Spencer Critchley

Spencer

Wonkosphere: Political Reputation – or at Least Buzz – Management

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It’s early days, but just like the record industry, American democracy is being taken apart and rebuilt by digital technology and the web.

Several trends are converging to make this possible and, I think, inevitable. All are characterized by the loss of centralized control to open and/or free systems. These include the rise of open political platforms, such as moveon.org, as an alternative to parties; and the disintermediation of news coverage via blogs, YouTube and citizen journalism. Lately I’ve been following the rise of a third trend: alternative ways of tracking candidates’ reputations. The latest example of that: Wonkosphere.

Wonkosphere graph of buzz about Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and other candidates

Wonkosphere uses patented technology licensed from the University of Arizona to track how much buzz there is about candidates, as well as the tone of that buzz. It crawls hundreds of blogs every day. To measure buzz:

[Wonkosphere] measures the proportion of buzz for each candidate in all blogs for the 24 hours preceding the latest update. Percentages for each candidate are calculated every four hours. To get the value we first analyze each blog post for each candidate, and score the prominence of the candidate’s name within the post. We sum these prominence scores across all candidates then express their scores as a percent of the total.

As for tone:

Tone measures the amount of positive and negative language used in statements about the candidate in blog posts. On the home page and top of the candidate pages, we indicate whether the tone value is high, low, or average compared to the average range of tone values for all the candidates in the last 24 hours. These values are broken out for liberal and conservative blogs.

We also calculate an average tone value across all posts each candidate for each calendar day, broken out by political persuasion of the blogs mentioning the candidate.

Wonkosphere also plans to reintroduce its “Mud Meter”, which it used in 2004 to measure mud-slinging between George Bush and John Kerry.

As I mentioned, Wonkosphere’s tech is patented (and they even trademarked “Mud Meter”), but the content is free. I don’t see any mention of plans for an open API, but that would be welcome.

As with the Wikipedia trust-coloring system (which is not limited to politics and which I wrote about here) and the Truth-o-Meter (wrote about it here), data graphics are used to powerful effect: condensing storms of information so that meaning can be seen at a glance.

And come to think of it, free, powerful data graphics generation is another trend behind technology-enabled open democracy.

How It Works

“The core of our system is a network text analysis technology developed at Arizona State University called Centering Resonance Analysis (CRA), which is licensed to Crawdad Technologies. It applies natural language processing techniques to convert blog texts into networks, then analyzes these networks to determine the relative importance of all the words in the text. This allows us to judge how much any given post is about a particular candidate, and how positive or negative the writing is. Centering Resonance Analysis has been shown in research… to be more accurate than simple ‘word counting’ methods.”

More Political Reputation-Management: The Truth-o-Meter

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Truth-o-MeterFollowing my recent post about a color-coded reputation management system* for politicians (indicating their truthfulness by the color used to display their names on web pages), I came across Politifact and its Truth-o-Meter.

Politifact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly that will “analyze the [presidential] candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.”

I found it via the techPresident blog, where Joshua Levy notes that the it could benefit by being opened up to users:

…and let them pore through the records and make the connections. As Jay Rosen’s recent overtures to crowdsourcing and the various projects of the Sunlight Foundation have shown us, the crowd is smarter than a few individuals; open up the process to them and you’ll be amazed at what they find.

And I’d like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there’s less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn’t end up visiting. A system that follows you around like, say, your name.

*Inspired in part by Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring project.

Proposal: A Politicians’ Reputation Management System

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News of computer scientist Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring system revived – and improved – an idea I’ve been playing with: automated reputation-management for politicians. The idea is to make the concept of honor meaningful again, by creating new social rewards and penalties for behavior that affects the rest of us. (It could, of course, also be applied to journalists, corporate leaders or other public figures.)

Chosen as a Top 10 blog post of the month by Carnival of Trust

De Alfaro’s system, now operating in demo form on a sample of a few hundred Wikipedia pages, ranks the trustworthiness of Wikipedia authors by measuring how long their contributions last without being edited. Text contributed by the author is color-coded for trustworthiness:

Text on white background is trusted text; text on orange background is untrusted text. Intermediate gradations of orange indicate intermediate trust values.

I think it would be useful to be able to do the same thing with politicians’ names every time they appear on the web. Here’s how I think it might be spec’d:

  • Our software would crawl the pages of factcheck.org, looking for the names of politicians.
  • The software would check to see if each name appeared in the context of a correction of an untruth/exaggeration/”misstatement”.
  • The reputation of each politician would be scored according to how many appearances his/her name made in such negative contexts.
  • Any time the politician’s name appeared on a web page, it would be displayed in a box of the appropriate color. In this case white might not be the best choice for “trustworthy”, since the politician might not be trustworthy, just unranked. So we might go spectrum-wise from green for “honest” to red for “frequent liar”. (On a relative scale – I’m not enough of a Puritan to believe there are people who are 100% honest or 100% dishonest.)
  • This color-coded display could be accomplished either on the client side or the server side: on the client side as a browser plug-in, or on the server side as an extension of the publisher’s content management system.

I think there would be a strong value proposition for both consumers and publishers. Imagine the impact of seeing your news presented this way:

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

vs.

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

And imagine the possible impact on politicians’ respect for the truth. Currently, if factcheck.org or some other organization calls you out on a fabrication, the impact is more or less safely sequestered within their limited reach. This way, the impact could spread everywhere, the way good or bad word on one’s reputation spreads through small real-world communities.

Why use factcheck.org as opposed to open ratings? If the reputation ranking were open, I think we could count on enormous amounts of abuse by partisans, including attempts to undermine all trust in the system. The people behind factcheck.org are journalism experts, and the site is avowedly non-partisan. But it might work to make the ranking system “porous” as opposed to fully open, like the new publish2 journalism community, or in fact like granddaddy slashdot. People who had themselves earned a reputation for honesty could be allowed to rank the honesty of others.

There would probably be claims, especially by those with names of an embarrassing color, that factcheck.org (or any other arbiter) is not in fact non-partisan. And so consumers might choose alternative arbiters, if it came to that. But here, too, some reputations would weigh more than others, as they always have.

Follow the Risk: Amateur Journalism & Democracy

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Adapted from a reply on John Jarvis’ Buzz Machine blog:

The Internet and cheap digital tools allow crowd-sourcing of news by amateurs, not just because the technology makes production and distribution fast, easy and cheap, but also because it diffuses risk through the crowd. So it makes any individual’s share of the risk small enough to be acceptable, and makes the small compensation (recognition, fun, etc) acceptable as well. In the same way, the net itself has been made available for next to nothing by diffusing the cost (risk) through countless servers and routers.

But in discussions of the amateur future of media there’s an issue of risk management that usually goes unexamined. Traditionally, risk has been contained by corporations (for profit or not), and individual reporters have been able to risk time, effort and potential liability because a corporation was both compensating them for and insuring them against risk.

The question for the future is how we make sure we still cover important stories if they require a lot of risk to be taken on by one or two individuals. The diffused risk model is fine – and may even be better in some ways – for reporting stories that can be reported from the outside, by amateur observers. For example: speeches, earthquakes, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.

But some of the most important stories will still require individuals to take on very large amounts of risk, including months or years of time and potentially huge liability. For example: financial crimes, political corruption or wars.

We might dismiss old ways of doing things, but we can’t just dismiss risk (I’ve noticed – and certainly been guilty of it myself – that when risk has been lost track of, hand-waving starts). In the new media world, some risks (such as printing costs) do disappear into the cloud. But only some.

Not all risks are financial. One possible outcome of the “amateurization” of news is that politically important stories stop being covered (and I’d say such a trend is already well under way, as the unit value of hard news coverage drops relative to to coverage of the nexus of sex, death, entertainment, shopping and celebrities. Not because only old-style experts can possibly report hard news, but because the risk isn’t being managed (including, I’d have to say, the risk involved in becoming an old-style expert).

This transition might lead to a financially optimal result. It might also amount to democratization in some ways, in that publishing is opened to all. But socially, the picture may not be all bright. It amounts to whether or not it matters if there remains a distinction between citizens and consumers.

I’m not saying “old ways good, new ways bad”. But neither am I saying “new ways good, old ways bad”. As is usually the case, I think the new reality is likely to be complicated. We’re going to have to find new ways to manage risks – like maintaining a healthy democracy – that will still be worth taking even after the old ways of handling those risks are gone. The “buggy whip maker” argument says that you shouldn’t try to force your fellows to pay you for economically unproductive activity, such as, by some lights, journalism. Again, not all risks are financial.

Enough of this creepy “Homeland” stuff: America is an idea

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(Cross-posted at dailykos.com.)

In 2008, let’s take back our language, too.

As far as I can tell, the first time the USA was widely referred to as the “Homeland” was when the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security. I thought it sounded creepy then, and, what with events since, it sounds even creepier now. Among the many other things that need to be fixed after Bush finally goes, we need to fix that name.

The greatness of America is precisely that it is not a Homeland. America is an idea, an idea that draws people from other places around the world. They come, and always have, because that idea is better and more powerful than any nativist myth about any physical piece of territory.

Yes, the land of the USA is spectacularly beautiful and bountiful. And yes, of course, it’s our home, and we should defend it if and when it’s attacked. But as much as we love it, our land is not what defines us, and the fact that it happens to be our home does not begin to suggest America’s true value.

What defines us is democracy, and what is best about us is democracy.

That’s the reason that terms like “fatherland” or “motherland” or indeed “homeland” have always sounded foreign to American ears. They sounded foreign not just because they were used in other countries. They sounded foreign because they are foreign to the idea of America. Because America is, first of all, an idea, not a “homeland”.

By creating legislation like the “PATRIOT Act”, turning our enemies into cartoon “evildoers” and by claiming to defend “Homeland Security”, the Bush administration has tried to shift the way we talk, and therefore think, about America. And that is a great threat to the security that matters most.

Our true homeland is freedom.