PD Newsletter #66: Roe v. Wade and Big Tech’s responsibilities

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Our latest essay collection Signals: sustainability in digital transformation is now available in French and Spanish thanks to our friends at Digital Impact Alliance. You can read 🇫🇷 Transformation numérique durable and 🇪🇸 Transformación digital sostenible online.

This is our fifth essay collection and we have contributions from 11 experts based in Indonesia, India, the Ivory Coast, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Mauritius, Tunisia, Switzerland, as well as the US and the UK. Unsurprisingly, the interpretations of the theme are diverse.

Amy
@amymcnichol

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Ways of working

📌 Bookmark Paul Craig’s post You don’t need a platform, you need one thing that works. It’s well-written, carefully explained and should be compulsory reading for executive teams and boards everywhere. TL;DR: “Well-executed platforms can save you a lot of time and money. They can solve a problem in one place instead of re-doing it 10 different times. However, you can end up creating a problem in one place that gets exported to 10 other products.” Learned a new word too: ‘boondoggle’.

🇨🇦 Nice post from product manager Clementine Hahn at Canadian Digital Service on Running inclusive retros. Keep retrospectives regular and blameless, she says. Super useful tips on avoiding ‘brain exhaustion’ and considering team members who are neurodiverse. Related: Monzo bank and YouGov did research into people with ADHD and their financial behaviour. Excellent to see a bank look to design services to help customers avoid charges.

✅ Sticking with Monzo, here’s an interview with Head of Writing and Customer Experience, Harry Ashbridge. Includes a history lesson on Latin, Roman Britain and taking back ownership of language from the social elite. Plus, the age-old assumption that serious things should be communicated in a formal way, and how readability tests can help organisations challenge this. Interesting: Monzo’s terms and conditions are not published unless they receive a Flesch score of 65 or higher. Practical tips from 35 minutes in.

💭 Most digital delivery teams’ go-to prototyping methods are online – maybe sketching at a push. Co-op Experience reminds us to match our method to the scenario by being clear about what we want to learn. This post describes why printing out floor plans and using figurines in a ‘desktop walkthrough’ was the method best-suited to the objectives.

State of technology

🇺🇸 Lots published about reversing the constitutional right to an abortion in America, including: urgent calls for users to delete their period tracker; whether tracker data is anonymised, stored safely, encrypted; whether it would be handed over to law enforcement, as well as arguments that other digital data is more likely to reveal an illegal abortion.

🤯 Much noise around the morality of abortion, but what about the morality/responsibilities of Big Tech? In May, BBC reported that organised groups were buying Google adverts to lure people seeking an abortion to fake clinics. Research by Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in certain states "11% of Google search results for abortion services led users to non-medical facilities that don’t provide abortion [and instead dissuade them from ending the pregnancy]. The result is 37% for Google Maps queries." Full report here. Google results showed a tiny label showing the legitimacy of clinics. Last month, lawmakers urged Google to change this so search results were genuine. Clearer policies are essential to avoid this stuff.

🤔 Using the Musk and Twitter saga as a springboard, Jamie Susskind asks how big tech should be regulated. Are powerful technologies economic entities which should be governed according to market principles? Or are they political in nature, and so should be governed by democratic norms? Particularly like the bit about “digital nationalists who see big tech as a vehicle for national greatness; digital liberals who wish to order the digital world according to notions of rights and consent; digital socialists who wish to see the most powerful technologies under common ownership; digital libertarians who argue for complete marketisation of the digital realm.”

🇰🇪 Published ahead of Kenya’s general election in August, How disinformation on TikTok gaslights political tensions in Kenya is a terrifying report by Odanga Madung for Mozilla Foundation. (Good profile on him here). It examines 130 videos from 33 accounts with a collective 4 million views that include hate speech, incitement against communities, and synthetic and manipulated content (note: this is just a small sample of problematic content). The research also includes interviews with ex-TikTok content moderators and TL;DR: “the moderation ecosystem lacks both the context and people to adequately engage with election disinformation in Kenya.”

⚖️ Related: Competing for the middle ground in internet governance by research analyst Sneha Dawda explores a “policy area that fundamentally determines whether technology is used or abused.” Pivotal quote: “If liberal democracies are committed to a free, open and peaceful internet, they must move beyond declarations or joint statements and focus on tangible interventions.”

Digital government

🇦🇺 The Australian medical app My Health Record is still not being used much despite $2 billion being spent on it. The app is supposed to make it easier for medical professionals including pharmacists to share patients’ medical information. But although around 22.65 million Australians have had a record created for them, only 12.9 million have data in them. Users were given a choice to opt out. Many did. Here’s the research which suggests where it’s failing to meet user needs.

☁️ Here's World Bank on the benefits cloud services have in accelerating digital transformation and delivering essential public services. Includes a 3-step framework as a reminder that public and private cloud procurement across the globe is determined by government objectives, performance requirements, data classification systems, and data governance laws and regulations.

🙌 Sean Boots interviews public service hero: Honey Dacanay. Honey is impressive and engaging, and Sean leads with a fitting opening line: “Honey Dacanay is a digital government legend in Canada.”

👍🏽 Thanks to Matt Eason who did a quick analysis of which UK government departments/public bodies/figures are consistently using alt text when they tweet images. Thread here (hopefully improved by now) and Google Sheet here.

😐 Digital Poverty Alliance has published its UK digital poverty evidence review 2022. TL;DR: digital poverty is as much a social problem as it is a technological one.
3 crucial findings:

1. Digital cannot be treated as a separate issue from other social, economic, and political issues.
2. Those who are digitally excluded are still digital citizens because everyone is subject to ‘datafication’.
3. The digital world can be unfair by design via unconscious assumptions.