It’s been a rough several months for the world’s dominant social media platforms. The recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was followed by a bruising congressional testimony for Mark Zuckerberg. And Twitter’s Jack Dorsey admitted earlier this year that abuse and harassment are overwhelming the platform.

As a result, users, policymakers and activists are abuzz about potential solutions. And while many talk of regulation, Sophie Varlow and Nick Wood suggest a different approach: introducing a new product from scratch, with radically different principles.

“You can’t change things by pushing against them,” Varlow says. “You need to build a new model.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

Varlow and Wood are the UK-based community organizers behind the Commons Platform, a nascent social media platform with core values like privacy and decentralization. The Commons Platform is participating in Mozilla’s Global Sprint, an annual, distributed hackathon taking place May 10 and 11. They’ll be working from the Redmond Community Centre in London.

Varlow and Wood began thinking about the Commons Platform long before Facebook and Twitter’s latest episodes. The idea came not from specific incidents, but larger, systemic problems with today’s social media ecosystem. Like “the impacts of not having consent within tech,” Varlow explains. “Or not owning our own data. These relate to structural inequalities within society.”

“We’ve been talking about these things for years,” Varlow adds.

So how is the Commons Platform different than the status quo? “One of the central differences is that everyone would own their own data,” Wood explains. Further, the platform itself would be owned by its members. Varlow likens it to public land: “No part of it can ever be owned by any individual or group in perpetuity.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

She adds: “Because it is not driven by the attention economy, advertising, and data revenue, people are not encouraged to spend time scrolling. They can curate their content to find the things that are interesting to them and connect to people, issues, and organisations that they care about quickly.”

Privacy features will be baked in from the start. And the Commons Platform is meant for communities, not just individuals. Groups will visit to organize, openly share software, and collaborate on solutions, the duo says. Developers won’t need permission to add or edit software. “We’re putting power back in the hands of communities, so they can create solutions that make their lives better,” Varlow notes.

Currently, Varlow, Wood and collaborators are finalizing the project’s values, aims, culture and ways of working. During the Global Sprint, they’re planning to work with like-minded designers and developers to take the next step forward: “The website, the technical infrastructure, the community standards,” Varlow explains.

But the Commons Platform welcomes more than just technical volunteers — any potential user or community is welcome to share feedback and ideas and co-create the platform. “We try to break down barriers between experts and nonexperts, users and developers,” Varlow says. “After all, we want to build a more equal society.”

Learn more about the Commons Platform. Learn more about the Global Sprint.

The post Social Media Decentralized: Spotlight on the Commons Platform appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I left Facebook in 2013, less for my own sake than for what my presence on the service was doing to others. I knew that anyone who “liked” my page could have their data harvested in ways they wouldn’t necessarily approve.

Over the past five years, people have not only become aware of this devil’s bargain but accepted it as the internet’s price of admission.”So what if they have my data,” I saw a graduate student ask her professor this week. “Why is my privacy so important?”

Bully for you if you don’t care what Facebook’s algorithms know about your sex life or health history, but that’s not the real threat. Neither Facebook nor the marketers buying your data particularly care about what you do with your clothes off, whom you’re cheating with or any other sordid details you may find embarrassing.

That’s the great fiction of social media: That you matter as a person. You don’t.

The platform cares only about your metadata, from which they can construct a psychological profile and then manipulate your behavior. They have been using and selling even the stuff you thought you were sharing confidentially with your friends in order to identify your neuroses and neurotic vulnerabilities and leverage them against you.

That’s what Facebook markets to its customers. The company has been doing it ever since its investors realized that, as owners of a mere social network, they would become only multi-millionaires; to become billionaires, they’d have to offer something more than our attention to ads. So they sold access to our brain stem.

With 2.2 billion active users, Facebook knew it had a big-data gold mine. While we’ve been busily shielding what we think of as our “personal” data, Facebook has been analyzing the stuff we think doesn’t matter: our clicks, likes and posts, as well as the frequency with which we make them. Looking at this metadata, Facebook, its psychologists and its clients put us into different psychographic “buckets.”

That’s how they came to be able to predict, with about 80% accuracy, our future behaviors, including whether we’re going to go on a diet, vote for a particular candidate or announce a change in sexual orientation. From there, the challenge is to compel the lagging 20% to fall in line — to get all the people who should be going on a diet or voting for a particular candidate to conform to what the algorithms have predicted.

That’s where companies like Cambridge Analytica come in. They paid thousands of people to take psychology tests and to surrender their own and their friends’ Facebook data. Then they compared all this data to infer how each of us would have answered that psychology test. Armed with our real or algorithmically determined psychological profiles, Cambridge Analytica surmised our individual neurotic makeups. And they figured out how to terrify each and every one of us.

That’s the greater collateral damage of social media. It’s not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product or vote for one candidate or another. It’s that their techniques bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy and appeal straight to our reptilian survival instincts.

These more primitive brain regions respond only to primitive stimulus: fear, hate and tribalism. It’s the part of us that gets activated when we see a car crash or a horror movie. That’s the state of mind these platforms want us to be in, because that’s when we are most easily manipulated.

Yes, we’ve been manipulated by ads for a century now. But TV and other forms of advertising generally happened in public. We all saw the same commercials, and they often cost so much that companies knew they had to get them right. Television networks would themselves censor ads that they felt would alienate their viewers or make fraudulent claims. It was manipulative, but for the most part, consumer advertising was aspirational.

Facebook figures out who or what each of us fears most, and then sells that information to the creators of false memes and the like, who deliver those fears directly to our news feeds. This, in turn, makes the world a more fearful, hostile and dangerous place.

To ask why one should care is a luxury of privilege. Data harvesting arguably matters most when it’s used against the economically disadvantaged. It’s not just in China that social media data are used to evaluate credit worthiness and immigration status. By normalizing the harvesting of data, those of us with little to fear imperil the most vulnerable.

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, a friend of his expressed surprise that people were surrendering so much personal data to the platform. “I don’t know why,” Zuckerberg said. “They trust me. Dumb …”

We may have been dumb to trust Facebook with our data in the first place. Now we know they’ve been using the data to make us even dumber.

Reposted from the Rushkoff list, subscribe here

Photo by Book Catalog

The post How Facebook Exploited Us All appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This month’s revelations that Facebook had sold, released or lost control of millions of users’ data has left many people wanting out — but wondering whether they can leave the social media platform they and hundreds of millions of others around the globe depend on.

I’m here to tell you can.

I left Facebook in 2013, declaring on CNN that “we are not the customers, we are the product.” And we now have proof this is true. Facebook was not breached or hacked by Cambridge Analytica. The Facebook platform was doing exactly what it is programmed to do: Harvest our data, identify our psychological triggers and then manipulate our behavior.

As users are finally realizing, neither Facebook nor the compliance professionals purchasing your data from them care about your secrets or your sex life. They care only about your raw data, from which they can infer your psychological vulnerabilities.

It’s not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product, or vote for one candidate or another. It’s that the techniques they are using intentionally bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy, and go straight to our reptilian survival instincts. Our neuroses are like blind spots. Once identified by the social media psychologist, they become access panels to the more impulsive parts of our brains.

Facebook can target and trigger us through terror. The network’s techniques don’t appeal to our logic or empathy, but to our deepest-held fears. Their tactics are aimed directly at our brain stems — the part of our brain that acts and thinks like a reptile: Fight or flight. Kill or be killed.

We’ve seen the impact of this technology on our social and political discourse. We may have real things to be angry about, but when these are the only stimuli delivered by our social media, we can end up living in a state of perpetual paranoia and rage. No, it’s not fun. But it’s also a tremendous public health hazard and threat to democracy. Democracy requires an informed, thinking public.

So, whether you want to be a more responsible citizen, or simply a happier person, you owe it yourself to get off Facebook any way you can. And I’m here to tell you, you can do it. You are going to be OK. It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s better.

First off, you won’t be pinged by those friends from second grade whom you have spent the last 40 years trying to forget. Is that sad? Maybe. Until we migrate to a less corrupted online directory of names and emails, people you no longer know may have a harder time locating you.

But that means you will be forced to spend your time and energy interacting with people who are in your life. Real world interactions allow you to establish rapport and bond in ways that just don’t happen online. Several hundred thousand years of human evolution have been dedicated to face-to-face interaction. That’s the only way for pro-social hormones such as oxytocin to get released into the bloodstream instead of the stress hormones, such as cortisol, which are released by social media use.

If the teenagers in your life can’t reach you through social media, they will ultimately use it less. The less they use social media, the less likely they may be to be depressed or commit suicide. Another great ancillary benefit of getting off Facebook.

Facebook’s useful function is that it lets us find and communicate with people — like an interactive phone book. Luckily, there are many ways to gain that same utility, without making ourselves so vulnerable to psyops.

If Facebook is the only way your relatives let you interact with them, then that’s already a problem. Accepting this restriction on your relationships is acquiescing to a system that values pings more than contact. You can still email, Skype and FaceTime, share photos through web pages, iCloud and photo streams, and create Google groups and live hangouts. But even more important and fulfilling, you should accept fewer substitutes for getting together with your loved ones in real life.

You also get your time back. Every minute off Facebook is a minute you can choose to spend with another person, forging psychologically healthy relationships instead of submitting to a company that is actively trying to undermine them.

Best of all, you get to live life free of the constant psychological abuse inflicted by companies that mean to undermine your social relationships, and governments that mean to undermine your faith in democracy, government and human nature. You get to leave the dark place, and step back into the light of day.

Pressuring Facebook in this way also serves those who may be less privileged than you — people whose home loans, parole hearings and immigration status is affected by the data they thought they were sharing in confidence through social networks such as Facebook. Recently, China revealed how their citizens’ social media connections and “likes” are used to determine their eligibility for jobs and visas.

You say, “That can’t happen here,” but it is already beginning. And if we are still a free country, then you should feel free to leave Facebook without consequence.

You can do it. I know you can.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo
Reposted from the Rushkoff list, subscribe here

The post You can ditch Facebook. It’s OK. You will survive appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Today’s social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society.

Bots (short for software robots) have been around since the early days of computers. One compelling example of bots is chatbots, algorithms designed to hold a conversation with a human, as envisioned by Alan Turing in the 1950s. The dream of designing a computer algorithm that passes the Turing test has driven artificial intelligence research for decades, as witnessed by initiatives like the Loebner Prize, awarding progress in natural language processing. Many things have changed since the early days of AI, when bots like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, mimicking a Rogerian psychotherapist, were developed as demonstrations or for delight.

Today, social media ecosystems populated by hundreds of millions of individuals present real incentives—including economic and political ones—to design algorithms that exhibit human-like behavior. Such ecosystems also raise the bar of the challenge, as they introduce new dimensions to emulate in addition to content, including the social network, temporal activity, diffusion patterns, and sentiment expression. A social bot is a computer algorithm that automatically produces content and interacts with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly alter their behavior. Social bots have inhabited social media platforms for the past few years.”

Video on the research

Photo by Basil Gloo

The post Essay of the Day: The Rise of Social Bots appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking.  I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community.  This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future.  However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages.  However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars.  Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models.  Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation.  However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.  I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before!  Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.

The post Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking: How the Internet Should Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies has an open call for international research fellows who during a 3 month stay in 2017 conduct critical studies of digital and social media’s role in society.

The WIAS aims to contribute to bringing about a paradigm shift from big data analytics to critical digital and social media research methods and theories. Digital and social media research at WIAS uses and develops critical theories, is profoundly theoretical, and discusses the political relevance and implications of the studied topics.

The WIAS’ Critical Digital and Social Media Studies Fellowship Programme is aimed at current and future research leaders, who engage in independent critical thinking. It enables them to undertake independent and collaborative research on original topics in a stimulating academic environment in London.

Funded scholarships are only awarded as a result of open calls. Priority will be given to well-defined projects that result in published research outputs and demonstrate benefits for the applicant, her/his university and the University of Westminster’s research interests.

The regular scholarship duration is 3 months (start between 9 January and 1 May 2017). Later start dates are not possible.”

Application deadline: Friday October 28, 2016.

More information, details and application can be found here.

Photo by Di_Chap

The post Call for Applications: International Research Fellowships in Critical Digital & Social Media Studies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“At an event yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn promised that Labour would deploy digital technology to mobilise Britain’s ‘most visible General Election campaign ever’. He said:

‘Labour have now lost two successive general elections…we will not win elections solely by relying on the methods and strategies of the past. And I’m pleased to say that our leadership campaign is leading the way in harnessing the advances of new technology so that we can organise political campaigning like we’ve never seen before in Britain…the challenge is to now take this forward to the next general election. Labour under my leadership will utilise the advances of digital technology so that we can mobilise the most visible, targeted and effective General Election campaign in British history.‘

While it is of some concern that Corbyn didn’t get more specific as to precisely how Labour can mobilise its massive and growing membership, nor how it can leverage new media for a comparative advantage on the ground and circumvent an often hostile mainstream media, as with much elsewhere, it’s clear that his offer is significantly more substantial than that of his rival, Owen Smith.

Let me be honest. As much as I like Jeremy Corbyn, fundamentally I don’t think that one person at the top of an organisation can make the difference between winning and losing. Nor can one person be sufficient to determine the future of what is now Europe’s largest centre-left party. What I do believe however, and this seems more sensible than anything I’ve heard about how Owen Smith could become Prime Minister, is that the Corbyn candidacy comes with a very unique dividend: a much larger membership – and with it more money and a potentially superior ground campaign – as well as the affordances of a social movement. More of that in a moment.

As I’ve written previously, it is this dividend which is Labour’s ‘get out of jail’ card. It might not lead to a parliamentary majority after the next General Election – after all that’s for the public to decide – but it is the answer to a decades-long crisis of social democracy more generally and the Labour party in particular.

What is the scale of that crisis? Well, Labour have lost seats at every single general election since 1997. That’s four elections and nearly two decades. While Cameron was a talented enough leader – after all he led his party for ten years – the rot set in well before he was hugging hoodies and riding huskies. Labour, under Tony Blair no less, lost forty-six seats in 2005. That wasn’t because the Tories offered anything new or because Michael Howard dazzled, he was only a slight improvement on his two predecessors, but because Britain was already tiring of New Labour. How else do you explain John Major winning more votes in 1997 than Blair eight years later? As I’ve said before, Labour dominance at the beginning of the century was probably more a result of Tory torpor than Labour talent.

Five million votes were lost between 1997 and 2010, and that was before the Scotland fiasco last year where the party lost forty out of forty-one seats – automatically rendering tragi-comic any future interventions by Ed Miliband regarding electability. People talk about Corbyn polling in the high twenties as a disaster, but they seem to have forgotten that’s precisely what Labour under Gordon Brown actually won in the 2010 general election. That was with a relatively united party and a mass media not perpetually beset by foaming wrath.

It’s clear that something seismic has shifted since the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then we have seen the same story that unfolded after the two major economic crises of the Twentieth Century: 1929 and 1971. A global crisis of capitalism has unravelled the prevailing orthodoxy, and with it how Labour understands the best way to run an economy and deliver rising living standards. As to when the party will find an answer and adapt this time round – as it previously did in 1945 and 1997 – remains unclear. I maintain you can see its outlines with the Corbyn project.

New Media is More Than Social Media

So, back to the Corbyn leadership and some of its unique advantages. One commonly hears the refrain that if Twitter was a decent indicator of public opinion, Ed Miliband would have won a healthy majority at the last general election. I agree. Twitter is no decent barometer of public sentiment – especially when age is an increasingly predictive indicator of party political preference. But to view this as what is meant by new media under Corbyn, and the opportunities it confers, is to disregard not only a rapidly changing area around media consumption but, put simply, how effective organisations now operate.

As Daniel Kreiss recently put it, ‘With digital convergence and technological change, all political communication practices, from advertising and field canvassing to direct mail, have taken on new technological dimensions and are now premised in some way on digital media, data and analytics’. There is no such thing as ‘digital organising’ or ‘digital activism’, just organising and activism. These are technologies that are now so fundamental to our lives that they have become ‘mundane’ – for some a new technology becomes transformative precisely at the moment it is taken for granted. To see the digital element of organising, persuasion and mobilisation as somehow distinct from the real thing is, in 2016, a misnomer. What is clear is that UK politics has significantly trailed events in the US over the last decade. Similarly, as Tim Ross identifies in his excellent book ‘Why the Tories Won’, Labour had trailed behind the Tories in deploying new media at the last election. With Corbyn as leader that gap, so the argument goes, could be overcome. That claim was repeated at yesterday’s event.

So, as someone who has researched this field for over five years – and as a response to yesterday’s digital media event – I’ve drawn up a list of proposals that Corbyn’s Labour should introduce focusing specifically on new media.

This list is informed by broader thinking about building left hegemony, not only within Labour but also in civil society more broadly. I’m speaking here to Owen Smith supporters as much as Corbyn ones. Some of you have asked me what I think needs to be done, so here it is. This, in part, is how we prepare to win.

1. Establish a Campus Recruitment Program: GradLAB.

This program would focus primarily on computer science departments, seeking out individuals who care about progressive issues and causes. The pitch to these young people, students but also graduates, junior academics and researchers, would be a simple one: come to volunteer and work for us so that we can build a set of technologies and processes not only capable of winning a general election, but changing minds and values across the country. Let’s engineer a new country. It can’t be left to serendipity that talented people in this field stumble across party politics and activism – and anyway, there aren’t enough of them – they must be actively sought out. These graduates would work on things like the party’s data and analytics platforms, data integration, APIs and field tools. They would also feed into the party’s ‘digital leaders’ program (see point 3) as well as a more digitally empowered Labour Students operation.

2. Re-establish an annual NetrootsUK Event.

Between 2011 and 2013 there were several ‘NetrootsUK’ events across the country. These were modeled on the annual political convention in the US, ‘Netroots Nation’, originally organised by a community orbiting the US blog the Daily Kos (the event was initially called the YearlyKos).

While NetRoots has proved an enduring success in the US, running every year between its inception in 2006 and earlier this month in Atlanta, Georgia, the UK equivalent failed to really get going. For me that offers, in microcosm, the gulf between what has happened in the US over the last decade in relation to progressive politics and the new media space, where significant advances have been made, and the UK. I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the first event at Congress House in 2011, but I think NetRoots would make far more sense in the present political environment, including not only anti-austerity groups and single issue campaigns, but also unions old and new, Corbynistas, Greens, and SNP activists. Politics has only got more interesting since 2011, and I think that would be reflected in the event. While the UK events had previously partnered with the likes of 38 Degrees, Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and the TUC, this seems to have created an aversion to a politics of disagreement and persuasion (the only politics that matters). A similar event, jointly hosted by unions, parties and other third sector groups, should happen – and with the same intentions in mind. This time, however, there will need to be a space for politics and, yes, ideology. It would be fantastic if not only Labour, but the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems, as well as groups like Compass and Momentum could be partners in such an event. Ideally, more than simply an annual event in London, NetRootsUK would be something that happens on a relatively regular basis in every major UK region, if not city.

3. Creation of a Digital Leaders Program in the party.

If Labour is to establish a genuine advantage with new media, not only nationally but at the local level too, talented amateurism needs to be polished and professionalised. What we’ve seen in the last five years is the emergence of a layer of activists that are intelligent content creators, operating at the interface between increasingly mediatised politics and journalism. While journalists have always held political commitments, sometimes stated and explicit, for the new generation that is now more true than ever before. Is Milo Yiannopolous a writer or an activist? How about Owen Jones? Paul Mason? Laurie Penny? Cenk Uyghur? Molly Crabapple? This phenomenon, which spans both the left and the right, is less to do with a revolving door between media and politics – thats nothing new – but the fact that modern political journalism is increasingly hybrid: it aims to inform but also to act. When Owen Jones tweets a facebook event for a protest he is facilitating collective action in a way which, until recently, we thought only organisations could perform. That is not to say that organisations aren’t necessary – they are as important as ever for sustained, compelling action – but that the worlds of politics and media increasingly overlap.

Paul Mason understands such individuals, those already mentioned as well as politicians like Pablo Iglesias (who started his political career on the TV show ‘La Tuerka’ ) and Yanis Varoufakis, as ‘networked individuals’. I agree with that label and think it cascades all the way down to individuals operating in local and hyperlocal activist-media contexts. What holds for these people – just as with the likes of Iglesias and Jones albeit in a different way – is that they are able to channel resources and information in ways that suit them and their politics to an extent that is significantly higher than is true for the general public. While everyone’s personal bandwidth to communicate and broadcast is widening in the digital environment, there are now individuals whose bandwidth is bigger than organisations. This is new.

More importantly, these networked individuals aren’t just influencers who come laden with social and media capital, but everyday people who allow contemporary social movements – from Black Lives Matter to Oxi – to achieve rapid scalability. They are the modern day ‘bridge leaders’ that Belinda Robnett identified as fundamental to the US civil rights movement. They are creatives, writers, video and podcast producers, designers and developers. One of the most exciting things about the groundswell of support around Corbyn, and other UK-based events such as IndyRef in 2014, was how the networked youth (and I understand this to mean the under-50s generally, but millennials in particular) suddenly engaged in massively increased communicative output. More than just Facebook posts and tweets, they created videos, blogs, podcasts. They campaigned using new media, created apps and convened conferences. In the case of Labour under Corbyn much of this must be formalised, trained and empowered. That’s where the Digital Leader Program comes in.

Right now CLP branches and Momentum groups will be using generalists: people familiar with Photoshop, video editing and content writing. The problem with that is people who are competent with Premier Pro (video editing software) tend to be less able at writing copy or collecting and analysing data. What Labour must offer these activists – networked individuals operating in local contexts – is training and certification. Very quickly this will become a training program, with its own academy, where party members are trained in a range of new media practices regarding campaigns, persuasion, infrastructure, data collection and mobilisation. Here they will learn about things like analytics, web development, content strategies and production. And all for free. In the short term, given this will be an important undertaking involving a significant transfer of communicative power to everyday people, it will be limited to a digital leaders program (Labour DLP) with numerous individuals in each CLP offered the opportunity to undergo a prototype training course including video production and editing, Photoshop, crowdfunding campaigns and web development. Each of these will be modules with certification.

One element of persuading those presently critical of Corbyn, and the dividend the party as movement will bring, is to make clear that the opportunities of new media also extend to candidates ‘downstream’ from Westminster elections. This new, large cohort of digital leaders will help MSPs, AMs, mayoral candidates and councillors win elections up and down the country. They will also, as an ancillary point, empower other campaigns and activist efforts that Labour members choose to involve themselves in. This network of digital leaders will interact with the party’s graduate program as outlined in point one, although there would be an open – and easy – applications process that is open to members of all ages and backgrounds. Individuals from minority backgrounds would be favoured, this being a first step in getting more BME members, as well as those from working class backgrounds, into elected office.

4. Establish a new media and technology incubator in Labour party HQ: LabourLAB.

In 2014 the Republican Party announced the launch of Para Bellum Labs. While the name of that project was unfortunate, it was also the name of a pistol produced by Nazi Germany, the concept was an impressive and original one. Para Bellum was intended to be an autonomous operation that operated both within and apart from the party. This would allow it to develop a different culture and serve as the incubator of new technologies for the Republican Party.

Similar, then, to a start up, Para Bellum Labs recruits highly skilled staffers by claiming its work is of significant importance to American democracy. This would also hold true in terms of the core beliefs behind LabourLAB – a similar operation – and how it would recruit. What specifically would this incubator do? It would take data and figure out how to harness it in order to change outcomes in elections; work on tools that empower local party democracy; upgrade the digital infrastructure of the Labour Party; and create processes and technologies by which Labour activists could communicate better among themselves, with other civil society actors and with the electorate.LabourLAB would inject the party with a different working culture in relation to new media and the relationship between analytics, data, communication and mobilisation. It would help create many of the tools and processes necessary in any fundamental disruption of British politics.

5. Hire a party Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

This individual would, at the highest level, be accountable for the party’s digital media, data and analytics operations, as well as delivering on the architecture outlined in the rest of this article – from local digital leaders to LabourLAB, and, eventually, regional directors of new media. A world class technologist in their own right they would work closely with not only the NEC and party leadership, but also the New Media Advisory Council (see point 8).

6. Creation of a Head of New Media (Battleground Constituencies).

This individual would be one of several answerable to the party’s new CTO and, ultimately, NEC. They would be accountable for new media in fifty constituencies isolated by the end of 2016 that Labour would be looking to win at the next general election. They would work not only with the CTO and new technology incubator above them, but also digital leaders across the fifty relevant constituencies below them. Again, this would be the beginning of a bigger process with heads of new media operating on a regional basis that serve as bridges between a massively enhanced party headquarters and empowered, well-resourced local party operations. In the future ‘battleground constituencies’ would be only one of these positions, but it is sensible that it is the first. This individual would be responsible for implementing new media strategies in each constituency – starting immediately – delivering content strategies that are locally relevant. These strategies would ultimately be coordinated with digital leaders in each constituency.

7. Creation of a party donation site for crowdfunding and microdonations: BeRed.

ActBlue is a political action committee (PAC) established in 2004 that enables anyone to raise money online for the Democratic Party candidates of their choice. In spite of that, it is independent of the party and does not endorse individual candidates. Over the last twelve years, ActBlue has raised more than US$1.1 billion for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations at various levels of politics, making it the single largest source of funds in US politics.

The last twelve months have shown a pressing need for a similar platform here in the UK. While rules around party spending are different this side of the Atlantic, crowdfunding has already played a significant role in internal party elections (Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and 2016, as well as Tom Watson last year and recent NEC elections); paying the costs for a recent legal challenge by five new party members who chose to contest the NEC decision to exclude them – and 126,000 others – from this month’s leadership election; and by Momentum, most recently in paying towards some of the costs for their ‘The World Transformed’ event at Labour party conference. Elsewhere the recent Deliveroo Strike in London saw its strike fund entirely crowdfunded.

Just as the Democratic Party has ActBlue, Labour now needs BeRed: a crowdfunding and donation platform for Labour party candidates, projects and various efforts undertaken by allied organisations and actors in the party’s orbit. Each party member – in addition to enjoying a membership number – would also automatically get a BeRed number and identity as well as be added to its mailing list. Were the party membership to reach one million before the next general election this would be a huge, instant community for crowdfunding and fundraising. Not only would it pay for various electoral efforts at local, regional and national levels, but it would also help resource the kinds of projects which are now fundamental to Labour becoming a genuine social movement at the local level: food banks, literacy classes and breakfast clubs. How this happens – and where – will, of course, be up to local party members. The ability to create assets and content for local crowdfunding efforts would be one of the original modules on the Digital Leaders Program.

The platform would also be used by affiliated organisations such as the Fabians, Labour Students, LGBT Labour and the Coop Party, with this new, disintermediated network helping to finance a flourishing party ecology at every level. The platform would not be limited to party members, but would be open to any member of the public – whether that means funding a project or starting one.

8. The Creation of a New Media advisory board (New Media Advisory Council).

This would be drawn up from world class academics and practitioners who would discuss best practice from around the world and how it can be adapted and deployed in a British context. The New Media Advisory Council would meet once every two months and would liaise with the party’s CTO and LabourLAB to discuss and measure progress in the party’s new media operation, the potential prototyping of new projects, and potential obstacles and opportunities that are on the horizon. Those on the council would include people from both the UK and beyond. The likes of Andrew Chadwick, Manuel Castells, Tiziana Terranova, Francesca Bria, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Ada Colau, Daniel Kreiss, and Joe Rospars should all be extended invitations.

Final thoughts

Already, the movement behind Corbyn is without precedent and has deployed new media in hitherto unseen ways in UK politics. In spite of that, the current trajectory doesn’t indicate a sufficient architecture to leverage the party’s growing membership, broadcast its message or circumvent – where necessary – an often hostile mainstream media.

What is now needed is the institutionalisation of what has been, so far, emergent and organic activism. The movement behind Corbyn now needs to create a discernible architecture for leveraging new media to not only win a general election, but transform civil society and dramatically shift public attitudes. I believe that with the institution of new actors at the national level (a new CTO, LabourLAB, regional CTOs), local level (Digital Leaders Program and ChangeLAB), with new technologies (BeRED) and new events (a revivified NetRootsUK) that process can be started.

All of the suggestions here, as well as being aimed at the Corbyn leadership and those who support it, are also intended for those backing Owen Smith or who remain sceptical of the possibilities that a party as social movement brings. It is now incumbent on us, as those supporting Corbyn, to visibly demonstrate the advantages of the party’s new direction, and, importantly, show how it confers new opportunities and advantages downstream to candidates seeking to win elected office at every level, from councillors to mayors and MPs. It is now incumbent on Corbyn’s team, and his movement, to advocate an architecture for the incipient energies his leadership bid has re-energised, and what the party can concretely achieve before, during and after the next general election.

The post Recruit, re-tweet, re-nationalise: Eight ideas for Labour’s new media strategy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Caitlin Dewey writes:

On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”

Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy.

Now, as if it needed further proof, the satirical headline’s been validated once again: According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.

Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”

To verify that depressing piece of conventional Internet wisdom, Legout and his co-authors collected two data sets: the first, on all tweets containing Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by Bit.ly, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

And that map showed, pretty clearly, that “viral” news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. (I’m really only typing this sentence for 4 in 10 people in the audience.)

Read the full article here

Photo by mkhmarketing

The post 6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the abstract:

“In this article, we review the workplace battleground and explore the potential of social media for mobilizing social movements in labour conflicts and beyond. By conducting a case study with empirical accounts obtained from the 2010–2011 British Airways cabin crew dispute in the United Kingdom, along with secondary sources, we discern social media in the workplace as a contested field. Inquiring into the unfolding dynamic of social media and workplace conflict, we investigate the mobilizing prospects of theoretical concepts like ‘distributed discourse’ and ‘accelerated pluralism’ through the analytical prism of our interviews. Our analysis of these empirical accounts will tease out certain empowering potentials in the use of social media to shape discourse and mobilise movement. However, we also note that these same communicative actions may challenge internal union authority, generate counter-mobilising efforts and constitute an integral part in exposing both our private and working lives to the processes of marketisation and commodification.”

Photo by Rosaura Ochoa

The post Essay of the Day: Striking with Social Media appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Yet only in the twisted logic of the startup economy could a company with around $500 million of revenue per quarter—and more, most recently—be called a failure. That’s half a billion dollars for a tiny application that simply lets people send out 140 characters to each other. The economic activity it has generated is nothing short of miraculous.

But that’s not enough for investors who expect recoup 100 or even 1,000 times their original investment in the company. To do that, Twitter must grow. Somehow, it must turn itself from a simple, popular, and profitable way for more than 300 million people to broadcast messages into something still bigger—even if it has to risk killing what people love about Twitter in order to do so.

This is why I couldn’t help but grimace that morning I saw Twitter’s founders smiling on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as the company celebrated its IPO and each of them became billionaires. Among them, these guys had upended journalism with Blogger, and credit with Paypal and Square. Here they were throwing in with the biggest industry of them all. When you get to ring the opening bell on the exchange and bask in the applause of the traders on the floor, it’s not because you have “disrupted” something. It’s because you have confirmed that—at least for a few—the game is still working. As the dealer is sure to cry out at the casino for all to hear, “We have a winner!”

But becoming such a winner—even playing the startup game to begin with—condemns the founders of a company to chase growth above all else. That’s the core command of the highly accelerated digital economy.

This is why a company like Uber can’t simply be satisfied helping people get rides. It must instead establish a monopoly in the taxi business so it can “pivot” to another vertical such as delivery services, logistics, or robotic transportation. Airbnb can’t just help people find places to stay, but must colonize city after city and deregulate its entire sector. A social media platform like Facebook must pivot to become a data miner; a messaging app Snapchat must try to become a news service; even a giant like Google must accept that its once-inspiring stream of innovations pales in comparison to what it can earn as a new holding company, Alphabet.

For Twitter, this command means finding a way to grow a business that may already be full-grown. What if half a billion dollars a quarter really is all the world wants to spend on tweets? But that is not an option. Instead, the company must pivot toward new potential growth areas, at the expense of the market it already has.

And so Twitter users are confronted with a news reader through which they’re supposed to glean the headlines. Or a new, annoying feature called “Twitter moments”—an algorithmically derived stream of greatest hits, which is little more than a thinly veiled opportunity to fold in “Sponsored Moments,” meaning commercial messages masquerading as organic content. Now the company is working on live-streaming video ads, again valuing growth over user experience.

Maybe it’s this very drive toward growth that is pushing users away. For the first time Twitter’s user base has begun to decline, from 307 million users down to 305. It’s just a tick, of course, but in the wrong direction.

If Twitter were to value the sustainability of its enterprise over the growth prospects of its shares, it wouldn’t have to invest so much of its revenue in new, outlandish features, and would have a lot more to show in profit. Heck, it might even be able to offer a dividend.

Last week, Dorsey told investors on his conference call that he wants Twitter to become “the planet’s largest daily connected audience.” That’s supposed to give them hope for the future. But when the hope of a company is based on it becoming the biggest thing in the whole world, chances are the opportunity for genuine prosperity has already been lost.

Originally published in The Atlantic

The post Twitter is not a failure appeared first on P2P Foundation.