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Jonathan Zittrain and the Evils of astroturfing

Sketchbook page from last night's Zittrain lecture

In the first of many blogging experiments, and to minimize the amount of time I spend at my computer this semester – not to mention to hone my cartooning skills – I’m going to post pages from my sketchbook from some of the lectures I attend this semester. Last night’s was part of the Liberation Technology series and featured Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain discussing the ethical pitfalls and perils of crowdsourced jobs – especially ones that seem innocuous at first but actually have nefarious goals. Such as what if the Iranian government (whose involvement would obviously be kept hidden) attempted to identify protestors at a rally by building an entertaining face-matching game, or companies luring “turkers” (from Amazon’s now notorious “mechanical turk” site) to provide bogus product reviews for points or minimal (3-5 cents) return.

We are all complicit when the promise of fake online points prompts gamers to overlook their ethical responsibility to society – check out this so-sinister-it’s-laughable true story of an anti-Health Reform Organization bribing facebook game players with points to send an email to their member of congress decrying the evils of Health Care reform. In a beautiful instance of technology spawning some great metaphorical neologisms, this process is called astroturfing – because it’s fake grass roots campaigning.

Find out more about Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, here.

Can Social Media be a Catalyst for Social Change?

That was the title of last night’s talk at The Hub, San Francisco featured Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, in conversation with David Batstone, President of Not for Sale as led by Michael Kieschnick, CEO of CREDO Mobile and Urban Studies Prof at Stanford. I’ll edit my video of the talk and put it on youtube later today. For the time-pressed amongst you, the highlights are below.

Olga and I cornered Jack and David at the end to tell them about our trafficking comic, Borderland (two weeks left until our Kickstarter time limit expires – order your comic now, plug plug!), as well as to discuss the opportunities for incorporating more storytelling into social media as a way of packaging the seemingly endless torrent of tweets, posts etc. Dorsey steered me towards Posterous as a way of embedding visuals in tweets – any Posterous users out there who use it to sync their WP, twit, Fb accounts?

  • Jack Dorsey has 1.5m followers, David Batstone (inc.Not for Sale) has 120K. Both argued that often people with lower number of followers are able to galvanize action, as commitment matters more than volume:

“The power of twitter isn’t the number of people following you, it’s the potential of the universe in just one tweet” (JD)

  • The top two most followed people on Twitter are Lady Gaga and Britney Spears. Let’s hope the above point holds true there.

Products in Development:

  • Dorsey also showcased his up and coming new business, Square (click for explanatory video) – a swipe-card device that plugs into your iphone that allows you to take instant credit/debit card payments. Apparently 10k of the 1″x1″ plugins are being produced daily, so we’re to expect a deluge of them around the bay area imminently.
  • Batstone talked about his Free to Work app, which will allow users to take a picture of a product/scan its barcode and receive a graded value for how ethically it was produced. Levis get a B, Haines T-shirts – a D-. Batstone argues that this information will win hearts and minds, leading to a rise in “buycotting”: consumers using their purchasing power to influence corporate decision-making through control of demand.

Social Media Collaborations that came up:

  • Dorsey mentioned his collaboration with the US State Dept, and how SMS-enabled mobile phones have a 70% penetration rate in Iraq. The rate here in the US? Also 70%. His work in Northern Mexico has included writing SMS shortcode that stripped off localizing info from SMS messages, which could then be forwarded to both the police and an NGO, which would monitor the Police’s repsonse. 30 mins later, the SMS would be publicly posted online. This was to avoid the corruption/retribution that is prevalent in the area that prevents eyewitnesses from coming forward with information.
  • Dorsey argued that more information online would lead to more empathy, which in turn would lead to less conflict. When asked about twitter’s fascination with the mundane (tweeting about what you’ve had for breakfast etc), Dorsey countered that: “we’re just humans…these small of details of life are the commonalities that bind us”.
  • Most telling quote of the evening? Dorsey’s comment that “my greatest hope for twitter is that it’s used as a peacemaker”.
  • Batstone put the emphasis on the need for “smart activism” (as opposed to the dumb, placard-waving  alternative) interested in the win, not righteousness.

Thanks to the Hub for putting on a great event.

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