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NationBuilder connects voters, politicians, volunteers and staffers in an integrated digital system. Political parties across the globe use it to manage data and campaigns. Unlike most political technology providers, NationBuilder is nonpartisan and sells to anyone. Given recent controversy around political technology, this paper looks for empirical examples of questionable use. Drawing on a 2017 scan of NationBuilder installations globally, the study identifies three questionable uses as: (1) a mobilisation tool for hate or groups targeting cultural or ethnic identities, (2) a profiling tool for deceptive advertising or stealth media, and (3) a fundraising tool for entrepreneurial journalism. These questionable uses may require NationBuilder to revise its 'Acceptable Usage Policy' and raises broader questions about the responsibilities of political technology firms to liberal democracy.

AbstractThe word "algorithm" is best understood as a generic term for automated decision-making. Algorithms can be coded by humans or they can become self-taught through machine learning. Cultural goods and news increasingly pass through information intermediaries known as platforms that rely on algorithms to filter, rank, sort, classify, and promote information. Algorithmic content recommendation acts as an important and increasingly contentious gatekeeper. Numerous controversies around the nature of content being recommended—from disturbing children's videos to conspiracies and political misinformation—have undermined confidence in the neutrality of these systems. Amid a generational challenge for media policy, algorithmic accountability has emerged as one area of regulatory innovation. Algorithmic accountability seeks to explain automated decision-making, ultimately locating responsibility and improving the overall system. This article focuses on the technical, systemic issues related to algorithmic accountability, highlighting that deployment matters as much as development when explaining algorithmic outcomes. After outlining the challenges faced by those seeking to enact algorithmic accountability, we conclude by comparing some emerging approaches to addressing cultural discoverability by different international policymakers.

AbstractThe word "algorithm" is best understood as a generic term for automated decision-making. Algorithms can be coded by humans or they can become self-taught through machine learning. Cultural goods and news increasingly pass through information intermediaries known as platforms that rely on algorithms to filter, rank, sort, classify, and promote information. Algorithmic content recommendation acts as an important and increasingly contentious gatekeeper. Numerous controversies around the nature of content being recommended—from disturbing children's videos to conspiracies and political misinformation—have undermined confidence in the neutrality of these systems. Amid a generational challenge for media policy, algorithmic accountability has emerged as one area of regulatory innovation. Algorithmic accountability seeks to explain automated decision-making, ultimately locating responsibility and improving the overall system. This article focuses on the technical, systemic issues related to algorithmic accountability, highlighting that deployment matters as much as development when explaining algorithmic outcomes. After outlining the challenges faced by those seeking to enact algorithmic accountability, we conclude by comparing some emerging approaches to addressing cultural discoverability by different international policymakers.

Platforms and infrastructures have quickly become seminal concepts to understand large-scale computational systems. The difference between a platform and an infrastructure is subject to debate. In this article, we use the concept of the darknet to describe how infrastructure tends toward being public with other things where platforms tend to private relations. The darknet reveals these relations negatively, as we discuss, by turning these media objects into that which they desire not to be. We analyze these negative relations through the concept of the parasite developed by Michel Serres. By following how darknets parasite both platforms and infrastructure, we suggest a need to develop new concepts to understand the diversity of relations now possible in a network society.

Political parties rely on digital technologies to manage volunteering, fundraising, fieldwork, and data collection. They also need tools to manage web, email, and social media outreach. Increasingly, new political engagement platforms integrate these tasks into one unified system. These platforms pose important questions about the flows of political practices from campaigns to platforms and vice versa as well as across campaigns globally. NationBuilder is a critical case in their study. It is a leading non-partisan platform used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The case of NationBuilder in Canada analyzes how political engagement platforms coordinate the global flows of politics. Through interviews, we find reciprocal influence among developers, party activists, consultants, and the NationBuilder platform. We call this process porting. It results in NationBuilder becoming a more portable global platform in tandem with becoming an imported, hybridized part of a campaign's digital infrastructure.

This report uses video analysis and semi-structured interviews to describe a case of community use of multi-site videoconferencing. The event in 2007 connected a number of First Nation communities across Canada for simultaneous audio-visual exchange. The meeting was hosted by K-Net Services in Ontario. The research project VideoCom organized the event to study the feasibility of public meetings through videoconferencing and to document an example of community uses of the technology. Our report suggests videoconferencing creates a public sphere in these First Nations communities. K-Net Services works to develop their videoconferencing infrastructure to better support this public space. The public sphere is way of thinking about how media practices have a political effect and how they contribute to the well-being of the community. The case meeting shows a potential new opportunity to further integrate videoconferencing into community development.

Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and interviews during the 2019 Canadian federal election, we find that these partisan scenes are an active part of elections and the overall political information cycle in Canada but endure beyond election cycles. Rather than trying to sway voters of different political affiliation and influence the election outcome, Facebook users employ memes to hang-out and build community, thereby reinforcing partisanship.

Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, communicational constraints and possibilities, and political practices in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Using Maurizio Lazzarato's exploration of immaterial labour (2004), we demonstrate the need to further understand the networking of publics and their issues by considering how online platforms provide the material, communicational, and social means for a public to exist and therefore define the parameters for assembling issues and publics and circumscribe a horizon of political agency. ; Langlois, G., Elmer, G., McKelvey, F., & Devereaux, Z. (2009). Networked Publics: The Double Articulation. Canadian Journal of Communication, 34(3), 415-434. Retrieved from http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2114