Moral critiques of computational algorithms seem divided between two paradigms. One seeks to demonstrate how an opaque and unruly algorithmic power violates moral values and harms users' autonomy; the other underlines the systematicity of such power, deflating concerns about opacity and unruliness. While the second paradigm makes it possible to think of end users of algorithmic systems as moral agents, the consequences of this possibility remain unexplored. This article proposes one way of tackling this problem. Employing Michel Foucault's version of virtue ethics, I examine how perceptions of Facebook's normative regulation of visibility have transformed non-expert end users' ethical selves (i.e., their character) in the current political crisis in Brazil. The article builds on this analysis to advance algorithmic ethical subjectivation as a concept to make sense of these processes of ethical becoming. I define them as plural (encompassing various types of actions and values, and resulting in no determinate subject), contextual (demanding not only sociomaterial but also epistemological and ethical conditions), and potentially harmful (eventually structuring harms that are not externally inflicted by algorithms, but by users, upon themselves and others, in response to how they perceive the normativity of algorithmic decisions). By researching which model(s) of ethical subjectivation specific algorithmic social platforms instantiate, critical scholars might be able to better understand the normative consequences of these platforms' power.
Big Tech companies have recently led and financed projects that claim to use datafication for the "social good." This article explores what kind of social good it is that this sort of datafication engenders. Drawing mostly on the analysis of corporate public communications and patent applications, it finds that these initiatives hinge on the reconfiguration of social good as datafied, probabilistic, and profitable. These features, the article argues, are better understood within the framework of data colonialism. Rethinking "doing good" as a facet of data colonialism illuminates the inherent harm to freedom these projects produce and why, to "give," Big Tech must often take away.
Este trabalho analisa a dinâmica de distribuição da Renda Per Capita, da Taxa de Alfabetização, dos Anos de Estudo Concluídos e da Expectativa de Vida ao Nascer nos municípios brasileiros. A estimação de matrizes de transição revelou os padrões nacionais, regionais e intrarregionais de convergência no período entre 1970 e 2000. As várias mudanças na estrutura municipal brasileira demandaram o agrupamento dos municípios em Áreas Mínimas Comparáveis (AMC). As estimações revelaram dois resultados importantes: a) convergência para as variáveis ligadas à educação, mas convergência em clubes para a Renda Per Capita e Longevidade; b) o clube de baixa Renda Per Capita, formado pelas AMC do Norte e do Nordeste, apresentou apenas um terço da Renda Per Capita de longo prazo do clube de alta renda, formado pelas AMC do Sul, do Sudeste e do Centro-Oeste.
There was substantial spatial variation in labor market outcomes in Brazil over the 1990's. In 2000, about one fifth of workers lived in apparently economically stagnant municipios where real wages declined but employment increased faster than the national population growth rate. More than one third lived in apparently dynamic municipios experiencing both real wage growth and faster-than-average employment growth; these areas absorbed more than half of net employment growth over the period. To elucidate this spatial variation, we estimated spatial labor supply and demand equations describing wage and employment changes of Brazilian municípios. We used Conley's spatial GMM technique to allow for instrumental variable estimation in the presence of spatially autocorrelated errors. Chief findings include: a very strong influence of initial workforce educational levels on subsequent wage growth (controlling for possibly confounding variables such as remoteness and climate); evidence of positive spillover effects of own-municipio growth onto neighbors' wage and employment levels; an exodus from farming areas; relatively elastic response of wages to an increase in labor supply; and evidence of a local multiplier effect from government transfers.
Technologies enable unprecedented democratization of cultural practices and the production and use of intellectual property. The creation of an effective system of sustainable norms for digital copyright is a major challenge due to four phenomena: copyright complexity, sidestepping, knowledge gap, and awareness gap. With its multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together researchers, practitioners and stakeholders, reCreating Europe, a recently launched EU Horizon 2020-founded project, will deliver ground-breaking contributions towards a clear understanding of what makes a regulatory framework that promotes culturally diverse production, and optimizes inclusive access and consumption. This online workshop is organized by Work Package 6 ("Intermediaries") of the ReCreating Europe project. WP6 focuces on the public and private regulatory framework of online intermediaries, with a special focus on the Copyright in Digital Single Market Directive, Member States' regulations as well as the private ordering of intermediaries. The work package intends to follow a comparative legal and social sciences & humanities approach. Researchers are keen to analyse intermediaries' role (rights and duties) in enhancing lawful consumption of protected subject matters online and in tackling infringing user behaviours. In this workshop, we will share and discuss the research findings of the WP6 members so far. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS João Pedro Quintais is a Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, Institute for Information Law (IViR), where he focuses on information law matters, including intellectual property and the application of copyright in the online environment, intermediary liability and the regulation of new technologies. He also leads ReCreating Europe's Work Package 6 focusing on intermediaries and copyright. João Carlos Magalhães is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, in Berlin. His research focusses on the relationship between datafication and ...
AbstractThis Opinion describes and summarises the results of the interdisciplinary research carried out by the authors during the course of a three-year project on intermediaries' practices regarding copyright content moderation. This research includes the mapping of the EU legal framework and intermediaries' practices regarding copyright content moderation, the evaluation and measuring of the impact of moderation practices and technologies on access and diversity, and a set of policy recommendations. Our recommendations touch on the following topics: the definition of "online content-sharing service provider"; the recognition and operationalisation of user rights; the complementary nature of complaint and redress safeguards; the scope of permissible preventive filtering; the clarification of the relationship between Art. 17 of the new Copyright Directive and the Digital Services Act; monetisation and restrictive content moderation actions; recommender systems and copyright content moderation; transparency and data access for researchers; trade secret protection and transparency of content moderation systems; the relationship between the copyright acquis, the Digital Services Act and the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act; and human competences in copyright content moderation.
Platform policies contain the spelled out rules about what is allowed and prohibited on a service. As such, they constitute both a normative framework as well as a means of public communication by platforms. Studying the evolution of the increasingly complex web of policies that platforms have developed can hence allow us to trace the emergence of a specific normative order, i.e. the ways in which platforms are governing user activities and public speech and communication dynamics, as well as identify how they have reacted to public controversies, political debates and legal regulation. A major difficulty for studies on the historical evolution of platform policies, however, is the availability of past policies which is often needed for a thorough analysis, as the policies change quite frequently and even their names and locations often differ from the current version. Although platforms have become increasingly transparent about how and when they are changing their rules and have begun to offer public archives of the different historical versions of their policies, these archives often do not contain all of the past versions of a policy and relying on them entails trusting the platforms to provide complete information. Thus it remains hard to systematically study how the rules and norms of platforms have changed over time. Our Platform Governance Archive (PGA) aims to address this need by providing a comprehensive and uniformly collected dataset of all of the historical versions of platform policies which does not rely on the platforms' own public records. While we are working on extending the scope of the archive to include more platforms and policies, the current dataset described in this paper contains all of the historical versions of three types of policy documents (Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, Privacy Policies) by four major platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram) in the time period from the inception of each policy until the end of 2021. Our paper gives a comprehensive overview of the conceptual layout of the Platform Governance Archive and details the automated and manual processes of data collection and data cleaning, as well as our practical and theoretical challenges. Starting with how we define a relevant change to a platform policy, we lay out how we used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to identify past versions of platform policies, collect them, and then automatically and manually check for changes. Specifically, we explain how we mapped the URLs of the selected policies and they have changed over time, putting together a puzzle of how they were renamed and relocated. We then detail the automated scraping process of these URLs from the Wayback Machine as well as the automated diff-checking which we employed. The last step of the data cleaning consisted in a manual revision of the automatically identified versions based on our definition of a relevant change, which was necessary because a significant amount of data noise remained. The paper furthermore describes how the platforms' ways of displaying their policies have changed over time by increasingly turning them into interactive pages and multi-page documents, as well as how we addressed the data collection challenges that arose from this. The paper furthermore provides an overview of the resulting v1 corpus the Platform Governance Archive which is a dataset consisting of 354 policy documents with a total of 6,036 pages. By detailing the structure of our data repository on Github, we offer a guide on how to access and work with the data. We furthermore describe the characteristics and details of each platform and policy type to account for the fact that each of them have undergone a specific historical development. Lastly, our paper also presents a structural analysis of some of the general trends and patterns which are visible in the dataset over a time period of up to almost two decades on the document level. Using a quantitative analysis, we analyse how the change frequency and the character count of each platform policy has developed over time. A comparative visualisation of these findings allows us to show how the extent of the policies has grown over time, to identify periods of high growth and frequent changes and to draw comparative conclusions about the four different platforms. The Platform Governance Archive aims to be a resource for researchers, journalists, policy-makers, platform operators, activists, and other stakeholders as well as the general public. By offering both a comprehensive dataset and an accessible interface, we aim to offer and continue to develop this resource to enable research and public debate on the historical evolution of platform policies in order to trace down changes, to identify characteristic periods of isomorphic policies, to measure influencing factors, and to understand how specific debates, events, and legislation have influenced and manifested in platform policies.
