 2015, then what we saw in 2015, 2016, 2021, would not be a surprise. I am in awe of Katie Pierce, of Meredith Clark, who’s doing amazing work on Black Twitter, among other questions of how Twitter affects daily life and the future of journalism. These are the sorts of questions that we ask in our worlds, in our conference rooms. The conversations are exciting. I think we are getting to the point where more scholars are able to get their work out to a larger public. Our community is not prescient, but we’re careful, and we’re engaged. We are still looking at all of this with fresh eyes, with the tool sets of multiple disciplines. 

Noshir Contractor: I thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today and look forward to your next venture, whether it’s going after the next company, whether it’s going after Metaverse or something else that you choose to do. It’s always going to be exciting, and your ability of being able to tell stories and make compelling arguments is exactly why I would again recommend folks listen to your podcast that you co-host titled Democracy in Danger. 

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Oh Nosh, it’s been such a pleasure to catch up with you. I hope I can see you in person very soon, let’s do that. 

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes using, with caution, your Google, Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft devices. Thanks for listening.

 

Sonia Livingstone: I’m actually so horrified by that metaphor of policing. You know, the first wave of parental controls  were all about various forms of kind of spying and secretly monitoring your child and then punishing them when you found they’ve done something wrong. But what are children doing?  You know, they absolutely believe that new technology is their way ahead and should be under their agency and control. It’s become very pernicious that the discourse has somehow set parents and children against each other in some kind of mutual struggle.

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web. 

My guest today is Sonia Livingstone, who you just heard talking about the tensions internet use can cause between parents and their children. Professor Livingstone is in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, specifically focusing on children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy, and rights in the digital environment. Professor Livingstone currently directs the Digital Futures Commission with the Five Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with UNICEF, and her recent book with Alicia Blum-Ross, Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives, was published by Oxford in 2020. Sonia was a keynote speaker at the ACM 2012 web science conference and was awarded the title of the Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2014 for services to children and child internet safety. Welcome, Sonia.

Sonia Livingstone: Thank you so much, Noshir. It’s great to be here.

Noshir Contractor: Well let’s take on that last statement: your recognition for your services to children and child internet safety. What prompted you to focus so much of your attentions on this particular topic? 

Sonia Livingstone: I began my career thinking about media audiences, and I focused on everybody. And when I did one project on children and the changing media environment, I discovered how much all kinds of stakeholders and the public were actually kind of keen to have and engage with the kind of knowledge that us academics produce. The question around risk to children, risk and harm and internet safety, has been building and building as an area where there can be real kind of action consequences from the evidence that I and my colleagues produce, and I found I wanted to get engaged in that and influence that process as well.

Noshir Contractor: And it’s a great example of taking the research that we do as academics and making a real difference in the world, and when you talk about the digital futures, you focus on several dimensions. Can you tell us a little bit more about play and education? 

Sonia Livingstone: I guess I like being where things are contentious. So the Digital Futures Commission, we chose these two topics to focus on as oddly contentious. Our focus on education data, that began as trying to think about a way that the move towards data could be positive for children and how could their data be used from their learning in ways that would benefit them in all kinds of ways and turned into a kind of a dystopian exploration about how value is being extracted from childhood and big tech is profiting from you know everyday activities. And, I mean, play seems like the essence of childhood, but if you talk to parents about playing online, they don’t want their kids to break rules or make new friends or experiment and explore or get into trouble, you know all the things that are part of play suddenly become really difficult in the online context. The purpose of the Digital Futures Commission is to try to think our way through the difficult, naughty, instances in order to, yeah, maybe redesign the web.

Noshir Contractor: One of the issues that you discuss in detail in your work is the amount of agency parents give their children in these contexts. Can you talk some more about the role of parenting in this particular situation? 

Sonia Livingstone: One thing that we learned from a public consultation we held with children earlier this year is how much they kind of want the kind of commercial games made for them to give them more agency. Agency is really hard for children to exercise online. When Alicia and I wrote the book about parenting for digital future, and we were one Britain one American, we had a lot of discussions about the difference between a kind of an American ethos, which is perhaps more protectionist and talks more about parent kind of right to manage and organize children’s digital activities, whereas in Britain and in Europe we’re a bit more kind of child rights focused, and there is more emphasis I think on children’s agency and autonomy, even though that might mean some greater – both risk to the child and also privacy between the child and the parent, and that does kind of change kind of how one can take a child rights perspective, which is what I always try to do my work, but also what the responsibility and role of the parent is in this situation.

Noshir Contractor: When you use the word childrens’ rights, is it only about protecting children, or is it also about giving them certain privileges rather than just focusing on protection? 

Sonia Livingstone: With the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child I’ve been developing this document, it’s called a general comment, which offers guidance to states on how to think about children’s rights in relation to their digital environment. So the purpose of the Convention  is to remind states that children have rights too, in other words, that human rights do apply to those, and people get it, I think, for the right to protection, but they don’t get it so much for the right to privacy or for the right to offer civil rights and freedoms, the right to expression, freedom of thought and assembly and so forth. And the Convention on the Rights of Child adds some things that are specific to children, so one thing is that children should have their rights considered according to their evolving capacity, and another really emphasizes the child’s right to be heard, because children by and large are not attended to in forums where decisions that affect them are taken. And then I guess the Convention adds a number of procedural rights, if you like ways in which, for example, remedy must be child specific. And buried in the Convention are a few extra rights, like the right to play. States kind of need to adjust their mechanisms to recognize children’s rights otherwise actually they’ll be infringed.

Noshir Contractor: And so you really are engaging both on the children’s rights issues with parents on the one hand, as well as governments, and also industry, I imagine? 

Sonia Livingstone: In all that work I did on internet safety, it really was kind of quite policy focused. It’s kind of increasingly becoming important to think more about the industry side, the design side. So many policymakers over the years, say to me, “Well we want X or Y to happen, but the industry is always pushing back saying it’s too late, because things have been set up in this way.” So I think the whole sizable movement now of “by design” – privacy by design, safety by design, security by design and so forth – is an effort that I’m keen to capitalize on so that we do begin to ask the questions about users, people, children also, from when digital products are first designed. 

Noshir Contractor: So is there any success story small or large that you can point to that came out of these efforts at helping to influence design, especially when dealing with industry? 

Sonia Livingstone: In Britain, we have a new code which embeds privacy by design for children, and in fact requires that providers treat children in a what’s called an age appropriate way. So we saw a whole raft of changes from social media platforms, turning off the possibility of unknown adults contacting somebody identified as a child, turning off autoplay for children on YouTube. So we’ve just proposed playful by design, which adds not only that the hygiene factors have got to be dealt with safety and privacy and security ethics, but also that build in imagination, choices for children, so they can determine their own kind of pathway through digital play and ensure that things are more diverse in terms of the emotional kind of experiences on offer and the forms of representation. So we’ve kind of identified, you know, not just how to eliminate problems, but also what would be good, and so we’re now working with games designers workshop that and co-design tools. In some ways the business models are, of course, against us. But I’m written to every day by a range of providers, large and small, who say, you know we want to do the right thing by children, but what is it and who’s going to guide us and where do we go for resources. And that’s the need that we’re trying to address.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you’ve discussed also is screen time and what you call “healthy screen time.” A lot of the publicity that we get is about parents policing their children, and platform developers making screen time available for users to monitor and assess. But at the same time, you’ve also said tell parents to stop policing children. 

Sonia Livingstone: I’m actually so horrified by that metaphor of policing. You know, the first wave of parental controls so called were all about various forms of kind of spying and secretly monitoring your child and then punishing them when you found they’d done something wrong. But what are children doing? You know, they absolutely believe that new technology is their way ahead and should be under their agency and control. It’s become very pernicious that the discourse has somehow set parents and children against each other in some kind of mutual struggle and, interestingly, research shows how unproductive this is, because if parents do take that kind of authoritarian approach, that’s when we see children find ways to go online. I don’t know that I really want to talk about healthy screen time so much as thinking in a more nuanced way about the content that children engage with with screens and the kind of context in which they do that, and that always requires an evaluation of what are the merits of the content and what is the child getting from it, and I think parents are actually really keen on that too, but I think as a society we haven’t given parents very many sort of bearings in how to make that judgment, so they don’t know what’s a safe or unsafe website, and we have a lot of marketing that makes a lot of false claims, so they feel kind of without them moorings in making parental judgment.

Noshir Contractor: You’ve said on some occasions that “coding is the new Latin.” Talk a little about how children are dealing – and what we can do as you said to focus not just on the hygiene practices of protecting them, but also unleashing their creativity and innovation. 

Sonia Livingstone: That “coding is the new Latin” was said to us by several parents in our Parenting for Digital Future book. I think in a number of parts of the world, certainly here in Britain, there’s been this kind of big push over the last 10 years to introduce coding into schools and informal learning settings, and this is often taken up with great enthusiasm by both children and parents who, when they’re kind of handed this sort of sense that there are these technological skills that they could gain that are going to be the Latin of the future, you know they’re kind of very keen to try to take them up. But, as we tracked in our book, there’s also all kinds of ways in which relatively privileged middle class parents can put more resources behind it, so it becomes yet another form of concerted cultivation. And we did trace this kind of very disheartening series of small but really consequential ways in which poorer kids kind of got dropped out or couldn’t make the connection between what their teachers wanted of them and what their parents were able to support them in, so the opportunities are there but inequalities are really major challenge.

Noshir Contractor: It won’t be the first time in history that technologies have had these differential impacts based on socioeconomic status, for example.

Sonia Livingstone: In a way, because it’s a familiar problem, it doesn’t necessarily gain the attention, though we are having some interesting debates here about the idea of digital poverty and that one should kind of specify what is the minimum technological support that a family might need just as one might look at their minimum kind of economic needs or nutrition needs.

Noshir Contractor: What you’re discussing takes on even more meaning and importance when we think of all the emerging economy countries and the kids in those countries and where their futures would be headed. 

Sonia Livingstone: Most of the research I’ve been talking about is yes, Global North you know it’s 10 percent of the world’s children. When we did the work on children’s rights for the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, we did a global consultation focusing on countries in the Global South, and what was really fascinating to me was the incredible range of challenges that children are perfectly articulate in telling us about, you know very often around access, cost, the difficulties of living in rural or impoverished circumstances, different family composition, different cultural values, all kinds of diversity in what it is that children want from technology. You know as a field, we’ve got a lot of mind stretching and diversifying to do in terms of setting the frames, and that of course has to be a global conversation, one that’s much more inclusive and collaborative.

Noshir Contractor: I would be remiss in not asking you for your reaction to the recent stories especially about the so-called Facebook Files and Frances Haugen’s comment about the research being done internally by Instagram, pointing to the fact that they are turning 10-year-olds into social media addicts, and that’s a quote. 

Sonia Livingstone: You know, as an academic I believe research should be independently funded, peer reviewed, and fully published. There is something very problematic about industry doing research which reveals problems with its product that damages its users and yet it doesn’t make that public, so I think, you know, she’s done the world an enormous favor in making known what we kind of knew already. That said, clearly it wasn’t great research, there’s plenty of research out there in the world, done independently, which shows that social media content can be harmful, especially to vulnerable teenagers in certain circumstances. I think really no researcher is going to stand up and say social media makes children addicted or social media is the sole cause of harm, so you know we have to have a more nuanced debate, we have to think about the quality of the research, we have to think about the power of the public conditions under which research gets property reviewed and critiqued, and then we need to keep in mind that any harms, anything going wrong in the lives of our children is multiply caused. Social media is just part of a really bigger picture.

Noshir Contractor: On the one hand, you are encouraged by the fact that these private companies and platforms are at least making an effort to do some research, but then, the quality of that research remains suspect, and yet, the dilemma is that these private platforms have access to incredibly large amounts of data that would lend themselves to a lot of rigorous research, and yet a lot of the research that you said that is being done by academics, is not leveraging this data. Is there an opening for academia to start a dialogue with the private platforms in order for them to make their data available for rigorous research that is more transparent than studies such as the ones Frances Haugen is reporting on?

Sonia Livingstone: I think, sometimes at least the politicians kind of representing the interests of the Academy have said, give us your data. And the platforms say you know, “We have an awesome amount of data, what do you want, and what are your questions?” And so I think we need to get clever in a way about specifying what data we want so that it becomes more precise. I just wonder if there are analogies that we could learn from. In the transport industry, did they work out how to figure out the safety of cars and traffic and trains and planes, you know, using industry data but also having independent scrutiny? You know, there must be some kind of precedent, it feels like we’re inventing this discussion de novo and we’re not doing a very good job at it. 

Noshir Contractor: Well I think that’s a really good idea to look for analogies in terms of being able to set up better academic industry partnerships. In closing here Sonia, can you talk a little bit about what’s next, what’s coming down the pike in terms of the Digital Futures Commission? What’s next on the horizon? 

Sonia Livingstone: I think for the Digital Futures Commission, what I really want to do is kind of distill from what we’ve learned about play and what we’re learning about education data, what that guidance would be for innovators and designers so that they have got the place to turn when they want to know how do they get it right for children. There isn’t synthesized guidance. And I think for me, the intellectual question coming up is really, how much are children not exactly the Canaries in the coal mine but a way in which society can think about vulnerable internet users generally, because there are clearly all kinds of parallels with other vulnerable or disadvantaged groups when it comes to digital design and technology policy, and it’s still an open question in my mind whether, you know, each group has to kind of fight its cause or whether there’s a way of kind of coming together and recognizing that the days of digital design for rather privileged, you know able bodied people, whether those days are done, and I don’t know what that new world will look like, but I think it’s going to be a really fascinating debate.

Noshir Contractor: Well again, thank you so much Sonia for taking time to talk to us about this incredible, intricate relationship between children, parents, government and policy makers, and platform developers, and I think you’ve really helped us a great deal in trying to rethink and reimagine what these relationships should be with the goals of helping preserve the rights of children and indeed to unleash their creativity moving forward. So thank you so much, Sonia for talking to us about this today. 

Sonia Livingstone: Thank you so much, this is just the journey and many people on it, but it’s always fun to discuss it with you, thank you.

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes. Thanks for listening.