SOPA and our 2010 Circumvention Study

Daniel Castro of The Information Technology & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress. In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA. This claim is a distortion of our work. We disagree with the use of our study to make the point that DNS-based Internet filtering works and that we should therefore use it as a means of stopping websites from distributing copyrighted content. The data we collected answer a completely different set of questions in a completely different context.

Among other provisions that seek to control the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, SOPA, if enacted, would call upon the U.S. government to require that Internet service providers remove from their DNS servers the names of any sites that either infringe copyright directly or merely “facilitate” copyright infringement. So, for example, the government could require that ISPs remove the name “twitter.com” from their DNS servers if twitter.com was not being sufficiently aggressive in preventing its users from tweeting information about places to download copyrighted materials. This practice is known as DNS filtering. DNS filtering is one of the most common modes of Internet-based censorship. As we and our collaborators in the OpenNet Initiative have shown over the past decade, practices of this sort are used extensively in autocratic countries, including China and Iran, to prevent access to a range of sites offensive to the governments of those countries.

Opponents of SOPA have argued that the DNS filtering, even though it will have a number of harmful effects on the technical and political structure of the Internet, will not be effective in preventing users from accessing the blocked sites. Mr. Castro cites our research as evidence that SOPA’s mandate to filter DNS will be effective. He quotes our finding that at most 3% of users in certain countries that substantially filter the Internet use circumvention tools and asserts that “presumably the desire for access to essential political, historical, and cultural information is at least equal to, if not significantly stronger than, the desire to watch a movie without paying for it. Yet only a small fraction of Internet users employ circumvention tools to access blocked information, in part because many users simply lack the skills or desire to find, learn and use these tools.”

In our report, we looked at three sets of censorship circumvention tools: complex, client-based tools like Tor; paid VPNs; and web proxies. We estimated usage of those three classes of tools. We used reports from the client tool developers, a survey to gather usage data from VPN operators and used data from Google Analytics to estimate usage of web proxy tools. Counting all three classes of tools, we estimated as many as 19 million users a month of circumvention tools. Given the large number of users in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other states where filtering is endemic, this represents a fairly small percentage of internet users in those countries; 19 million people represents about 3% of the users in countries where internet filtering is pervasive. We actually believe that 3% figure is high, as some of the tools we study are used by users in open societies to evade corporate or university firewalls, not just to evade government censorship.

We stand behind the findings in our study (with reservations that we detail in the paper), but we disagree with the way that Mr. Castro applies our findings to the SOPA debate. His presumption that people will work as hard or harder to access political content than they do to access entertainment content deeply misunderstands how and why most people use the internet. Far more users in open societies use the Internet for entertainment than for political purposes; it is unreasonable to assume different behaviors in closed societies. Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content.

Rather than comparing usage of circumvention tools in closed societies to predict the activities of a given userbase, Mr. Castro would do better to consider the massive userbase of tools like bit torrent clients, which would make for a far cleaner analogy to the problem at hand. Likewise, the long line of very popular peer-to-peer sharing tools that have been incrementally designed to circumvent the technical and political measures used to prevent sharing copyrighted materials are a stronger analogy than our study of users in authoritarian regimes seeking to access political content.

Second, our research has consistently shown that those who really wish to evade Internet filters can do so with relatively little effort. The problem is that these activities can be very dangerous in certain regimes. Even though our research shows that relatively few people in autocratic countries use circumvention tools, this does not mean that circumvention tools are not crucial to the dissident communities in those countries. 19 million people is not large in relation to the population of the Internet, but it is still a lot of people absolutely who have freer access to the Internet through the tools. We personally know many people in autocratic countries for whom these tools provide a crucial (though not perfect) layer of security for their activist work. Those people would be at much greater risk than they already are without access to the tools, but in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism. It would be highly counter-productive for the U.S. government to both fund and outlaw the same set of tools.

Finally, our decade-long study of Internet filtering and circumvention has documented the many problems associated with Internet filtering, not its overall effectiveness. DNS filtering is by necessity either overbroad or underbroad; it either blocks too much or too little. Content on the Internet changes its place and nature rapidly, and DNS filtering is ineffective when it comes to keeping up with it. Worse, especially from a First Amendment perspective, DNS filtering ends up blocking access to enormous amounts of perfectly lawful information. We strongly resist the claim that our research, and that of our collaborators, makes the case in favor of DNS-based Internet filtering.

Links:

Mr. Castro’s report may be found here:

http://www.itif.org/publications/pipasopa-responding-critics-and-finding-path-forward

with the reference to our work on p. 8.

The study that is being misused by Mr. Castro is here:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Circumvention_Tool_Usage.

The findings of our decade-long studies are documented in three books, published MIT Press and available freely online in their entirety at:

http://access.opennet.net/

- Rob Faris, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Jill York, and Ethan Zuckerman

Mapping Media Ecosystems at Center for Civic Media

This summer, Sasha, Lorrie and I started brainstorming the sorts of events we wanted to host at the Center for Civic Media this fall. The first I put on the calendar was a session on “mapping civic media”, a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people who are working to study, understand and visualize how ideas move through the complicated ecosystem of professional and participatory media.

To represent the research being done in the space, we invited Hal Roberts, my collaborator on Media Cloud (and on a wide range of other research), Erhardt Graeff from the Web Ecology project, and Gilad Lotan, VP of R&D for internet analytics firm BetaWorks. On Wednesday night, I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session (which we’ll post soon) will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall. In the meantime, here are my notes, constrained by the fact that I was moderating the panel and so couldn’t lean back and enjoy the presentations the way I otherwise might have.

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he’s produced great swaths of research on internet filtering, surveillance, threats to freedom of speech, and the basic architecture of the internet. (That he’s written some of these papers with me reflects more on his generosity than on my wisdom.) He’s the lead architect of Media Cloud, the system we’re building at the Berkman Center and at Center for Civic Media to “ask and answer quantitative questions about the mediasphere in more systematic ways.” As Hal explains, media researchers “have been writing one-off scripts and systems to mine data in haphazard ways.” Media Cloud is an attempt to streamline that process, creating a collection of 30,000 blogs and mainstream media sources in English and Russian. “Our goal is to get as much media as possible, so we can ask our own questions and also let others ask questions of our duct tape and bubblegum system.”

Hal’s map of clusters in popular US blogs. An interactive version of this map is available here.

Much of Hal’s work has focused on using the content of media – rather than the structure of its hyperlinks – to map and cluster the mediasphere. He shows us a map of US blogs that cluster into three main areas – news and political blogs, technology blogs and what he calls “the love cluster”. This last cluster is so named because it’s filled with people talking about what they love. Subclusters include knitters, quilters, fans of recipes and photography. The technology cluser breaks down into a Google camp, an iPhone camp and a camp discussing Android Apps. Hal’s visualization shows the words most used in the sources within a cluster, which helps us understand what these clusters are talking about. The Google cluster features words like “SEO, webmaster, facebook, chrome” and others, suggesting the cluster is substantively about Google and its technology projects.

While we might expect the politics and news cluster to divide evenly into left and rightwing camps, it doesn’t. Study the link structure of the left and the right, as Glance and Adamic and later Eszter Hargittai have, and it’s clear that like links to like. But Hal’s research shows that the left and right use very similar language and talk about many of the same topics. This is a novel finding: It’s not that the left and right are talking about entirely different topics – instead they’re arguing over a common agenda, an agenda that’s well represented in mainstream media as well, which suggests the existence of subjects neither the right or left are talking about online.

Building on this finding, Hal and colleagues at Berkman looked at the Russian media sphere, to see if there was a similar overlap in coverage focus between mainstream media and blogs. “Newspapers and the television are subject to strong state control in Russia – we wanted to see if our analysis confirmed that, and whether the blogosphere was providing an alternative public sphere.

The technique he and Bruce Etling used is “the polar map” – put the source you believe is most important at the center, and other sources are mapped at a distance from that source where the distance reflects degree of similarity. The central dot is a summary of verbiage from Russian government ministry websites. Right next to it is the official government newspaper. TV stations cluster close to the center, while blogs cover a wide array of the space, including the edges of the map.

It’s possible that blogs are showing dissimilarities to the Kremlin agenda because they’re talking about knitting, not about politics. So a further analysis (the one mapped above) explicitly identified democratic opposition and ethno-nationalist blogs and looked at their placement on the map. There’s strong evidence of political conversations far from the government talking points in both the democratic opposition and in the far right nationalist blogosphere.

What’s particularly interesting about this finding is that we don’t see the same pattern in the US blogosphere. Make a polar map with the White House, or a similar proxy for a US government news agenda, at the center, and you’ll see a very different pattern. Some right wing American blogs flock quite closely to the White House talking points – mostly to critique them – while the left blogs and mainstream media generally don’t. However, when Hal and crew did an analysis of stories about Egypt, they saw a very different pattern than in looking at all stories published in these sources. They saw a tight cluster of US mainstream media and blogs – left and right – around the White House. The government, the media and bloggers left and right talked about Egypt using very similar language. In the Russian mediasphere, the pattern was utterly different – the democratic opposition was far from the Kremlin agenda, using the Egyptian protests to talk about potential revolution in Russia.

The ultimate goal of Media Cloud, Hal explains, is to both produce analysis like this, and to make it possible for other researchers to conduct this sort of analysis, without a first step of collecting months or years of data.

Erhardt Graeff is a good example of the sort of researcher Media Cloud would like to serve. He’s cofounder of the Web Ecology Project, which he describes as “as a ragtag group of casual researchers that has now turned in a peer-reviewed publication“. That publication is the result of mapping part of the Twitter ecosystem during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and attempting to tackle some of the hard problems of mapping media ecosystems in the process.

The Web Ecology Project began life researching the Iranian elections and resulting protests, focusing on the #iranelection hashtag. With a simple manifesto around “reimagining internet studies”, the project tries to understand the “nature and behavior of actors” in media systems. That means considering not just the top users, or even just the registered users of a system like Twitter, but the audience for the media they create. “Each individual user on Twitter has their personal media ecosystem” of people they follow, influence, are followed by and influenced by.

This sort of research rapidly bumps into three hard problems, Erhardt explains:

- Did someone read a piece of information that was published? Or as he puts it, “Did the State Department actually read our report about #IranElection?” It’s very hard to tell. “We end up using proxies – you followed a link, but that doesn’t mean you read it.”

- Which piece of media influenced someone to access other media? “Which tweet convinced me to follow the new Maru video, Erhardt’s or MC Hammer’s?”

- How does the media ecosystem change day to day? Or, referencing a Web Ecology paper, “How many genitalia were on ChatRoulette today?” The answer can vary sharply day to day, raising tough problems around generating a usable sample.

The paper Erhardt published with Gilad and other Web Ecology Project members looks at the Twitter ecosystem around the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt. By quantitatively searhing for information flows, and qualitatively classifying different types of actors in that ecosystem, the research tries to untangle the puzzle of how (some) individuals used (one type of) social media in the context of a major protest.

To study the space, the team downloaded hundreds of thousands of tweets, representing roughly 40,000 users talking about Tunisia and 62,000 talking about Egypt. They used a “shingling” method of comparison to determine who was retweeting whom ad sought out the longest retweet chains. They looked at the top 10% of these chains in terms of length to find the “really massive, complex flows” and grabbed a random 1/6th of that sample. That yielded 774 users talking about Tunisia, 888 talking about Egypt… and only 963 unique users, suggesting a large overlap between those two sets.

Then Erhardt, Gilad and others started manually coding the participants in the chains. Categories included Mainstream Media (@AJEnglish, @nytimes), web news organizations (@HuffingtonPost), non-media organizations (@Wikileaks, @Vodaphone), bloggers, activists, digerati, political actors, celebrities, researchers, bots… and a too-broad unclassified category of “others”. This wasn’t an easy process – Erhardt describes a system in which researchers compared their codings to ensure a level of intercoder reliability, then had broader discussions on harder and harder edge cases. They used a leaderboard to track how many cases they’d each coded, and goaded those slow to participate into action.

The actors they classified are a very influential set of Twitter users. The average organization in their set has 4004 followers, the average individual 2340 (which is WAY more than the average user of the system). To examine influence with more subtlety than simply counting followers, Erhardt and his colleagues use retweets per tweet as an influence metric. What they conclude, in part, is that “mainstream media is a hit machine, as are digerati – what they have to say tends to be highly amplified.”

The bulk of the paper traces information flows started by specific people. In the case of Egypt, lots of information flows start from journalists, bloggers and activists, with bots as a lesser, but important, influence. In Tunisia, there were fewer flows started by journalists, more by bots and bloggers, and way fewer from activists. This may reflect the fact that the Tunisian story caught many journalists and activists by surprise – they were late to the story, and less significant as information sources than the bloggers who cover that space over time. By the time Egypt becomes a story, journalists realized the significance and were on the ground, providing original content on Twitter, as well as to their papers.

One of the most interesting aspects of the paper is an analysis of who retweets whom. It’s not surprising to hear that like retweets like – journalists retweet journalists, while bloggers retweet bloggers. Bloggers were much more likely to retweet journalists on the topic of Egypt than on Tunisia, possibly because MSM coverage of Egypt was so much more thorough than the superficial coverage of Tunisia.

While Gilad Lotan worked with Erhardt on the Tunisia and Egypt paper, his comments at Civic Media focused on the larger space of data analysis. “I work primarily on data – heaps and mounds of data,” he explains, for two different masters. Roughly half his work is for clients, media outlets who want to understand how to interact and engage with their audiences. The other half focuses on developing the math and algorithms to understand the social media space.

This work is increasingly important because “attention is the bottleneck in a world where threshhold to publishing is near zero.” If you want to be a successful brand or a viable social movement, understanding how people manage their attention is key: “It’s impossible to simply demand attention – you have to understand the dynamics of attention in the face of this bottleneck.”

Gilad references Alex Dragulescu’s work on digital portraits, pictures of people composed of the words they most tweet or share on social media. He’s interested not just in the individuals, but in the networks of people, showing us a visualization of tweets around Occupy Wall Street. Different networks take form in the space of minutes or hours as new news breaks – the network around a threatened shutdown of Zuccotti Park for a cleanup is utterly different than the network in July, when Adbusters was the leading actor in the space.

Lotan’s visualizations of Twitter conversations about Occupy in July and October 2011

Images like this, Lotan suggests, “are like images of earth from the moon. We knew what earth looked like, but we never saw it
We knew we lived in networks, but this is the first time we can envision it and see how it plays out.”

When we analyze huge data sets, we can start approaching answers to very difficult questions, like:
- What’s the audience of the New York Times versus Fox News?
- What type of content gains wider audiences through social media?
- What topics do certain outlets cover? What are their strengths, weaknesses and biases?
- How do audiences differ between different publications? How are they similar?
- How fast does news spread, and how does it break?

Much of media and communications research addresses these questions, though rarely directly – as Erhardt noted, we generally address these questions via proxies. But Lotan tells us, we can now ask and answer questions like, “How many Twitter users follow Justin Bieber and The Economist?” The answer, to a high degree of precision, is 46,000. It’s just shy of the number who follow The Economist and the New York Times, 54,000.

Lotan is able to research answers like this because his lab has access to the Twitter “firehose” (the stream of all public data posted to Twitter, moment to moment) and to the bit.ly firehose. This second information source allows Lotan to study what people are clicking on, not just what media they’re exposed to. He offers a LOLcat, where the feline in question is dressed in a chicken costume. “We can see the kitty in you, and the chicken you’re hiding behind.” What people share and what they click is very different, and Lotan is able to analyze both.

This data allowed Lotan to compare what audiences for four major news outlets were interested in, my measuring their clickstreams. Al Jazeera and The Economist, he tells us, are pretty much what you’d think. But Fox News watchers are fascinated by crime, murders, kidnappings and other dark news. This sort of insight may help networks understand and optimise for their audiences. Al Jazeera’s audience, he tells us, is very engaged, tweeting and sharing stories, while Fox’s audience reads a lot and shares very little.

Some of Lotan’s recent research is about algorithmic curation, specifically Twitter’s trending topics. Many observers of the Occupy movement have posited that Twitter is censoring tweets featuring the #occupywallstreet hashtag. Lotan acknowledges that the tag has been active, but suggests reasons why it’s never trended globally. Interest in the tag has grown steadily, and has a regular heartbeat, connected to who’s active on the east coast of the US. The tag has spiked at times, but remains invisible in part due to bad timing – a spike on October 1st was tiny in comparison to “#WhatYouShouldKnowAboutMe”, trending at the same time.

At this point, Lotan believes he’s partially reverse engineered the Trending Topics algorithm. The algorithm is very sensitive to the new, not to the slowly building. This raises the question: what does it mean to “get the math right”. Lotan observes, “Twitter doesn’t want to be a media outlet, but they made an algorithmic choice that makes them an editor.” He’s quick to point out that algorithmic curation is often very helpful – the Twitter algorithm is quite good at preventing spam attacks, which have a different signature than organic trends. So we see organic, fast-moving trends, even when they’re quite offensive. He points to #blamethemuslims, which started when a Muslim women in the UK snarkily observed that Muslims would be blamed for the Norway terror attacks. That tweet died out quickly, but was revived by Americans who used the tag unironically, suggesting that we blame Muslims for lots of different things – that small bump, then massive spike is a fairly common organic pattern… and very different from the spam patterns he’s seen on Twitter.

When we analyze networks, Lotan suggests, we encounter a paradox that James Gleick addresses in his recent book on information: just because I’m one hop away from you in a social network doesn’t mean I can send you information and expect you to pay attention. In the real world, people who can bridge between conversations are rare, important and powerful. He closes his talk with the map of a Twitter conversation about an event in Israel where settlers were killed. There’s a large conversation in the Israeli twittersphere, a small conversation in the Palestinian community, and two or three bridge figures attempting to connect the conversations. (One is my wife, @velveteenrabbi.) Studying events like this one may help us, ultimately, determine who’s able to build bridges between these conversations.

I can’t wait for the video for this event to be put online – we’ll get it up as soon as possible and I’ll link to it once we do.

Beth Coleman on “Tweeting the Revolution”

Beth Coleman presents some of her recent research on the protests in Tahrir square, and a broader theory of how social networks and activism in the physical world work together today at the Berkman Center. With her is Mike Ananny, her coauthor and researcher in danah boyd’s lab at Microsoft Research. The presentation, “Tweeting the Revolution”, tries to understand how we read large data sets to understand located action. This is a timely topic because we’re seeing a rise in protest activity that’s been missing from the public sphere for a few decades. Coleman wants to know what we can understand about social media and people’s willingness to take an activist stance. One of the foci of her work is the idea of mediated copresence, which she sees as a major way of understanding the relationship between technology and public action.

Tahrir Square offers an opportunity to think through the relationship between three types of speech:
- Public speech, the broadcast of information to a broad audience
- Civic speech, speech within the networks of your located environment
- Poetic speech, speech about expressing needs and interests

What’s the effect of Twitter, SMS and other technologies in a space like Tahrir? They may be critical in understanding the sustainability of commitments to a movement beyond the initial phase of protest.

In his critiques of online activism in understanding the Arab Spring, Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that activism needs to include bodily presence, risk of harm or arrest, and developed organizational infrastructures. It’s worth asking those questions – does online participation matter? Do we need bodily presence for activism? Coleman and Ananny use the possibility of bodily risk – in this case, the physical presence in Egypt – as a precursor for inclusion for her interview group. She cites Elaine Scarry’s work on body and pain, suggesting that when a body is in pain, there’s a loss of self, a loss of agency, and a loss of language. Pain cannot be articulated, and there’s the failure of “subject as a system”. So physical location in Egypt opens risk of incarceration and torture, and creates a category of potentially effected actor.

There’s lots of analysis of network collective action from at least two points of view: considering social media as an augmentation to traditional organizing tools, and considering network media as a form of command and control. There’s an open space for analysis around strategic and tactical engagement around located network media. We might think of social media as a way of facilitating co-presence, the way of being part of a phenomenon either in physical space or in a complementary virtual space. If we’re continually surrounded by Twitter, Facebook and SMS, which remind us of people’s presence even if we’re not interacting with them, how does this help us understand a move from onlooker to participant in collective action.

To understand copresence, we need to understand quotidian media engagement. 17% of Egyptians were online before the revolution and 72% on mobile phones. Coleman notes that Kate Crawford, studying non-literate women in India, sees SMS use from people you wouldn’t expect to be able to use SMS. It’s worth being open to the notion that SMS could be a powerful tool for sending the sense of presence for a very large swath of an Egyptian audience. Coleman suggests that we need to engage in careful consideration of the oral and the local to understand the cascae of strong and weak ties and their relationship to collective action.

She and Ananny propose a way of thinking through Egyptian positions towards the Tahrir protests. There were people who were present in Tahrir and those who weren’t. There were people engaged with the protests online and those who weren’t. We can create four categories of engagement by considering those categories in terms of binaries. This separates some figures from the discussion – individuals like Alaa Abdel Fatteh, who was deeply engaged online, but in South Africa for much of the protest. But it’s a useful structure in part because it forces you to consider the bottom quadrant, those who didn’t engage physically or online, and are therefore the hardest to study. Eszter Hargittai’s contribution to the work, Coleman notes, is to urge her to take that quadrant of nonparticipation seriously.

Interviews with participants quickly complicate and stretch the boundaries of these categories. An interview with a 20-something woman, upper middle class, who’s been using Ushahidi to map sexual harassment, shows Coleman that “on/off the square” may be too binary a distinction. In the wake of the media blackout on the 28th, she tells Coleman, she was motivated to go to the square because she didn’t want to be alone, she wanted to find other people, and she felt like the movement was moving from online to offline. But as she headed to the square, she felt a sense of risk and turned around. Her story calls into question the idea of whether you needed to be in Tahrir physically to be part of the revolution.

Coleman shows us a graph of Dima Khatib’s Twitter network rendered by Gilad Lotan. Based on the frameworks Coleman is suggesting, can we better understand who connects, who retweets and how information cascades? “How might the data trace of media engagement overlap with the human narrative?”

This matters, ultimately, because it influences how we might develop new tools. This past weekend, Coleman led a workshop with Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi, a platform for crisis mapping and management. “After the crisis, what are the tools for sustaining movements?”

A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later

Fifty years ago, Newton Minow, the 35 year old FCC chairman, gave a speech that’s still studied today. It’s taught in rhetoric courses, tested on the LSAT reading comprehension test and still is invoked in discussions of how communications technology affects entertainment, news, and democracy. The speech challenged broadcasters to actually watch their programming, and urged them to consider whether they were proud of what’s they’d see. It read, in part:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Today, Minow’s daughter, Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, welcomed her father to the stage at her institution as part of an event titled, “News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited“. Minow (I’ll refer to Newton Minow throughout the rest of this post) starts his talk by noting that we’re a day past the ten year anniversary of 9/11, a time at which there was no YouTube, no Twitter, none of the social media we discuss today to understand the tragic events of the day. If that shift is difficult to comprehend, it’s much harder to understand the landscape of fifty years ago, when phone calls traveled by wire, when there were no computers, one phone company and two and a half television companies. There was no public television or radio. Audiences, Minow reminds us, were passive – they gathered around the single set in the house and watched in silence.

When Minow came to the FCC, it was a group wracked by scandal – previous commissioners had been fired for corruption. Minow’s relationship was a highly personal one with President Kennedy. He recalls a meeting with Kennedy and Commander Alan Shepard, recently returned from the first American voyage into space. Kennedy was enroute to a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters, and asked Minow what he thought Kennedy should say to the broadcasters. He told him, “Mr. President, tell them that this is the difference between a free and a closed society: when the Soviets send people into space, we don’t know whether they succeed or fail. In the US, we let people see and hear what’s going on.”

Kennedy gave a brief speech to the NAB which used Minow’s talking points and got a standing ovation. Minow’s infamous speech didn’t get quite as warm a reception. Minow reminds us that Sherwood Schwartz, producer of the television show Gilligan’s Island, honored him by naming the sinking ship on his show the S.S. Minow.

Why give such an incendiary speech? Television was the dominant medium of the era. The televised Kennedy/Nixon debate had decided the election. But there was little discussion about public interest and public responsibility on the part of broadcasters. Minow’s contribution as an FCC chairman was to try to expand choice – licensing the UHF spectrum, early cable TV systems and satellite television. When Kennedy invited him to visit the space program, Minow observed that satellites were more important to sending a man into space, because they permitted sending ideas into space, and ideas last longer than people. Minow notes that there’s a strong possibility that the recent events of the Arab Spring were a product, in part, of satellite communication.

Both Minow and Kennedy had lived in cities where there was a strong public television statement. They both assumed that public television would spread throughout the country, but there was no public TV in New York, LA or Washington DC. When Minow left the FCC, he went on to serve on the board of governors of the Public Broadcasting Service, and on the Carnegie Foundation, one of the major funders of public broadcasting.

As someone who’s been concerned with public broadcasting for his entire career, Minow tells us that he’s deeply disappointed by the relationship between money and politics. “Politicians need massive amounts of money to buy radio and television ads. They raise money from the public to gain access to something the public owns: the airwaves.” This is an absurdity – the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide access to the airwaves to candidates. In the UK and Japan, it’s not possible to buy access to the airwaves. Much of the cost of American campaigning comes from the media.

Minow ends his remarks with praise for his host: “I wish the Berkman Center had existed 50 years ago,” because the issue of the responsibilities of broadcasters was neglected 50 years ago, and is still neglected today.

Anne Marie Lipinski, the new curator of the Niemann Center, is one of the three designated “respondents” to Minow’s remarks. She suggests that the most inspiring aspect of Minow’s remarks is the idea that we can do better – as individuals, as broadcasters. One of the challenges in helping us become better is defining the public interest. “I don’t think we have a shared ethos around te public interest in contemporary society.”

Journalist Jonathan Alter reminds us that Minow is also the father of the televised presidential debate. While we still see this important form of civic programming, most of what passes for civic discourse online is extremely poor. “The news business is the only business recognized by the Constitution and it’s largely dysfunctional.” Talk is cheap and reporting expensive, he argues – “the vast wasteland has a Tower of Babel on top of it.” Much of the news we get is “people like me babbling on MSNBC or Fox”, rather than the sort of expensive newsgathering required to report facts on the ground.

Yochai Benkler calls on a section of Minow’s speech where he challenges broadcasters to challenge their sponsors: “Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with cost per thousands and more concerned with understanding per millions.” This section points to the core tension between an American broadcast model that is anchored in markets, and the challenges of public responsibility. Public funding for media and nonprofit models tend to be foreign to American audiences. Yet there’s evidence that networks like the BBC produce some of the highest quality news content available.

Benkler provokes Alter by suggesting that there’s the possibility of producing key and investigative reporting via radically distributed methods. He suggests that the Neda Aga Soltan video, which Alter alluded to in his remarks, was an example of the power of citizen production. He (generously) references a talk I gave the week before about the complex interaction of Tunisians on the ground, activists in the diaspora and Al Jazeera – a state-funded media network – to amplify voices in Sidi Bouzid leading to the Tunisian revolution. “Because we all now carry sound, video and text generating and disseminating tools – phones – we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to close the gap between what costs a great deal of money and what we all need as citizens.”

Lipinski asks whether anyone is prepared to pay for this sort of crowd-sourced media, asking if any of us pay people whose blogs and twitter feeds we read. Minow suggests that this may be the wrong place to ask for support. He notes that the Japanese closely studied media models around the world before starting NHK and based their model on the BBC, including charging a license fee for television sets. “Other countries started building public media before they built commercial. We tacked on public broadcasting after the fact, without a way to pay for it.” This leaves us with a difficult choice: “Do you want the market to decide and provide everything? And if the market is not going to provide everything, do you want to build an alternative system?”

Alter suggests we don’t hold our breath waiting for the rise of a new public media system in the US. What’s happening instead is the fragmentation of what media exists. He points to the evening entertainment market, where big shows like Leno’s and Letterman’s are ceding ground to the Colbert Report. “It’s a move towards greater choice.” But the downside of this move is that we may be seeing a divide between elites who have access to a vast selection of media, and masses who get little critical media. “The political conversation involves a maximum of 10 to 15 million people,” he asserts, “but 130 million vote in Presidential elections.”

Ellen Goodman offers a nutritional analogy. “People don’t want to eat their broccoli, but they still might vote.” She’s suspicious of the idea that public media will produce the broccoli and be able to get people to eat it, because “public broadcasting in the US is weak and designed to be weak.” Proposals that are unrealistic but still worth making for the production of marketing of broccoli might not be directed to our existing public media institutions, she argues, because these institutions may not be capable of innovation. “It’s reasonable to ask these actors to solve our problems, but they are not going to solve them.”

Virginia Heffernan, cultural critic for the New York Times, suggests we consider not just news. When we look at television entertainment, especially HBO and Bravo, we’re no longer facing a vast wasteland. Minow invites us to imagine the forces of art, daring and imagination unleashed on the television screen, and the artistic explosion we’ve seen the last few years suggests that “television both as an art form and a public health hazard makes these things possible.”

She offers a caution to Alter’s skepticism about digital media and direct sources – we quickly found dangerous media online, like Loose Change, a video that offered the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job. But we also were able to find video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, shot and distributed by an American serviceman. “Our million dollar Baghdad bureau didn’t get the execution story right” because they were working from eyewitness testimony from individuals in the room, and that testimony wasn’t correct. The actual account of Hussein’s final words came from the video, not the reporting.

What’s key in this world of internet video, she offers, is contextualization. As the New York Times invests in international reporting, they need to make a major investment in contextualizing these images and videos. Asked by Jonathan Zittrain, our moderator, how we might take on Minow’s challenge to “do better”, Heffernan asks us to “register as a Wikipedia editor today. Twice, if you’re a woman.”

Zittrain observes that the phenomenon of Doris Kearns Goodwin, sitting next to Heffernan, registering on Wikipedia could lead to some interesting edit battles over Lincoln’s biography. Asked whether she will register as a Wikipedian, Goodwin offers, “I didn’t know I could!” (Note to Jimmy Wales – we still have work to do.) C

With three former FCC chairs in the room, Susan Crawford – introduced as a “shadow FCC commissioner” in the Obama administration – is offered the first FCC response to Minow provocations with a line about “beauty before age”. She responds to Reed Hundt with a quip about pearls before swine(!) and suggests we think about parallels between Minow’s speech in the service of a “handsome young president, with a beautiful family” and suggests that such a speech would be unthinkable nowadays. For one thing, Minow would have been speaking to the wrong people. Distribution networks are now so much more powerful than content providers, and players like Comcast now control programming and internet access. “There’s only four actors in America who have any power” around these issues of content of the media, “and they really believe that personal preferences equal good programming.”

Kevin Martin, FCC chair under George W. Bush, focused his observations on a topic dear to my heart – the state of international media. He observed that business network Bloomberg now devotes significantly more resources to overseas coverage than the New York Times. (For the record, so does the Wall Street Journal – business papers cover international more thoroughly than “general interest” sources…) Despite those coverage resources, some Bloomberg channels have had difficulty gaining carriage on some cable systems, where they are perceived as specialist content.

Reed Hundt, who chaired the FCC under President Clinton, calls his moves to force broadcasters to show three hours a week of children’s programming his way of honoring Minow’s legacy. “Mandating children’s programming turns out to be a violation of the first amendment, to my amazement.” Like Minow, Hundt was “honored” by broadcasters’ response to his work – the WB network’s show Animaniacs introduced a clown named Reed Blunt… and offered the show as evidence of their compliance with creating children’s programming.

Minow points out that lawyers end up as chairmen of the FCC because “it’s the only government agency that’s regulating a medium of communication.” Lawyers who understand the first amendment understand how treacherous it is and how complicated regulation in the space can be.

Asked to comment on Minow’s legacy, Nicholas Negroponte offers the observation that photography is a medium where artists have been the technical innovators, while broadcasting is a field where the engineers have worked out the tech while the artists were creative. What the Media Lab tries to do, he tells us, is do for computer media what photographers have done – advance the field by advancing both the tools and the creativity.

Zittrain invites Minow to comment on the rise of Twitter: “threat or menace?” Minow demurs, arguing “the more communication the better.” And he thanks us for considering these issues of public interest fifty years after he raised their importance.

Terry Fisher offers a summation that introduces several new, important ideas. New technologies, and some of the practices that surround them (though are not dictated by them) are eroding some existing, long-standing dichotomies: public/private, professional/amateur, speaker/audience, news/entertainment, university/society. There are huge benefits and costs to this corrosion. We see the collapse of oligarchies, address of systematic biases, democratization of processes. But we also have fragmentation, loss of a coherent single culture, the rise of a tower of pundit babel, and the superficiality of much programming. This move, he argues, is impossible to stop. Instead, we need to think through the new opportunities the shift presents: the ability to change who contributes to this process. And we need to figure out how to ameliorate the costs we suffer. That means creating distributed models for sifting, curating, organizing, like Wikipedia, Slashdot and academic projects like Jeffrey Schapp’s Digital Humanities project. In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover – the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage.

Martin Nowak and the mathematics of cooperation

Mathematical biologist Martin Nowak talks to us about the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation is a puzzle for biologists because it doesn’t make obvious evolutionary sense. In cooperation, the donor pays a cost and the recipient gets a benefit, as measured in terms of reproductive success. That reproduction can be either cultural or biological and the challenge to explain remains.

It may be simplest to consider this in mathematical terms. In game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma makes the problem clear to us. Given a set of outcomes where we’re individually better off defecting, it’s incredibly hard to understand how we get to a cooperative state, where we both benefit more. Biologists see the same problem, even removing rationality from the equation. If you let different populations compete, the defectors win out against the cooperators and eventually extinguish them. Again, it’s hard to understand why people cooperate.

There are five major mechanisms that biologists have proposed to explain the evolution of cooperation:
- kin selection
- direct reciprocity
- indirect reciprocity
- spatial selection
- group selection

Nowak works us through the middle three in some detail.

In direct reciprocity, I help you and you help me. This is what we see in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma. It’s no longer best to defect. As originally discovered by Robert Axelrod in a computerized tournament, the three-line program “Tit for Tat” wins:

At first, cooperate.
If you cooperate, continue to cooperate.
If you defect, defect.

While it’s a powerful strategy, it’s very unforgiving. If there’s a mistake, there’s an endless cycle of retaliation. Nowak wondered what would happen if natural selection designed a strategy. He created an environment to allow this, and permitting random errors to create a harder environment. If the other party plays randomly, the best strategy is to defect every time. But when tit for tat is introduced, it doesn’t last for long, but it does lead to rapid evolution. You’ll see “generous tit for tat” – if you cooperate, I will. If you defect, I will still cooperate with a certain probability. Nowak suggests that this is a good strategy for remaining married, and step towards the evolution of forgiveness.

In a natural selection system, you’ll eventually reach a state where everyone communicates, always. A biological trait needs to be under competition to remain – we can lose our ability to defect and become extremely susceptible to a situation where an always defect strategy can come into play. Cooperation is never stable, he tells us – it’s about how long you can hold onto it and how quickly you can rebuild it. Mathematically, direct reciprocity can come about if the benefits of cooperation, on average, outweigh the costs of playing a new round.

Indirect reciprocity is a bit more complex. The good samaritan wasn’t thinking about direct repayment. Instead, he was thinking “if I help you, someone will help me.” This only happens when we have reputation. If A helps B, the reputation of A increases. The web is very good at reputation systems, but we’ve got simple offline systems as well. We use gossip to develop reputation systems. “For direct reciprocity, you need a face. And for indirect reciprocity, you need a name and the ability to talk about others.” In indirectly reciprocal systems, cooperation possible if the probability to know someone’s reputation exceeds the costs associated with cooperation. And this only works if the reputation system – the gossip – is conducted honestly.

In spatial selection, cooperation happens based on people who are close geographically, in terms of graph theory. Graph selection favors cooperation if there’s a few close neighbors – it’s much harder to do with lots of loose collaborators. A graph where you’re loosely connected to a lot of people equally doesn’t tend towards cooperation.