Information & Ethics committee  Where I would like to see improvements here comes down to the reporting on why I would be targeted in the first place, because compared with knocking on doors, or even using other technologies such as television or radio, that kind of interaction doesn't provide the same wealth o

Information & Ethics committee  I missed most of that question, because the call cut out. Would you mind just summarizing quickly?

Information & Ethics committee  Whatever political parties are collecting on potential voters, it should be divulged. As some of the other panellists have said, other entities do report that information under law already, and political parties should not be an exception here. It's really important that users al

Information & Ethics committee  I won't add much to the conversation here other than that I think the differentiation between something that is paid for and something that I post organically is a good way to define an advertisement.

Information & Ethics committee  I agree. I think there is a real risk in removing anonymity from these platforms. We do have to remember that they are global platforms. Protecting the identity of individuals in countries where there is less freedom of speech and less protection against violations of human right

Information & Ethics committee  I'll jump in here first. For me, it's a little bit of everything. We definitely need regulation. If the past year has taught us anything it's that we need to step in, and government has a really important role to play in regulating these platforms. I think private self-regulati

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. When I was talking about the principles supporting the algorithms, I was talking more about social media algorithms and the way those things tailor content or deliver content to users. They deliver content based on virality. If things get a lot of clicks, that means that a l

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not an expert on the legal points surrounding what you could actually do to help prevent foreign actors from making contributions to third parties or whatnot. What I do know and what I have seen in a lot of the research we've done tracking foreign influence in other countries

Information & Ethics committee  I guess I'll just jump in here for the last point. I definitely agree with Professor Dubois about the dangers of being able to link a phone number, say, to other datasets, because most people do connect their mobile to their Facebook profiles and other social media platforms. T

Information & Ethics committee  A lot of it comes down to addressing some of these bigger systemic issues around the platforms. If you can address the root cause of bad information and junk information being able to spread so quickly across social media platforms, then you could also address that while protecti

Information & Ethics committee  If we look at the U.S. and junk news being spread in swing states, this is just based on Twitter. It wasn't a Facebook analysis, but just Twitter and what people were sharing as news and information. We analyzed a couple of million tweets in the 11 days leading up to the vote.

Information & Ethics committee  As you mentioned, it's quite new. I haven't actually seen the document yet. I know that social media platforms have always fallen under safe harbour provisions that do protect them from the content that people post on their platforms. Back in the day, we considered it a positive

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think that would make sense. There is always a danger of making algorithms too public, though, because as soon as they become very public and as soon as they're really out in the open there is a whole industry built on trying to break algorithms. There is search engine opt

Information & Ethics committee  Having the human element in reviewing and auditing algorithms I think is really important. We can't just sprinkle magic artificial intelligence dust on it to solve the problem. Having this technology support human decisions is great, and that's where I see a lot of the benefit i

Information & Ethics committee  Great. Thanks for having me today. My name is Samantha Bradshaw. I'm a researcher on the computational propaganda project at the University of Oxford. I'll shorten that to Comprop. On the Comprop project, we study how algorithms, big data and automation affect various aspects