Wilson Center’s Science & Technology Innovation Program

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

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NEW POLICY MEMO: Cybersecurity Issues in Social Media and Crowdsourcing

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, News and Events, Reports and Publications on April 29, 2013 at 12:00 pm

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The Commons Lab today released a new policy memo exploring the vulnerabilities facing the widespread use and acceptance of social media and crowdsourcing. This is the second publication in the project’s policy memo series.

Using real-world examples, security expert George Chamales describes the most-pressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in this space and calls for the development of best practices to address these vulnerabilities, ultimately concluding that it is possible for institutions to develop trust in the emerging technologies. From the memo’s executive summary:

Individuals and organizations interested in using social media and crowdsourcing currently lack two key sets of information: a systematic assessment of the vulnerabilities in these technologies and a comprehensive set of best practices describing how to address those vulnerabilities. Identifying those vulnerabilities and developing those best practices are necessary to address a growing number of incidents ranging from innocent mistakes to targeted attacks that have claimed lives and cost millions of dollars.

Click here to read the full memo on Scribd.

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NEW REPORT: Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Governance, Reports and Publications on April 22, 2013 at 10:58 am

priv_imgSeveral recent natural disasters have illustrated the need for humanitarian groups, volunteers and policymakers to understand privacy issues when searching for missing persons in the aftermath of these crises.

The Commons Lab and the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) at Fordham Law School have teamed up on a new report looking at these legal and policy issues. The report, “Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters,” can be found online here.

From the press release:

The report offers a roadmap to the legal and policy issues surrounding privacy and missing persons following natural disasters. It provides strategies that humanitarian organizations, private sector organizations, volunteers and policymakers can pursue to help those affected by major natural disasters.  For example, the report recommends that the United States government exercise existing legal authority to support appropriate sharing of personal information about missing persons following natural disasters.  More broadly, the report recommends that those developing technologies to share information about missing persons implement design principles that carefully balance privacy consistent with existing legal obligations. The report also calls on privacy policy makers, legislators, and regulators to take steps to clarify how privacy rules apply to missing persons activities in identified key areas so that missing persons activities can proceed without the threat of legal liability. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Boston Marathon Bombings and the Limitations of Crowdsourced Intelligence

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Technology and the Law on April 18, 2013 at 4:43 pm

In the wake of the horrific bombings at this week’s Boston Marathon, a complex web of agencies has been furiously searching for suspects. Intelligence analysis is already a challenge, and attempting to identify suspects at a massively popular public event is even more difficult. Eager to scoop this major story, news outlets have repeatedly “broke” pieces on suspects only to retract them quickly. The paucity of information has been exacerbated by dubious crowd-based efforts to aid the search.

Popular news aggregator Reddit quickly created a subReddit entitled “FindBostonBombers,” inviting community members to share information and photos of the scene before, during and after the explosions. While the forum contains multiple disclaimers discouraging racism and posting of personal information, the limitations of this type of analysis quickly became apparent. These well-intentioned efforts have led to multiple false positives, and major outlets who eagerly seized the opportunity to beat the rush have been forced to back off: the “person of interest” was in fact a local high school student. Read the rest of this entry »

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More Politicians Are Tweeting. But What Are They Saying?

In Commons Lab on April 4, 2013 at 3:55 pm
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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Congress and social media have had a rocky relationship. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had a popular Twitter account, including musings on everything from hitting a deer in his car to the History Channel, until his staff felt the need to rein it in and focus on policy. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) political downfall began with a tweet. During this year’s Super Bowl, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) accidently blasted out personal tweets to all of his followers.

The list of Twitter-based foibles goes on. One might think Capitol Hill should steer clear of fast-paced, two-way communication channels. But a new report finds use of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook by Congress members has increased dramatically.

The March report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), available here, uses data from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin to track social media use of members of the U.S. Congress. It finds that, of 541 members in both chambers, the number registered on Twitter jumped from 205 in 2009 (38 percent) to 426 in January 2013 (78.7 percent). Meanwhile, 87.2 percent of all members have a Facebook account.

CRS finds that the most prolific users of social media in Congress are Senate Republicans, who sent out an average of 1.53 tweets per day. They were followed by their Democratic colleagues, who tweeted an average of 1.49 tweets per day. In the House, Republicans averaged 1.23 tweets per day and their Democratic colleagues averaged 1.09 tweets per day. Senate Republicans also posted on Facebook most often, with an average of 0.84 posts a day. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Social Media a Cybersecurity Gamechanger?

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Foresight, News and Events, Reports and Publications on February 26, 2013 at 4:07 pm

The Commons Lab today released a new policy memo analyzing the increased potential of social media to exacerbate conflict situations and create cybersecurity threats – a potential “gamechanger” as the United States seeks to ramp up its cybersecurity efforts. The brief is the first in the program’s Policy Memo Series.

Using recent riots in India as an example, Dr. Rebecca Goolsby, a program officer with the Office of Naval Research, describes in the policy memo how social media channels can quickly disseminate false information and argues that social media users must develop a “healthy skepticism” when dealing with information from outlets like Twitter and Facebook to avoid this new brand of cyber-attack. From the executive summary:

Social media is responsible for much positive change in the world. But these new tools can be used by bad actors to foment strife and undermine stability, as seen during violent incidents in the Assam state of northeast India in July 2012. Cybersecurity efforts must take into account the growing potential for cyber-attack using social media, where hoax messages are incorporated into a stream of otherwise legitimate messages, and understand how quickly mobile apps and text services can disseminate false information. Authorities and volunteers must develop a healthy skepticism about information derived from these systems and new research and tools are needed to facilitate the self-policing of social media.

Click here to read the full memo on Scribd.

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Tweeting Up a Storm

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management on December 5, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 25, 2012

Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 25, 2012

We are inundated daily with stories from the news media about the possible impact social media like Facebook and Twitter will have on our lives. When a storm like Hurricane Sandy hits the East Coast, can this technology actually help to save lives and reduce catastrophic damages? It’s possible.

For instance, mobile devices could allow emergency responders, affected communities, and volunteers to rapidly collect and share information as a disaster unfolds. Photos and videos provided through social media could help officials determine where people are located, assess the responses and needs of affected communities—such as water, food, shelter, power and medical care—and alert responders and citizens to changing conditions.

At least that is the promise. When Hurricane Irene barreled across the Eastern seaboard in August 2011, many in the news media cited it as a pivotal moment for social media for disasters. But research we conducted on the use of social media during Irene suggests otherwise. While some emergency management departments launched new social media outreach strategies during the storm, particularly to push information out to the public, many did not change their practices radically and overall use of the technology varied. Read the rest of this entry »

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Gaming for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science

In Citizen Science, Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing on November 27, 2012 at 8:24 am

Crowdsourcing and citizen science are integrating lessons from gaming culture studies in lots of interesting ways. Since many rote tasks performed by scientists are becoming too large for individuals to complete, particularly under tighter budgets, crowdsourcing — allowing the public to participate — is a viable way of fulfilling necessary activities. Many of these tasks are still too large and complex for ordinary citizens, so citizen science and crowdsourcing often borrow concepts and ideas from gaming studies to make tasks more manageable.

These key concepts and ideas can be classified into a few broad categories. First, successful crowdsourcing and citizen science projects make their tasks fun to complete. Most adopt diverse approaches to reward participants for completing tasks. A particularly innovative approach to incentivization is to link tasks to a user profile, similar to social networking sites; this allows users to track their contributions and share their participation statistics with their friends. HealthMap’s Flu Near You application uses this idea exceptionally well, even allowing users to register using their Facebook accounts and giving users a “profile” to track their symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hurricane Sandy and Crisismapping

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management on October 31, 2012 at 4:47 pm

As Hurricane Sandy approached the East Coast this weekend, efforts were already underway to allow the mapping of geographically referenced data. A developing trend in disaster management is to allow members of the public to produce data related to their needs and location, to map disaster-affected areas, and to process the data that’s produced. This “crowdsourcing” relies on mapping platforms such as Ushahidi, Google.org’s CrisisMaps, and OpenStreetMap, but there are many such examples.

Several hours before Sandy made landfall on Oct. 29, many of these kinds of platforms were set up and ready to be used, each covering a different component of the overall response. Coordination came from Hurricane Hackers, a loose coalition that formed in the run-up to the storm. This group and many volunteers assembled a list of different crisis maps in use and different ideas and areas to which volunteers could contribute. Crisis maps were established for diverse aspects of disaster response, including shelters and evacuation zones and communications network outages, and efforts are underway to engage volunteers in the post-hurricane rebuilding.

Social media was a prominent dimension of data production. The number of Sandy-related tweets posted to Twitter was astounding, with 695,000 posted before 11:00AM on Monday, and reaching 3,200 per minute at one point. Instagram was also a documenting tool of choice by the public, with 10 photos per second being posted at the peak of the storm. Additionally, many citizens were using LiveStream to broadcast their observations in real time. With this amount of data being produced, visualization becomes a challenge; one solution for visualization and analysis is the Tweak the Tweet project. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tracking the Revolution

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Governance on September 21, 2012 at 10:41 am

With the Syrian revolution having claimed more than 21,000 lives, policymakers and foreign affairs pundits from around the world have been making the case for intervention into the war to minimize casualties and ease the cost of rebuilding after hostilities cease. Last month, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece in the Financial Times about how the United States should form a coalition of countries to provide direct military aid to the Syrian rebellion. While this is not a new idea, Prof. Slaughter also noted that, among other things, the coalition should set up and maintain a system by which citizen journalists in Syria can upload reports of what they witness — effectively crowdsourcing human intelligence.

While crowdsourcing is one of the most efficient ways to collect information about events in real time and to effectively respond to a crisis, if this coalition were to ever form, it should know that the group Syria Tracker has been forming a crowdsourced crisis map in Syria for well over a year, to good effect. Syria Tracker is a crisis mapping system that uses crowdsourced text, photo and video reports to form a live map of the Syrian revolution, while also leveraging a data-mining tool that scans English language sources on the web for reports about human rights violations in Syria. Since its website launched in April 2011, Syria Tracker has received more than 2,000 geo-tagged reports from citizen journalists and over 30,000 official news reports, which provide a living record of the progression of the revolution over time.

With a user base spread throughout the country and robust software powering it, the question is, would Syria Tracker be a good partner for an international coalition interested in crisis mapping the war in Syria? A case could be made both ways. Read the rest of this entry »

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WEBCAST: Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management on September 6, 2012 at 12:15 pm

On behalf of the Commons Lab of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (The Wilson Center), the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation, the International Association for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ESRI, TechChange, NetHope, and Project EPIC, we are honored to invite you to participate in a LIVE WEBCAST of the policy roundtable “Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management.”

Live Webcast

Unfortunately, the workshop itself is now full, but we will be making the majority of the panel discussions available live over the web from the Wilson Center webpage on:

Click on these links above to watch the live webcasts and to download copies of the agenda and background materials.

Social Media Engagement

In addition, we had so much fun with TechChange helping us with our last event (Crowdsourcing and USAID Development Credit Loans) that we’ve asked them to facilitate the social media engagement for two keynote sessons:

To watch the live webcasts of these two keynotes and submit your comments and questions:

  • Click on the TechChange Keynote links above.
  • Follow the live webcast discussion on Twitter using hashtag: #DG2G
  • You also can email your questions for the panelists before and during the live webcast: DG2G [at] TechChange [dot] org

Read the rest of this entry »

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