Presentation by Jonathan Breckon & Jason Leaveywww.alliance4usefulevidence.org

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Social media and public policy - - an overview of preliminary research findings

Can evidence drawn from social media enhance public services and inform the development of

public policy?

• Clarity is in short supply - a high degree of uncertainty, hype and misinformation surrounds the issue of social networks and their potential.

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Social media and public policy

CONTEXT• A significant level of social, economic and political activity now

happening on the internet. • Many organisations still grappling with potential of social media

as a communication and engagement tool. Approach still maturing - a transitional phase.

• Social networks are a small but highly visible element of ‘big data’.

• Private sector investment in tools and services to exploit big data is growing at around 16% per year and already exceeds £50 billion globally.

• Analysts point to some private sector investment in social media lacking a robust business case.

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Social media and public policy

“Free sharing, recommendation and rating of content by individuals, with that incredibly low barrier to entry, will remain a mainstay of our culture. And it will be an essential part of a government’s function to engage with and understand that flow of personal information.”

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“It appears to me that we’re at the top of the hype cycle in relation to data and open data. It’s potentially data with any number of descriptors attached: big, open, geo-tagged. You name it.“

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Social media and public policy

OPPORTUNITY

• Enhanced democratic representation.• Early warning indicators in critical public services and

infrastructure, such as health and transport.• Behavioural insights into social problems.• Knowledge sharing amongst public service users reducing

demand on the public sector.• Operational improvements to public service delivery

generally and particularly at a local level.• Fairer, ruled based processes for transactions with citizens.• Developing highly effective public information campaigns

based on accurate and localised understanding of views and behaviours.

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Social media and public policy

OPPORTUNITY

Three of the more compelling arguments:

• Real-time

• Sincerity

• Cost

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Social media and public policy

“At think-tank level and party level the use of social media research to help determine policy, not simply enhance its delivery, is already visible. It remains to be seen within government. That said, this government wrote its manifesto in early 2010 when current social media research techniques weren’t available. But I think it will come.“

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Social media and public policy

“At think-tank level and party level the use of social media research to help determine policy, not simply enhance its delivery, is already visible. It remains to be seen within government. That said, this government wrote its manifesto in early 2010 when current social media research techniques weren’t available. But I think it will come.“

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

"Social media science promises to be transformative. By harnessing datasets unprecedentedly large, linked and recent, it could make the public policy decisions that are made much more informed and data-led. However, we are far from there yet. The current methods, skills, tools - many drawn from the advertising and marketing industries - fall far short of the evidentiary standards needed by policymakers making weighty, important decisions." - Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

Three routes to using social media to generate evidence: • A collaborative tool – developing policy by wiki, for

example• A tool to carry out consultations – crowdsourcing

opinions or carrying out a poll, for example• A primary research tool – analysis of the large datasets

available, for example

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

Conceptual challenges • Data from social networks aren’t something in aggregate.• Social networks aren’t necessarily a social research

resource in their own right.

“If anyone starts talking about doing some social media research, I think it’s a mistake. You need to be much more specific than that, ask yourself what you can gain from different types of social media data. Can the question you’re asking be answered by that specific data set.”

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

Research challenges

• Decades of experience have gone into traditional research methods. Although not perfect, they are highly-evolved and we understand their limitations.

• Insights drawn from social media become useful and far more powerful when used in tandem with other insights.

• Data from social networks should be viewed as one data source in the rapidly emerging world of ‘big data’.

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Social media and public policy

“The way I think about so many of these questions is to try and relate them to solutions that we have previously arrived at in the social sciences. When we weight evidence we look at the methodologies that underlie how the evidence was generated. There is a whole theory of knowledge from looking at philosophical assumptions to do with knowledge, to margins of error in statistics, the bias inherent in questionnaire sampling and so on. Overall weighting in social media research will therefore require an overall epistemology to be able to generate evidence. A fancy word, but all that really means is an understanding of what kind of evidence we are generating and how confident we can be in it.” - Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos.

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

Methodology required

• Underlying data from social networks are the property of the owner of a site or third parties.

• Establishing information about the sample such as demographic profiles and information determining its provenance, reliability and timeliness is a challenge.

• The on/off line bias. How to correctly weight the data for the wider population that do not have any kind of presence in social media networks. Individuals behave differently in different environments and online is no exception.

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Social media and public policy

CHALLENGE

• Flexible framework

• Adoption of data-driven insights

“When it comes to the use of social media it’s doubly difficult for the civil service. Below the senior civil service you’re essentially an anonymous official. That is completely at odds with the openness and blurred personal and professional persona inherent to social media.”

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Social media and public policy

“There is strong demand from government for quantitative and qualitative research to understand how visible and important an issue is to social media users benchmarked against other public issues. They want to understand how they make decisions and who is influencing these other users in the formation of their views. But eventually I expect these public sector bodies would like to join in the conversation.”

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Social media and public policy

RISK

Privacy & a potential backlash Social media analysis is now a mainstream activity for companies, businesses, academics, intelligence agencies and governments. Awareness of the extent of this use amongst the creators of the data – the public – appears to be minimal. Is there a potential for a backlash?

A more up front approach by government about its data use and a tougher regulatory regime could reduce that liability.

“Government should ensure that when they use people’s conversation in Twitter is done so in a way that gels with the interest of that community.”

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Social media and public policy

RISK

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Social media and public policy

RISKGlobal consumer data broker plans to reveal your dataZDNet – 10 April 2013

Consumer data broker Acxiom plans to introduce a service that will reveal to people what it knows about them, according to a Financial Times report.

The company, which is based in Little Rock, Arkansas in the U.S., bills itself as an enterprise data, analytics and software-as-a-service company. It serves 47 of the Fortune 100 companies, more than 7,000 in all, and counts more than a trillion data transactions each week from 700 million consumers worldwide.Even though the company probably has a file on you, that data has never before been available to you.

In the interest of transparency -- and quite possibly spurred by a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation launched in December -- the company will open its database.

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Social media and public policy

RISK

“The most granular data is the most useful but that’s when you’re most likely to invade someone’s privacy. And we haven’t yet had a proper debate with the general public to establish if they think the ends justify the means. The government will need to be able to articulate the benefits and the proposed rules of engagement. It should take an open approach to this and not just get a load of experts together and then present it as a fate accompli.”

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Social media and public policy

RISK

“If you really want to find out how to get reliable evidence from social media platforms, there are plenty of repressive regimes you could ask.”

• The Dark Side

• Trust

• Loss of authority

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Social media and public policy

RISK• Digital exclusion

• Representation - your algorithm didn’t include me

“It’s not just a methodological issue, it’s an ethics issue. You don’t want people with the access, the time and the cultural capital to dominate any aggregated data results. In a democracy with one person one vote everyone’s voice is equal and this is why social media should never be the only source of information for a government doing social research. It’s useful but it’s never complete.”

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Social media and public policy

CONCLUSIONS Can evidence drawn from social media be used to inform the development of public policy and enhance public services?

• As things stand, no. With the right advances in understanding it is theoretically possible to generate evidence robust enough but it is unlikely to be sufficient in its own right.

• Major ethical questions are presented by current and increasing use of publicly available data.

• Major technology players such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have become actors in the public policy arena.

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Social media and public policy

RECOMMENDATIONS

• The government should take a more proactive role in shaping these emerging technologies.

• Many constituents within the public policy community, particularly researchers, require clarity to understand the ethical boundaries of conducting research using data from social networks. Especially if it is intended for government use.

• This is not a ‘take it or leave it’ scenario for government.

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Social media and public policy

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Government should take steps to bring together the skills required to develop an effective research methodology that would draw multiple academic higher education disciplines and the private sector together.

• The development of capabilities to develop and adopt data-driven insights should be done in controlled environments, similar to those used for war-gaming simulations.

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Social media and public policy

A FINAL THOUGHT

“Most of the value of big data, indeed, is likely to lie far away from Facebook and Google – in buttressing existing information systems to give us a better picture of what is happening in the real world rather than simply harvesting more data about what people believe to be the case. And blind correlations, while occasionally useful for taking a punt or devising an early warning system, will not suffice; we’re going to need our theories and ideas more than ever.”- James Harkin, director of the social trend agency Flockwatching, writing in the Financial Times, March 1 2013.