Open Password – Friday February 11, 2022
#1028
Frances Haugen – Moral Compass – Facebook – Conscience – Willi Bredemeier – Whistleblowers – Functionality of Democracy – Vladimir Putin – Xi Jiping – Social Media – Regulation and Legislation – Mental Health – Algorithm – Collateral Damage – Google – Yelp – Pintarest – Civic Integrity Department – Hate and incitement – Congress – Wall Street Journal – Cryptocurrency – Luminate – Whistleblower Aid – Conspiracy theories – George Soros – Engagement Base Ranking – Congressional elections – Storming of the Capitol – Attempted coup – Developing and emerging countries – India – Ethiopia – Myanmar – Persecution of Muslims – Violence against ethnic groups – Disappointment with America – Meta – Telegram – Edward Snowden – National Security Agency – Politics – Media – Donald Trump – Populism – Political polarization – Freedom of expression – EU – Content responsibility
EBSCO – IFIS – FSTA – Reaxys – LexisNexis PatentSight – Nielsen – Media Equity – News Corp – Apple News – IDG Communication – Selling Simplified – Thomson Reuters – Springer Nature – Open Access in the Americas – ZoomInfo – MarketingOS – Outsell – Dow Jones – ESG – Sustainability Scores – SASB – Financial Firms – Wall Street Journal – Arabesque S-Ray – University teaching – Classic textbooks – Lecturers – Students – TIB – DZHW – BMBF – MINT subjects – E-books – Digital teaching materials – Copyright – Open Access Textbooks – Libraries – Björn Huß – Frank Dölle
- Title
Woman of the Year 2022/2021: Frances Haugen
With mountains of material and a clear moral compass, Facebook’s illegitimate actions were exposed – “If you overcome your fear of dying, everything becomes possible. This gave me the freedom to say: Do I want to follow my conscience?” – How do we manage to become a bit like Frances Haugen?
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International News
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Dow Jones: Launching Sustainability Data to Optimize Global Environmental, Social and Governance Investing
University teaching: Classic textbooks continue to be important, e-books are more of a supplement
Woman of the Year 2022/2021:
Frances Haugen
With mountains of material and
a clear moral compass, Facebook’s illegitimate actions were exposed
“If you overcome your fear of dying,
anything becomes possible. This gave me the freedom to say: Do I want to follow my conscience?”
to become a little like Frances Haugen?
By Willi Bredemeier
Frances Haugen
It can be explained why Frances Haugen, of all people, became the whistleblower of the year, and if you take her performance into account, she became the woman of the year 2022/2021 (at least for Open Password). Their achievement is to fully expose the damage that Facebook has done to the functioning of democracy in Western countries. These threats to democracy caused by the invalidation of the concept of truth on social media platforms and their promotion of hatred and agitation there are likely to have outweighed the threats to the democratic form of government posed by Putin, Xi Jinping and other autocratic rulers in recent years. However, unlike in geopolitical contexts, Western democracies have it in their own hands to make social media socially and publicly acceptable through stricter regulation and legislation.
The bigger, more difficult question to answer is why none of Facebook’s 58,000 employees were able to do anything like Frances Haugen. There were definitely other whistleblowers on Facebook and at least one group was temporarily formed that resisted company policies that were perceived as illegitimate. However, these isolated initiatives did not gain public acceptance like Frances Haugen. While Haugen’s campaign was running, additional independent studies emerged about the negative consequences of Facebook use, including the threat to the mental health of teenage girls.
In the following I will focus more on the person Frances Haugen. It is true, however, that the time was ripe for their revelations, as the fatal consequences of the Facebook algorithm and the acceptance of social collateral damage by Facebook’s management for the purpose of maximizing advertising revenue were known in principle and the attitudes of politicians and the media towards Facebook had become more critical.
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Self-confidence, competence and a clear moral compass – commitment to higher-level values and economic independence.
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What made it possible for Frances Haugen to achieve something special?
- Exceptional confidence, exceptional competence and clear moral compass. Haugen was already considered a child prodigy in college because she individually beat her entire class in guessing games. As a member of a debate team, she refused to take positions that contradicted her moral beliefs. Or she spent so much time searching for a justification for a position that was compatible with her values. After studying computer science and business administration, she joined Google, where she helped develop a patent that improved the ranking of search results. She later was a successful product manager at Yelp and Pintarest. When Facebook tried to recruit her, she replied that she would come, but only if she could work in the Civic Integrity Department (CID). In view of the increasing public criticism, Facebook founded this to counter the mass false reports and hate messages appearing on its platform. Haugen: “I felt compelled to take an active role in creating a better, less toxic Facebook.” After she decided to go public, she appeared to be very organized in both the collection of internal documents in the planning and implementation of her campaign, with which she reached Congress, the Wall Street Journal and later the wider public as well as the EU and British Parliament.
- Commitment to higher-level values and economic independence. Haugen’s parents were professors who also talked about scientific matters at the lunch table. When Haugen entered college, she had no idea how to make small talk. This may have facilitated their commitment to abstract values and made it impossible to immerse themselves in reference groups for whom values are one thing and their own actions are something completely different. After her academic career, Haugen’s mother became a Protestant pastor who supported her daughter when she struggled for a long time about whether she should go public with Facebook’s internal documents. Shortly before publishing her materials, Haugen invested in a cryptocurrency and used her winnings to gain economic independence, which made it easier for her as an individual to come into conflict with a multi-billion dollar high-tech corporation. Haugen is currently supported by Luminate, a philanthropic organization that promotes reforms in high-tech companies in the United States and Europe. The same applies to Whistleblower Aid, which represents Haugen’s legal interests pro bono.
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Steeling through personal misfortune – The sheer extent of Facebook’s illegitimate actions.
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- Steeling through personal misfortune. After an allergic reaction, Haugen almost bled to death and suffered nerve damage to his hands and feet. To cope at home, she hired a part-time helper, with whom she developed a close friendship. When the pandemic hit the world, he fell for conspiracy theories while surfing social media and believed that George Soros was running the global economy. Haugen realized she could no longer reach her friend. The desire to protect others from her friend’s wrong path was another reason for her to want to make Facebook better. She later said about her illness: “If you overcome your fear of dying, everything becomes possible. This gave me the freedom to say, ‘Do I want to follow my conscience?’” She has since largely recovered from her illness, although she remains hampered by her neuropathy.
- The sheer scale of Facebook’s illegitimate actions. As an employee of the Civic Integrity Department, Haugen offered a number of suggestions to combat the spread of misinformation and hate information, only to have her suggestions shot down. Other members of the CID resigned and ultimately stopped making any suggestions. Or they moved to another company. In addition, the CID was largely underequipped. Had Haugen and the Civic Integrity Department succeeded in their step-by-step approach to reforming Facebook’s algorithm, would the company have responded more constructively to their suggestions? Doubts are appropriate because the basic principle of the Facebook algorithm is to bring people with the same opinions together and to separate people with different opinions (“engagement-based ranking”). Within the groups that have been made homogeneous, strong incentives are created to stand out from the others with increasingly strong emotional and affirmative statements, so that the tendency towards radicalization of groups is inherent from the outset. This is all done in order to keep users on your platform for as long as possible in order to maximize advertising revenue. The algorithm promotes the exact opposite of communication that relies on the rational exchange of arguments and the willingness of all participants to learn from each other.
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Partly responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the persecution of ethnic minorities in developing countries.
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In the 2020 Congressional elections, all CID resources were focused on this issue. From Haugen’s point of view, the CID failed spectacularly because in this case, too, Facebook did not think about subordinating its profit interests to the common good. When the Civic Integrity Team was disbanded, Haugen decided to go public and began systematically collecting internal materials for this move. In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published “The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation” based on internal materials provided by Haugen.
Haugen holds Facebook’s platform partly responsible for the “storming of the Capitol,” the first coup attempt experienced by the “mother of modern democracy” (2021). This failed because, despite the political polarization caused by social media, there were still many Democrats in responsible positions in the USA (“Democrats” in both senses of the word).
Haugen found the effects of the Facebook platform in developing and emerging countries to be worse than the undesirable developments in Western democracies, for which Facebook is partly responsible. In 2020, Facebook paid 3.2 million man-hours to combat misinformation, but only 13% of those were spent combating misinformation in foreign markets. The elimination of false information failed in some countries because Facebook dominated the market in a country, but hardly anyone in the company knew the dominant language there. While many Americans were gradually introduced to social media and most of them knew that lies were also being told on the social media platforms, so they had developed at least a “partial immunity” from the hate speech and misinformation on the Internet, many Hindi in India and many Ethiopians overwhelmed by social media. According to Haugen, the idea that online information was false or misleading was beyond her imagination. As a result, from Haugen’s perspective, the messages spread on Facebook increased the persecution of Muslims in India and violence against ethnic groups in Ethiopia. According to Haugen’s research, the same applied to the persecution of the Muslim minority in Myanmar.
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The United States as the great disappointment.
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Haugen advocates for strong regulation of Facebook, now renamed Meta, not for breaking it up, as even small Facebooks can be very dangerous, as the calls to kill posted daily on Telegram show. Rather, Facebook’s algorithm must be subject to state control and the company will have to pay high fines if it does not comply with binding requests to delete problematic content. Haugen sees herself less as a political activist than as a provider of information and education. In the future, Haugen would like to support citizen initiatives that make young people sufficiently intellectually and mentally resilient in their use of social media.
Frances Haugen is the second whistleblower to be named Open Password’s Person of the Year. In 2013, Edward Snowden was named “Man of the Year” after he made public the National Security Agency’s limitless spying on allies and its own citizens. It should be critically noted that the control of the secret services and tech companies by politicians and the media was not enough and it only took two whistleblowers to make public misconduct that was both scandalous and a threat to democracy. When two of the last major threats to democracy come from the United States of all places, I feel particularly affected because I grew up in a country whose citizens were deeply authoritarian. Like many of my generation, I oriented myself towards the wonderfully casual Americans who seemed to make everything possible. Our disappointment was even deeper during the Donald Trump years.
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Social media must be responsible for the content on their platforms, just as traditional media is responsible for their content.
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Will the upcoming stricter regulation of social media be sufficient to ensure that false and hate information no longer occurs or is identified and deleted as soon as possible? Furthermore, will the influence of populism and political polarization decline in Western democracies? Again, there are grounds for doubt, especially since the USA is the first to be called upon and the Americans represent an excessive form of freedom of expression. Impetus for stronger regulation than expected from the USA is already coming from the EU. Facebook and Co. cannot ignore the upcoming EU directives, especially since they generate a significant portion of their sales in European countries.
Personally, I believe that the EU requirements as they are now emerging are also not sufficient. In my view, social media must radically reposition itself in order to become common and socially acceptable. This can only be achieved if they are held responsible for the content on their platforms – as is the case with traditional media, whether in print or online format.
The question remains why the employees of the National Security Agency and Facebook did not put up greater resistance, even though everyone knew that their management massively disregarded generally accepted values. This is obviously a rhetorical question, because there are many ad hoc examples in which facility-related special morals have become a matter of course for almost all employees. Unfortunately, conformity and loyalty to one’s own institution, regardless of any collateral damage in the outside world, is the norm. The whistleblower, on the other hand, is an absolute exception and perhaps only a few of them will be successful.
This leads me to the further question of how the individual willingness to take responsibility can be strengthened against group pressure inside and outside of institutions and how more people than before can gain a clear moral compass that determines their actions. In other words: How do we manage to become a little like Frances Haugen?
International News
EBSCO Information Services and IFIS Release FSTA with Full Text
EBSCO Information Services has released FSTA with Full Text. This new resource provides access to full-text for the food and nutrition science database. FSTA with Full Text includes food-focused scientific content across a host of related fields including biotechnology, food safety, omics technologies, pet foods, sport science and sustainability.
Elsevier announces its collaboration with LexisNexis PatentSight. In March 2021, Elsevier launched its initiative to strengthen the existing patent coverage in Reaxys. The content expansion resulted in an increase in patent coverage and ensures pharmaceutical and chemical companies do not miss competitive intelligence insights.
Nielsen Launches Diverse Media Equity Program
Nielsen announces the launch of its Diverse Media Equity program, which is designed to elevate the visibility of diverse-owned media companies with advertisers and agencies. The initiative includes measurement of diverse media historically excluded from investment and funding certification fees of diverse-owned media.
News Corp Expands Apple News Licensing Deal
Users of Apple News+ will continue to see publications like the Wall Street Journal through the service, as Apple has signed a new expanded licensing deal with News Corp. News Corp also makes the UK’s Times available under Apple News+. Items from the New York Post and The Sun are also viewable in Apple News under the free offering.
IDG Communications Acquires Selling Simplified
IDG Communications announced it has acquired Selling Simplified, a Marketing-as-a-Service platform that provides lead generation products, data services and analytics. The acquisition of Selling Simplified allows IDG to add contact and account level AI powered lead generation capabilities to its suite of intent-based marketing technologies.
Thomson Reuters Reports Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2021 Results
Thomson Reuters reported results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2021: Strong revenue and sales growth for the fourth quarter and full year. Full-year total company revenue up 6%/organic revenue up 5%. Fourth-quarter total company revenue up 6%/organic revenue up 6%.
Springer Nature has agreed to two Transformative Agreements which further pave the way for achievable and sustainable pathways to open research in the Americas. These include the first TAs for the publisher in Canada and Colombia and follows Springer Nature’s agreement with the University of California in 2020.
ZoomInfo Launches New Account-Based Marketing Platform, MarketingOS
ZoomInfo announced the launch of MarketingOS, a new ABM platform that aligns sales and marketing teams in a unified system powered by ZoomInfo’s business-to-business data. MarketingOS helps teams target and convert leads into buyers through insight-driven orchestration and personalized engagement across multiple channels.
Source: Outsell
Dow Jones
Launching Sustainability Data to Optimize Global Environmental, Social and Governance Investing
(BIIA) Dow Jones announced the launch of its sustainability data to help the global
financial community understand the performance and impact of a company’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. The initial offering is available for asset managers to make sustainable investment decisions and to better engage the growing audience of purpose-driven investors.
The new data set provides sustainability scores and sentiment on more than
6,000 publicly traded companies. The scoring model is aligned with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards, covering five sustainability dimensions and 26 categories. Combining company-disclosed data with news from thousands of global sources, the methodology is uniquely news driven. Daily news sentiment and scoring updates ensure financial firms are basing sustainable investment decisions on information that is more timely and transparent than self-reported data alone.
With regulation on the rise, Dow Jones’s sustainability data also helps financial firms provide greater transparency about how they are accounting for sustainability risks, and integrating ESG into the investment process. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial team led the creation of Dow Jones’s sustainability scoring methodology. The data model was co-developed with ESG data and technology provider Arabesque S-Ray. Combining machine learning techniques with human expertise, Dow Jones’s unique methodology will help institutional investors build ESG portfolios with confidence.
University teaching
Classic textbooks are important, e-books are more of a supplement
(TIB) “Classic” textbooks continue to be very important for teachers and students as a medium for imparting knowledge.
How important are textbooks in university teaching today? This question is answered by the current study “Significance, use and access to textbooks at universities” , which was carried out by the German Center for University and Science Research (DZHW) in collaboration with the TIB – Leibniz Information Center for Technology and Natural Sciences on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The importance of textbooks in the technical and scientific areas is particularly high. The results show that both teachers and students still attach great importance to classic textbooks – especially for imparting basic knowledge. This is also confirmed by employees of university libraries in recent years, most of whom have registered an increasing or at least constant use of textbooks. Textbooks are particularly important in the MINT area (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, technology). However, the survey also showed that teachers attach greater importance to textbooks than students.
E-books relevant for distance teaching. Although there is a noticeable trend towards increased use of e-books, which has been exacerbated by the consequences of the corona pandemic, almost half of the teachers and students surveyed still prefer printed textbooks. E-books are therefore more of a supplement to printed textbooks and digital textbook formats are particularly relevant for distance learning.
Regardless of their form of delivery (e-book or print), textbooks are the most frequently mentioned and primarily used teaching material among teachers. For students, however, digital teaching materials (exclusive textbooks) such as PDF scripts, presentation slides or e-learning offers that provide exam-relevant knowledge in a bundled form dominate. Textbooks come in second place among students, followed by journal articles and other specialist books.
Copyright regulations in teaching, teaching, research and libraries. The vast majority of teachers surveyed are aware of the copyright regulation most relevant to courses, according to which a maximum of 15 percent of a protected work may be made available free of charge as part of teaching. One in four teachers is not aware of any of the essential copyright regulations.
The majority of students and teachers surveyed would use open access textbooks more if they were more widely available. However, the library employees surveyed are skeptical about the willingness of teachers to make textbooks they have written available via open access. This willingness could be increased in particular by changing recognition rules (e.g. through positive consideration in evaluations), a reduction in publication costs and improved technical and legal support for authors.
Study: Huss, Björn; Dölle, Frank. Importance, use and access to textbooks at universities: central results of the survey study for the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): Report December 2021. [DZHW], 2021, doi:10.2314/KXP:1788361857
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