(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift.)

A friend of mine worked for an online dating company whose audience was predominantly hetero 30-somethings. At some point, they realized that a large number of the “female” accounts were actually bait for porn sites and 1–900 numbers. I don’t remember if users complained or if they found it themselves, but they concluded that they needed to get rid of these fake profiles. So they did.

And then their numbers started dropping. And dropping. And dropping.

Trying to understand why, researchers were sent in. What they learned was that hot men were attracted to the site because there were women that they felt were out of their league. Most of these hot men didn’t really aim for these ultra-hot women, because they felt like they would be inaccessible, but they were happy to talk with women who they saw as being one rung down (as in actual hot women). These hot women, meanwhile, were excited to have these hot men (who they saw as equals) on the site. These also felt that, since there were women hotter than them, that this was a site for them. When they removed the fakes, the hot men felt the site was no longer for them. They disappeared. And then so did the hot women. Etc. The weirdest part? They reintroduced decoy profiles (not as redirects to porn but as fake women who just didn’t respond) and slowly folks came back.

Why am I telling you this story? Fake accounts and bots on social media are not new. Yet, in the last couple of weeks, there’s been newfound hysteria around Twitter bots and fake accounts. I find it deeply problematic that folks are saying that having fake followers is inauthentic. This is like saying that makeup is inauthentic. What is really going on here?

From Fakesters to Influencers

From the earliest days of Friendster and MySpace, people liked to show how cool they were by how many friends they had. As Alice Marwick eloquentlydocumented, self-branding and performing status were the name of the gamefor many in the early days of social media. This hasn’t changed. People made entire careers out of appearing to be influential, not just actually being influential. Of course a market emerged around this so that people could buy and sell followers, friends, likes, comments, etc. Indeed, standard practice, especially in the wink-nudge world of Instagram, where monetized content is the game and so-called organic “macroinfluencers” can easily double their follower size through bots are more than happily followed by bots, paid or not.

Some sites have tried to get rid of fake accounts. Indeed, Friendster played whack-a-mole with them, killing off “Fakesters” and any account that didn’t follow their strict requirements; this prompted a mass exodus. Facebook’s real-name policy also signaled that such shenanigans would not be allowed on their site, although shhh…. lots of folks figured out how to have multiple accounts and otherwise circumvent the policy.

And let’s be honest — fake accounts are all over most online dating profiles. Ashley Madison, anyone?

Bots, Bots, Bots

Bots have been an intrinsic part of Twitter since the early days. Following the Pope’s daily text messaging services, the Vatican set up numerous bots offering Catholics regular reflections. Most major news organizations have bots so that you can keep up with the headlines of their publications. Twitter’s almost-anything-goes policy meant that people have built bots for all sorts of purposes. There are bots that do poetry, ones that argue with anti-vaxxers about their beliefs, and ones that call out sexist comments people post. I’m a big fan of the @censusAmericans bot created by FiveThirtyEight to regularly send out data from the Census about Americans.

Over the last year, sentiment towards Twitter’s bots has become decidedly negative. Perhaps most people didn’t even realize that there were bots on the site. They probably don’t think of @NYTimes as a bot. When news coverage obsesses over bots, they primarily associate the phenomenon with nefarious activities meant to seed discord, create chaos, and do harm. It can all be boiled down to: Russian bots. As a result, Congress saw bots as inherently bad and journalists keep accusing Twitter of having a “bot problem” without accounting for how their stories appear on Twitter through bots.

Although we often hear about the millions and millions of bots on Twitter as though they’re all manipulative, the stark reality is that bots can be quite fun. I had my students build Twitter bots to teach them how these things worked — they had a field day, even if they didn’t get many followers.

Of course, there are definitely bots that you can buy to puff up your status. Some of them might even be Russian built. And here’s where we get to the crux of the current conversation.

Buying Status

People buy bots to increase their number of followers, retweets, and likes in order to appear cooler than they are. Think of this as mascara for your digital presence. While plenty of users are happy chatting away with their friends without their makeup on, there’s an entire class of professionals who feel the need to be dolled up and giving the best impression possible. It’s a competition for popularity and status, marked by numbers.

Number games are not new, especially not in the world of media. Take a well-established firm like Nielsen. Although journalists often uncritically quote Nielsen numbers as though they are “fact,” most people in the ad and media business know that they’re crap. But they’ve long been the best crap out there. And, more importantly, they’re uniform crap so businesses can make predictable decisions off of these numbers, fully aware that they might not be that accurate. The same has long been true of page views and clicks. No major news organization should take their page views literally. And yet, lots of news agencies rank their reporters based on this data.

What makes the purchasing of Twitter bots and status so nefarious? The NYTimes story suggests that doing so is especially deceptive. Their coverage shamed Twitter into deleting a bunch of Twitter accounts, outing all of the public figures who had bought bots. It almost felt like a discussion of who had gotten Botox.

Much of this recent flurry of coverage suggests that the so-called bot problem is a new thing that is “finally” known. It boggles my mind to think that any regular Twitter user hadn’t seen automated accounts in the past. And heck, there have been services like Twitter Audit to see how many fake followers you have since at least 2012. Gilad Lotan even detailed the ecosystem of buying fake followers in 2014. I think that what’s new is that the term “bot” is suddenly toxic. And it gives us an opportunity to engage in another round of social shaming targeted at insecure people’s vanity all under the false pretense of being about bad foreign actors.

I’ve never been one to feel the need to put on a lot of makeup in order to leave the house and I haven’t been someone who felt the need to buy bots to appear cool online. But I find it deeply hypocritical to listen to journalists and politicians wring their hands about fake followers and bots given that they’ve been playing at that game for a long time. Who among them is really innocent of trying to garner attention through any means possible?

At the end of the day, I don’t really blame Twitter for giving these deeply engaged users what they want and turning a blind eye towards their efforts to puff up their status online. After all, the cosmetic industry is $55 billion. Then again, even cosmetic companies sometimes change their formulas when their products receive bad press.

Note: I’m fully aware of hypotheses that bots have destroyed American democracy. That’s a different essay. But I think that the main impact that they have had, like spam, is to destabilize people’s trust in the media ecosystem. Still, we need to contend with the stark reality that they do serve a purpose and some people do want them.

(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift)

Ever since key Apple investors challenged the company to address kids’ phone addiction, I’ve gotten a stream of calls asking me to comment on the topic. Mostly, I want to scream. I wrote extensively about the unhelpful narrative of “addiction” in my book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. At the time, the primary concern was social media. Today, it’s the phone, but the same story still stands: young people are using technology to communicate with their friends non-stop at a point in their life when everything is about sociality and understanding your place in the social world.

As much as I want to yell at all of the parents around me to chill out, I’m painfully and acutely aware of how ineffective this is. Parents don’t like to see that they’re part of the problem or that their efforts to protect and help their children might backfire. (If you want to experience my frustration in full color, watch the Black Mirror episode called “Arkangel” (trailer here).)

Lately, I’ve been trying to find smaller interventions that can make a huge different, tools that parents can use to address the problems they panic about. So let me offer two approaches for “addiction” that work at different ages.

Parenting the Small People: Verbalizing Tech Use

In the early years, children learn values and norms by watching their parents and other caregivers. They emulate our language and our facial expressions, our quirky habits and our tastes. There’s nothing more satisfying and horrifying than listening to your child repeat something you say all too often. Guess what? They also get their cues about technology from people around them. A child would need to be alone in the woods to miss that people love their phones. From the time that they’re born, people are shoving phones in their faces to take pictures, turning to their phones to escape, and obsessively talking on their phones while ignoring them. Of course they want the attention that they see the phone as taking away. And of course they want the device to be special to them.

So, here’s what I recommend to parents of small people: Verbalize what you’re doing with your phone. Whenever you pick up your phone (or other technologies) in front of your kids, say what you’re doing. And involve them in the process if they’d like.

• “Mama’s trying to figure out how long it will take to get to Bobby’s house. Want to look at the map with me?”
• “Daddy’s checking out the weather. Do you want to see what it says?”
• “Mom wants to take a picture of you. Is that OK?”
• “Papa needs a break and wants to read the headlines of the New York Times. Do you want me to read them to you?”
• “Mommy got a text message from Mama and needs to respond. Should I tell her something from you too?”

The funny thing about verbalizing what you’re doing is that you’ll check yourself about your decisions to grab that phone. Somehow, it’s a lot less comfy saying: “Mom’s going to check work email because she can’t stop looking in case something important happens.” Once you begin saying out loud every time you look at technology, you also realize how much you’re looking at technology. And what you’re normalizing for your kids. It’s like looking at a mirror and realizing what they’re learning. So check yourself and check what you have standardized. Are you cool with the values and norms you’ve set?

Parenting the Mid-Size People: Household Contracts

I can’t tell you how many parents have told me that they have a rule in their house that their kids can’t use technology until X, where X could be “after dinner” or “after homework is done” or any other markers. And yet, consistently, I ask them if they put away their phones during dinner or until after they’ve bathed and they look at me like I’m an alien. Teenagers loathe hypocrisy. It’s the biggest thing that I’ve seen to undermine trust between a parent and a child. And boy do they have a lot to say about their parents’ addiction to their phones. Oy vay.

So if you want to curb the usage of your child’s technology use, here’s what I propose: Create a household contract. This is a contract that sets the boundaries for everyone in the house — parents and kids.

Ask your teenage or tween child to write the first draft of the contract, stipulating what they think is appropriate as the rules for everyone in the house, what they’re willing to trade-off to get technology privileges and what they think that parents should trade-off. Ask them to list the consequences of not abiding by the household rules for everyone in the house. (As a parent, you can think through or sketch the terms you think are fair, but you should not present them first.). Ask your child to pitch to you what the household rules should be. You will most likely be shocked that they’re stricter and more structured than you expected. And then start the negotiation process. You may want to argue that you should have the right to look at the phone when it’s ringing in case it’s grandma calling, but then your daughter should have the right to look at her phone to see if her best friend is looking. That kind of thing. Work through the process, but have your child lead it rather than you dictate it. And then write up those rules and hang them up in the house as a contract that can be renegotiated at different types.

Parenting Past Addiction

Many people have unhealthy habits and dynamics in their life. Some are rooted in physical addiction. Others are habitual or psychological crutches. But across that spectrum, most people are aware of when something that they’re doing isn’t healthy. They may not be able to stop. Or they may not want to stop. Untangling that is part of the challenge. When you feel as though your child has an unhealthy relationship with technology (or anything else in their life), you need to start by asking if they see this the same way you do. When parents feel as though what their child is doing is unhealthy for them, but the child does not, the intervention has to be quite different than when the child is also concerned about the issue. There are plenty of teens out there that know their psychological desire to talk non-stop with their friends for fear of missing out is putting them in a bad place. Help them through that process and work through what strategies they can develop and learn to cope. Helping them build those coping skills long term will help them a lot more than just putting rules into place.

When there is a disconnect between parent and child’s views on a situation, the best thing a parent can do is try to understand why the disconnect exists.Is it about pleasure seeking? Is it about fear of missing out? Is it about the emotional bond of friendship? Is it about a parent’s priorities being at odds with a child’s priorities? What comes next is fundamentally about values in parenting. Some parents believe that they are the masters of the house and their demands rule the day. Others acquiesce to their children’s desires with no push back. The majority of the parents are in-between. But at the end of the day, parenting is about helping children navigate the world and support them to develop agency in a healthy manner. So I would strongly recommend that parents focus their energies on negotiating a path through that allows children to be bought-in and aware of why boundaries are being set. That requires communication and energy, not a new technology to police boundaries for you. More often than not, the latter sends the wrong message and backfires, not unlike the Black Mirror episode I mentioned earlier.

Good luck parents — parenting is a non-stop adventure filled with both joy and anxiety.

(This was originally posted on Medium)

If you ever hear that implementing algorithmic decision-making tools to enable social services or other high stakes government decision-making will increase efficiency or reduce the cost to taxpayers, know that you’re being lied to. When implemented ethically, these systems cost more. And they should.

Whether we’re talking about judicial decision making (e.g., “risk assessment scoring”) or modeling who is at risk for homelessness, algorithmic systems don’t simply cost money to implement. They cost money to maintain. They cost money to audit. They cost money to evolve with the domain that they’re designed to serve. They cost money to train their users to use the data responsibly. Above all, they make visible the brutal pain points and root causes in existing systems that require an increase of services.

Otherwise, all that these systems are doing is helping divert taxpayer money from direct services, to lining the pockets of for-profit entities under the illusion of helping people. Worse, they’re helping usher in a diversion of liability because time and time again, those in powerful positions blame the algorithms.

This doesn’t mean that these tools can’t be used responsibly. They can. And they should. The insights that large-scale data analysis can offer is inspiring. The opportunity to help people by understanding the complex interplay of contextual information is invigorating. Any social scientist with a heart desperately wants to understand how to relieve inequality and create a more fair and equitable system. So of course there’s a desire to jump in and try to make sense of the data out there to make a difference in people’s lives. But to treat data analysis as a savior to a broken system is woefully naive.

Doing so obfuscates the financial incentives of those who are building these services, the deterministic rhetoric that they use to justify their implementation, the opacity that results from having non-technical actors try to understand technical jiu-jitsu, and the stark reality of how technology is used as a political bludgeoning tool. Even more frustratingly, what data analysis does well is open up opportunities for experimentation and deeper exploration. But in a zero-sum context, that means that the resources to do something about the information that is learned is siphoned off to the technology. And, worse, because the technology is supposed to save money, there is no budget for using that data to actually help people. Instead,technology becomes a mirage. Not because the technology is inherently bad, but because of how it is deployed and used.

Next week, a new book that shows the true cost of these systems is being published. Virginia Eubanks’ book“Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor” is a deeply researched accounting of how algorithmic tools are integrated into services for welfare, homelessness, and child protection. Eubanks goes deep with the people and families who are targets of these systems, telling their stories and experiences in rich detail. Further, drawing on interviews with social services clients and service providers alongside the information provided by technology vendors and government officials, Eubanks offers a clear portrait of just how algorithmic systems actually play out on the ground, despite all of the hope that goes into their implementation.

Eubanks eschews the term “ethnography” because she argues that this book is immersive journalism, not ethnography. Yet, from my perspective as a scholar and a reader, this is the best ethnography I’ve read in years. “Automating Inequality” does exactly what a good ethnography should do — it offers a compelling account of the cultural logics surrounding a particular dynamic, and invites the reader to truly grok what’s at stake through the eyes of a diverse array of relevant people. Eubanks brings you into the world of technologically mediated social services and helps you see what this really looks like on the ground. She showcases the frustration and anxiety that these implementations produce; the ways in which both social services recipientsand taxpayers are screwed by the false promises of these technologies. She makes visible the politics and the stakes, the costs and the hope. Above all, she brings the reader into the stark and troubling reality of what it really means to be poor in America today.

“Automating Inequality” is on par with Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” or Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted.” It’s rigorously researched, phenomenally accessible, and utterly humbling. While there are a lot of important books that touch on the costs and consequences of technology through case studies and well-reasoned logic, this book is the first one that I’ve read that really pulls you into the world of algorithmic decision-making and inequality, like a good ethnography should.

I don’t know how Eubanks chose her title, but one of the subtle things about her choice is that she’s (unintentionally?) offering a fantastic backronym for AI. Rather than thinking of AI as “artificial intelligence,” Eubanks effectively builds the case for how we should think that AI often means “automating inequality” in practice.

This book should be mandatory for anyone who works in social services, government, or the technology sector because it forces you to really think about what algorithmic decision-making tools are doing to our public sector, and the costs that this has on the people that are supposedly being served. It’s also essential reading for taxpayers and voters who need to understand why technology is not the panacea that it’s often purported to be. Or rather, how capitalizing on the benefits of technology will require serious investment and a deep commitment to improving the quality of social services, rather than a tax cut.

Please please please read this book. It’s too important not to.

Data & Society will also be hosting Virginia Eubanks to talk about her book on January 17th at 4PM ET. She will be in conversation with Julia Angwin and Alondra Nelson. The event is sold out, but it will be livestreamed online. Please feel free to join us there!

In March 2013, in a flurry of days, I decided to start a research institute. I’d always dreamed of doing so, but it was really my amazing mentor and boss – Jennifer Chayes – who put the fire under my toosh. I’d been driving her crazy about the need to have more people deeply interrogating how data-driven technologies were intersecting with society. Microsoft Research didn’t have the structure to allow me to move fast (and break things). University infrastructure was even slower. There were a few amazing research centers and think tanks, but I wanted to see the efforts scale faster. And I wanted to build the structures to connect research and practices, convene conversations across sectors, and bring together a band of what I loved to call “misfit toys.”  So, with the support of Jennifer and Microsoft, I put pen to paper. And to my surprise, I got the green light to help start a wholly independent research institute.

I knew nothing about building an organization. I had never managed anyone, didn’t know squat about how to put together a budget, and couldn’t even create a check list of to-dos. So I called up people smarter than I to help learn how other organizations worked and figure out what I should learn to turn a crazy idea into reality. At first, I thought that I should just go and find someone to run the organization, but I was consistently told that I needed to do it myself, to prove that it could work. So I did. It was a crazy adventure. Not only did I learn a lot about fundraising, management, and budgeting, but I also learned all sorts of things about topics I didn’t even know I would learn to understand – architecture, human resources, audits, non-profit law. I screwed up plenty of things along the way, but most people were patient with me and helped me learn from my mistakes. I am forever grateful to all of the funders, organizations, practitioners, and researchers who took a chance on me.

Still, over the next four years, I never lost that nagging feeling that someone smarter and more capable than me should be running Data & Society. I felt like I was doing the organization a disservice by not focusing on research strategy and public engagement. So when I turned to the board and said, it’s time for an executive director to take over, everyone agreed. We sat down and mapped out what we needed – a strategic and capable leader who’s passionate about building a healthy and sustainable research organization to be impactful in the world. Luckily, we had hired exactly that person to drive program and strategy a year before when I was concerned that I was flailing at managing the fieldbuilding and outreach part of the organization.

I am overwhelmingly OMG ecstatically bouncing for joy to announce that Janet Haven has agreed to become Data & Society’s first executive director. You can read more about Janet through the formal organizational announcement here.  But since this is my blog and I’m telling my story, what I want to say is more personal. I was truly breaking when we hired Janet. I had taken off more than I could chew. I was hitting rock bottom and trying desperately to put on a strong face to support everyone else. As I see it, Janet came in, took one look at the duct tape upon which I’d built the organization and got to work with steel, concrete, and wood in her hands. She helped me see what could happen if we fixed this and that. And then she started helping me see new pathways for moving forward. Over the last 18 months, I’ve grown increasingly confident that what we’re doing makes sense and that we can build an organization that can last. I’ve also been in awe watching her enable others to shine.

I’m not leaving Data & Society. To the contrary, I’m actually taking on the role that my title – founder and president – signals. And I’m ecstatic. Over the last 4.5 years, I’ve learned what I’m good at and what I’m not, what excites me and what makes me want to stay in bed. I built Data & Society because I believe that it needs to exist in this world. But I also realize that I’m the classic founder – the crazy visionary that can kickstart insanity but who isn’t necessarily the right person to take an organization to the next stage. Lucky for me, Janet is. And together, I can’t wait to take Data & Society to the next level!

There’s a joke out there that when you’re having your first child, you tell everyone personally and update your family and friends about every detail throughout the pregnancy. With Baby #2, there’s an abbreviated notice that goes out about the new addition, all focused on how Baby #1 is excited to have a new sibling. And with Baby #3, you forget to tell people.

I’m a living instantiation of that. If all goes well, I will have my third child in early March and I’ve apparently forgotten to tell anyone since folks are increasingly shocked when I indicate that I can’t help out with XYZ because of an upcoming parental leave. Oops. Sorry!

As noted when I gave a heads up with Baby #1 and Baby #2, I plan on taking parental leave in stride. I don’t know what I’m in for. Each child is different and each recovery is different. What I know for certain is that I don’t want to screw over collaborators or my other baby – Data & Society. As a result, I will be not taking on new commitments and I will be actively working to prioritize my collaborators and team over the next six months.

In the weeks following birth, my response rates may get sporadic and I will probably not respond to non-mission-critical email. I also won’t be scheduling meetings. Although I won’t go completely offline in March (mostly for my own sanity), but I am fairly certain that I will take an email sabbatical in July when my family takes some serious time off** to be with one another and travel.

A change in family configuration is fundamentally walking into the abyss. For as much as our culture around maternity leave focuses on planning, so much is unknown. After my first was born, I got a lot of work done in the first few weeks afterwards because he was sleeping all the time and then things got crazy just as I was supposedly going back to work. That was less true with #2, but with #2 I was going seriously stir crazy being home in the cold winter and so all I wanted was to go to lectures with him to get out of bed and soak up random ideas. Who knows what’s coming down the pike. I’m fortunate enough to have the flexibility to roll with it and I intend to do precisely that.

What’s tricky about being a parent in this ecosystem is that you’re kinda damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Women are pushed to go back to work immediately to prove that they’re serious about their work – or to take serious time off to prove that they’re serious about their kids. Male executives are increasingly publicly talking about taking time off, while they work from home.  The stark reality is that I love what I do. And I love my children. Life is always about balancing different commitments and passions within the constraints of reality (time, money, etc.).  And there’s nothing like a new child to make that balancing act visible.

So if you need something from me, let me know ASAP!  And please understand and respect that I will be navigating a lot of unknown and doing my best to achieve a state of balance in the upcoming months of uncertainty.

** July 2017 vacation. After a baby is born, the entire focus of a family is on adjustment. For the birthing parent, it’s also on recovery because babies kinda wreck your body no matter how they come out. Finding rhythms for sleep and food become key for survival. Folks talk about this time as precious because it can enable bonding. That hasn’t been my experience and so I’ve relished the opportunity with each new addition to schedule some full-family bonding time a few months after birth where we can do what our family likes best – travel and explore as a family. If all goes well in March, we hope to take a long vacation in mid-July where I intend to be completely offline and focused on family. More on that once we meet the new addition.