It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, November 26, 2021
Pandemic sees criminals target online shoppers: Europol
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a sharp rise in online shopping fraud, Europe's policing agency warned on Thursday, saying criminals continued to prey on victims working from home.
Fears of catching the virus have driven a sharp increase in online shopping, which in turn has led to a major rise in delivery fraud in the second year of the pandemic, Europol said in its annual cybercrime report.
"The extension of lockdowns throughout Europe has brought with it a number of new e-commerce opportunities, which have often proven to be a target for criminals," the Hague-based agency said.
"Criminals offer goods and receive payment without delivery, defraud online shops with weak security measures, or use delivery services as phishing lures," it said.
Mobile phones in particular were being targeted, with criminal gangs posing as delivery services pretending to offer information about a parcel, but in reality hoping to get the victim's account and credit card details.
This included sending messages via SMS on mobile phones, a practice referred to as "smishing."
Meanwhile, the dark web continued to be the main market place for illicit activity, despite recent global police successes in taking down illegal websites such as DarkMarket in January.
Europol said cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Monero remained the most popular form of payment for illegal goods and services on the dark web.
Weapons appear to be increasingly traded on the dark web as well as through encrypted chat groups, Europol said.
Novel weapons, such as those made by three-dimensional printers, were also on the rise.
For instance, Spanish police in September last year busted a workshop where these weapons were being made.
There, law officials seized templates for guns downloaded from the dark web and several 3D printers, "one of which was in the process of printing a small firearm," Europol said.
It might seem that video would be a singularly influential medium for spreading information online. But a new experiment conducted by MIT researchers finds that video clips have only a modestly larger impact on political persuasion than the written word does.
"Our conclusion is that watching video is not much more persuasive than reading text," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results.
The study comes amid widespread concern about online political misinformation, including the possibility that technology-enabled "deepfake" videos could easily convince many people watching them to believe false claims.
"Technological advances have created new opportunities for people to falsify video footage, but we still know surprisingly little about how individuals process political video versus text," says MIT researcher Chloe Wittenberg, the lead author on the paper. "Before we can identify strategies for combating the spread of deepfakes, we first need to answer these more basic questions about the role of video in political persuasion."
The paper, "The (Minimal) Persuasive Advantage of Political Video over Text," is published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The co-authors are Adam J. Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science; Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Ben Tappin, a postdoc in the Human Cooperation Lab; and Chloe Wittenberg, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science.
Believability and persuasion
The study operates on a distinction between the credibility of videos and their persuasiveness. That is, an audience might find a video believable, but their attitudes might not change in response. Alternately, a video might not seem credible to a large portion of the audience but still alter viewers' attitudes or behavior.
For example, Rand says, "When you watch a stain remover ad, they all have this same format, where some stain gets on a shirt, you pour the remover on it, and it goes in the washer and hey, look, the stain is gone. So, one question is: Do you believe that happened, or was it just trickery? And the second question is: How much do you want to buy the stain remover? The answers to those questions don't have to be tightly related."
To conduct the study, the MIT researchers performed a pair of survey experiments involving 7,609 Americans, using the Lucid and Dynata platforms. The first study involved 48 ads obtained through the Peoria Project, an archive of political materials. Survey participants either watched an ad, read a transcript of the ad, or received no information at all. (Each participant did this multiple times.) For each ad, participants were asked whether the message seemed believable and whether they agreed with its main message. They were then shown a series of questions measuring whether they found the subject personally important and whether they wanted more information.
The second study followed the same format but involved 24 popular video clips about COVID-19, taken from YouTube.
Overall, the results showed that video performed somewhat better than written text on the believability front but had a smaller relative advantage when it came to persuasion. Participants were modestly more likely to believe that events actually occurred when they were shown in a video as opposed to being described in a written transcript. However, the advantage of video over text was only one-third as big when it came to changing participants' attitudes and behavior.
As a further indication of this limited persuasive advantage of video versus text, the difference between the "control condition" (with participants who received no information) and reading text was as great as that between reading the transcript and watching the video.
These differences were surprisingly stable across groups. For instance, in the second study, there were only small differences in the effects seen for political versus nonpolitical messages about COVID-19, suggesting the findings hold across varying types of content. The researchers also did not find significant differences among the respondents based on factors such as age, political partisanship, and political knowledge.
"Seeing may be believing," Berinsky says, "but our study shows that just because video is more believable doesn't mean that it can change people's minds."
Questions about online behavior
The scholars acknowledge that the study did not exactly replicate the conditions in which people consume information online, but they suggest that the main findings yield valuable insight about the relative power of video versus text.
"It's possible that in real life things are a bit different," Rand says. "It's possible that as you're scrolling through your newsfeed, video captures your attention more than text would. You might be more likely to look at it. This doesn't mean that video is inherently more persuasive than text—just that it has the potential to reach a wider audience."
That said, the MIT team notes there are some clear directions for future research in this field—including the question of whether or not people are more willing to watch videos than to read materials.
"Some people may prefer watching video to reading text," notes Tappin. "For example, platforms like TikTok are heavily video-based, and the audience is mostly young adults. Among such audiences, a small persuasive advantage of video over text may rapidly scale up because video can reach so many more people. Future research could explore these and other ideas."People are persuaded by social media messages, not view numbers
More information:Chloe Wittenberg et al, The (minimal) persuasive advantage of political video over text,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2021).DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2114388118
Removing high-profile COVID conspiracy theorists from Facebook has had only limited impact upon the spread of misleading information, research from Cardiff University has found.
Fan pages, affiliated groups and other secondary accounts set up by devoted believers continue to share problematic content about the causes and consequences of COVID-19 long after primary accounts have been taken down, the findings reveal.
The team, from Cardiff University's Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI), say these "minion accounts" also increase the resilience of conspiracists by encouraging them to diversify their presence across an alternative network of platforms, personal websites and subscription services.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Information, Communication and Society, the study examines Facebook's de-platforming of David Icke and Kate Shemirani for repeatedly violating its policies on harmful disinformation during the pandemic, and how followers of these individuals responded to the interventions to limit their overall effectiveness.
Lead author Dr. Helen Innes, Research Fellow at the CSRI, said, "Our research shows how de-platforming can sometimes reinforce support for charismatic conspiracists like Icke and Shemirani amongst their adherents. Their removal from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is framed as a badge of honor, evidence that their actions worried mainstream big tech enough to act against them.
"When this happens, our data shows how their followers mobilize by setting up new fan pages, public and private groups, sharing links and videos, and setting social media challenges in order to continue a mission which they feel is being censored.
"In this context, de-platforming has limited success in actually disrupting and suppressing the harmful behavior. Instead, for many it actually reinforces their conspiratorial beliefs, as what we term 'minion accounts' double down on spreading the disinforming material on behalf of those who have been de-platformed."
In the four weeks following the de-platforming of Icke, a well-established conspiracy theorist, researchers analyzed 11,877 public posts that mentioned him. These posts yielded 2.2 million user interactions. In the seven days following his account removal on 30 April, his public mentions on Facebook increased by 84%.
The team analyzed 1,636 post mentions of Kate Shemirani during 2020. Her profile grew in prominence during the pandemic before she was de-platformed on 4 September 2020.
In the two months following her removal, post mentions and user engagement on Facebook decreased markedly. However, the suppression effect appeared to be temporary, with signs of revival from the end of 2020, where the number of Facebook video shares increased from approximately ten in October and November 2020 to over 60 in the next two months.
Facebook's measures to stop misleading information were ramped up in 2020 in response to the pandemic and prior to the US election. De-platforming, which is Facebook's ultimate sanction, was applied to accounts assessed as posing risks to public safety, defined under its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy.
In the year to September 2020, Facebook took down more than 1 million groups for repeat violations, implementing new counter-measures intended to prevent the administrators of those groups from creating new ones.
Co-author Professor Martin Innes, Director of the CSRI, said, "There is little doubt that despite Facebook's efforts to combat the spread of harmful misinformation, more effective action is required from big tech in order to combat the deluge of conspiracy theories that we've seen over the course of the pandemic.
"If, as our study suggests, de-platforming can have complex effects in terms of both constraining the public reach of harmful content, whilst simultaneously inducing greater resilience among these groups, then further measures will need to be introduced to ensure misleading information is not allowed to thrive online."Facebook bans German accounts under new 'social harm' policy
More information:H. Innes et al, De-platforming disinformation: conspiracy theories and their control,Information, Communication & Society(2021).DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994631
The ability to remain anonymous when commenting online is a double-edged sword. It is valuable because it enables people to speak without fear of social and legal discrimination. But this is also what makes it dangerous. Someone from a repressive religious community can use anonymity to talk about their sexuality, for example. But someone else can use anonymity to hurl abuse at them with impunity.
Many people focus on the dangers of online anonymity. Back in 2011, Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark and (then) marketing director of Facebook, said that for safety's sake, "anonymity on the internet has to go away". Such calls appear again and again. Behind them is a common intuition: that debate would be more civil and constructive if people used their real names.
But my research with colleagues suggests that anonymity—under certain conditions—can actually make for more civil and productive online discussion. This surprising result came out of a study looking at the deliberative quality of comments on online news articles under a range of different identity rules.
We built a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post website between January 2013 and February 2015. During this period, the site moved from a regime of easy anonymity to registered pseudonyms and finally to outsourcing their comments to Facebook. This created three distinct phases.
In the initial phase users could easily set up multiple accounts. The comment space was, at that time, a troll's paradise. People could read an article, quickly create a username, and post whatever they wanted. If moderators blocked that username for abusive behavior, the person (or even bot) behind it could just make another, and then another, and so on. This led to a space that was unpleasant for users. So the website began to make changes.
In the second phase, users had to authenticate their accounts, but did not have to use their real name with their comments. That meant they could be anonymous to other users but could be identified by the platform. If they behaved badly and were blocked, they couldn't just make a new account and carry on—at least, not without creating a new authenticating account on Facebook. This made personas on this commenting space less disposable. They became "stable pseudonyms."
In the third phase, the commenting system was outsourced to Facebook. Huffington Post usernames were replaced with user's Facebook names and avatars. Depending on settings, comments might appear on users' Facebook feeds. While not everyone has their own face on their profile picture, and not everyone even uses their real name on their account, many users do. This third phase therefore roughly approximates a real-name environment.
Keeping it friendly
We looked initially at the use of swear words and offensive terms—a crude measure of civility. We found that after the first change the use of these words dropped significantly. This was not just because some of the worst offenders left the site. Among those who stayed, language was cleaner after the change than before. We describe this as a sort of "broken-windows" effect, after the famous theory that cleaning up a neighborhood can help reduce crime. Here, a cleaner environment improves everyone's behavior.
We then looked across all three phases at other features of individual comments, including the length of words, causation words (for example, "because"), words indicating tentative conclusions (for example, "perhaps"), and more. We were able to automate this analysis and use it to construct a measure of the "cognitive complexity" of comments. This method has been tested on the deliberations of the Swiss parliament and shown to be a good proxy for deliberative quality. We could not, of course, see the context and meaning of each individual comment, but using this method at least allowed us to do the analysis at a very large scale.
Our results suggest that the quality of comments was highest in the middle phase. There was a great improvement after the shift from easy or disposable anonymity to what we call "durable pseudonyms." But instead of improving further after the shift to the real-name phase, the quality of comments actually got worse—not as bad as in the first phase, but still worse by our measure.
A surprise finding
This complicates the common assumption that people behave better with their real names on display. We don't know exactly what explains our results, but one possibility is that under durable pseudonyms the users orient their comments primarily at their fellow commentators as an audience. They then perhaps develop a concern for their own reputation within that forum, as has been suggested elsewhere. It's possible that a real-name environment shifts the dynamic. When you make comments that can be seen not only by other Huffington Post readers but also by your Facebook friends, it seems plausible that you might speak differently.
What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behavior in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality.
There is obviously more to online discussion spaces than just their identity rules. But we can at least say that calls to end anonymity online by forcing people to reveal their real identities might not have the effects people expect—even if it appears to be the most obvious answer.Banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer to online abuse
Harmonized carbon footprints of IT software and service (ITSS) companies. Analysis is based on CDP responses of 2019 and corporate reports of the corresponding reporting period. For each company the sum of the initial carbon footprint, as provided in the corporate report, and the omitted emissions form the harmonized carbon footprint. Omitted emissions results from sources of errors such as reporting inconsistency,boundary incompleteness, and activity exclusion. See supplementary data: sheet 2.1–2.3 for calculations. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, Integrated Reporting (IR)framework, or Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards are ticked in case the corporate report was prepared in accordance with them. Credit: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26349-x
Companies in the digital technology industry are significantly underreporting the greenhouse gas emissions arising along the value chain of their products. Across a sample of 56 major tech companies surveyed in a study by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), more than half of these emissions were excluded from self-reporting in 2019. At approximately 390 megatons carbon dioxide equivalents, the omitted emissions are in the same ballpark as the carbon footprint of Australia. The research team has developed a method for spotting sources of error and calculating the omitted disclosures.
For policy makers and the private sector to set targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions, it is important to know how much CO2 companies are actually emitting. However, there are no binding requirements for comprehensive accounting and full disclosure of these emissions. The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is seen as a voluntary standard. It distinguishes three categories of emissions: Scope 1 refers to direct emissions from a company's own activities, scope 2 refers to emissions from the production of purchased energy, and scope 3 to emissions from activities along the value chain, in other words all emissions from raw material extraction to the use of the end product. Scope 3 emissions often represent the majority of a company's carbon footprint. Past studies have also shown that these emissions account for most reporting gaps. Until now, however, it was not possible to quantify these gaps or determine their causes.
Lena Klaaßen and Dr. Christian Stoll at the TUM School of Management of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a method for identifying reporting gaps for scope 3 emissions and used it in a case study to determine the carbon footprints of pre-selected digital technology companies. Their paper has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Companies publish inconsistent figures
Klaaßen and Stoll determined that many companies submit different greenhouse gas emission figures depending on where they are reporting them. They focused mainly on the companies' own reports as compared with voluntary disclosures to the non-profit organization CDP. The annual survey of companies conducted by CDP is regarded as the most important collection of data based on the structure of the GHG Protocol. Most companies disclose lower emissions in their own reports than in the CDP survey. This could be partly due to the fact that the CDP report is intended mainly for investors, while corporate reports are addressed to the general public.
In addition, CDP leaves it up to the reporting companies to choose which of the 15 GHG Protocol categories—ranging from business travel to waste disposal—are relevant to them. The studies show that this discretionary freedom results in some companies ignoring certain categories or not fully reporting the related emissions. Most companies have reporting gaps simply because they do not receive emissions data from all suppliers and do not fill the gaps with secondary data.
To close the gaps, Klaaßen and Stoll calculate the emissions by applying the values of several comparable companies which report complete figures. They take into account whether these companies are from the same industry and are comparable in terms of key indicators such as sales, profits and workforce size. To apply a uniform benchmark, they assume that GHG Protocol categories are relevant to a company unless it specifically states that emissions are non-existent in this area.
751 vs. 360 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalents
Klaaßen and Stoll applied this method to quantify the scope 3 emissions of 56 digital technology companies. Due to its high energy consumption, this industry is seen as a major source of CO2 emissions, but has frequently claimed that it is committed to a low-carbon business model. The case study investigates software and hardware manufacturers which were included in the 2019 Forbes Global 2000 list, ranking the world's largest public companies, and have participated in the CDP survey in the same year.
The calculations show that in 2019 the analyzed tech companies did not disclose more than 50% of greenhouse gas emissions along the value chain in their own reports and/or the CDP survey. Instead of the reported 360 megatons carbon dioxide equivalents (the standardized unit for all greenhouse gases), the study arrives at a total of 751 megatons. The 391 megatons discrepancy is comparable to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Australia.
Significant differences between companies
Half of the companies submitted data to the CDP that did not agree with the data disclosed in their own corporate reports. It was especially common for these reports to ignore GHG Protocol categories that contribute substantially to emissions. For example, 43 percent of the companies neglected emissions from the use of sold products and 30 percent neglected purchased goods and services.
The differences in the quality of companies' disclosures was significant. Whereas some companies omitted only one GHG Protocol category, others ignored all classes of scope 3 emissions. In the biggest discrepancy found by the researchers, the publicly disclosed emissions and the figure calculated differed by a factor of 185. The closest amounts differed by just 0.06%. Hardware companies had omitted more than half of their overall emissions, and software companies somewhat less than half. Companies that have announced ambitious CO2 reduction targets were relatively accurate in their reporting. Here the difference between the disclosed and adjusted quantities was less than 20%.
'Consider adopting binding regulations'
"The often unsystematic and inaccurate reporting of companies' carbon footprints is a problem for policymakers, stakeholders and the companies themselves," says Lena Klaaßen. "The lack of transparency makes it difficult to set realistic targets and develop effective strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the proper assessment of companies." In addition to further research on other branches, the authors believe, that a new regulatory framework is needed. "In light of the current underreporting we have observed, it seems unlikely that voluntary guidelines alone can bring about more accurate disclosures in the future," says Christian Stoll. "Consequently, policy makers should think about binding guidelines with clear rules on how greenhouse gas emissions are reported."Study says tech firms underreport their carbon footprint
More information:Lena Klaaßen et al, Harmonizing corporate carbon footprints,Nature Communications(2021).DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26349-x
In a bid to shine a spotlight on their research and make it more accessible, academics around the world are following in the footsteps of their students and taking to TikTok to share videos.
The trend is being highlighted by a team of researchers at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. The researchers looked at the different ways academics, educators and scholarly communities are using TikTok, the popular social media platform that specializes in short-form user-generated videos, to share knowledge—from Gothic architecture explainers to weight loss tips.
In particular, the researchers examined user behavior, concerns about youth engagement, data and privacy implications, the technical features of the app and the visual aspect of scholarly contribution.
"If watching YouTube is like sitting in a lecture, then using TikTok is like having a conversation," says study co-lead JP King, a sessional instructor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design who works as KMDI's data visualization and graphic designer. "TikTok provides a fun place to create new forms of accessible learning shared outside of classrooms, textbooks, and conference halls.
Led by King and Associate Professor Sara Grimes, director of KMDI, four graduate students with an interest in critical media literacy reviewed TikTok videos made by academics for the study. The team also analyzed more than 100 journal articles, books and research papers focused on TikTok, social media, technology and digital rights. Their study recommends some best practices for academics using TikTok, which ranks as the fourth most popular social media platform after YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram.
The researchers found that TikTok videos often tend to be "amateurish" and offer a peek behind the scenes. The estimated 20 million-plus daily users, who are mostly under 30, embrace a less professional approach and don't feel the need to make everything perfect. They may simply record themselves with their smartphones with no special lighting or makeup. While this might feel out of place on Instagram or YouTube, it is acceptable if not expected on TikTok.
TikTok is also unique in how it encourages active engagement. Users can remix one another's videos or produce creative responses towards others' content. At the same time, however, users risk having their video or audio remixed or repurposed without their permission if they don't adjust their privacy settings accordingly.
"You might make a sincere video explaining your research that someone else turns into a song or a joke," the study warns academics. "Decide now if you're comfortable with that possibility."
The study's authors attributed the phenomenon at least partly to a generational shift around intellectual property. Without bibliographies or citations, TikTok videos can challenge the sense of ownership that academic communities have traditionally had around ideas. "It's more difficult to maintain ownership of your ideas online, and you can't control how people will use your imagery or audio. Researchers must be aware of this fact, and be thoughtful when they are publishing content," King says.
The researcher say that academics also need to understand the large impact that a single video could have on their personal brand. If their personal views clash with institutional values, there could be pushback from the academic community and repercussions from administrators. Even though tenured faculty members have academic freedom, they may not get a free pass if they use TikTok in ways their colleagues consider out of line, the researchers warn.
What's more, an outsized social media profile won't necessarily enhance a scholar's professional status. "In simple terms, a million followers won't guarantee you tenure or a promotion," says King.
Above all, it's a way to spread the word, possibly dispelling popular myths with facts and encouraging an audience to think about a topic from a different perspective. Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, runs a popular TikTok account that often challenges viewers to consider the problems with Facebook's domination of the online experience. It's possible to imagine a teenager finding one of Fiesler's videos tucked between dance trends and dog tricks and questioning Facebook for the first time, according to King.
"TikTok offers enormous potential for the discovery of critical ideas," he says. "This is why using TikTok effectively is crucial. Sharing research with an audience outside of the academy brings together people with diverse educational backgrounds. TikTok offers an exciting new way to find like-minded thinkers, makes research accessible, and start important conversations."
Here are a few of the study's recommendations for best practices on how scholarly communities can engage:
Keep your videos short and simple: Less than one minute is ideal because online attention spans are shorter than in-person ones
Use storytelling and humor to make your content more accessible: You are competing with all the other content online, so lighten the mood by telling a story or adding unique humor
Find ways to engage people instead of speaking to them: Invite users to try out an experiment for themselves and create a video reply with their results
Get your data from TikTok so you know what's being tracked. Remember social media lives forever: You might be surprised by how well TikTok knows you. Download your data and decide for yourself if you are comfortable with TikTok having this information and selling it without your knowledge
Be aware that your video or audio may be remixed or repurposed without your permission, unless you change your privacy settings: You might make a sincere video explaining your research that someone else turns into a song or a joke. Decide now if you're comfortable with that possibility
Since the end of the 20th century, daily life for most of us has increasingly moved into the digital sphere. This has led to the rise of the so-called "onlife" dimension, which represents the intimate intertwining of our online and offline lives. One day we may see the creation of the so-called metaverse, a perpetual online environment providing new digital spaces where people can interact, work and play as avatars.
The result is that people's rights and freedoms are increasingly shaped by the rules set by big technology firms. Twitter's decision to silence the former US president Donald Trump in the aftermath of the violence at Capitol Hill, Facebook's banning of Australian publishers and users from sharing or viewing news content, and the decision of YouTube to block anti-vaccine content from spreading misinformation, are just some examples of how tech firms have expanded their role not only as global gatekeepers of information but also as private powers.
These examples raise constitutional questions about who has legitimacy, who should have power, and how democracy can best function in the digital age. This points to the rise of digital constitutionalism, a new phase where individual rights and public powers are "relocated" among different groups—such as technology companies—on a global scale.
A new power play
Digital constitutionalism does not mean revolutionizing the roots of modern constitutionalism, the principles of which include responsible and accountable government, individual rights and the rule of law. Rather, it is about reframing the role of constitutional law in the digital age.
Modern constitutionalism has always pursued two missions: protecting fundamental rights and limiting powers through checks and balances.
In the digital age, one of the primary concerns regards the exercise of public powers which threaten rights and freedoms, such as internet blackouts or surveillance. This was underlined by the Snowden affair, where a CIA employee leaked documents revealing the extent of surveillance of the US's National Security Agency (NSA), prompting debate about national security and individual privacy.
But private companies now dominate the internet and enforce terms of service or community guidelines which apply to billion of users across the globe. These rules provide alternative standards which compete with the constitutional protection of fundamental rights and democratic values.
The challenge for constitutional democracies no longer comes from state authorities. Rather, the biggest concerns come from formally private entities but which control things traditionally governed by public authorities—without any safeguards. The capacity of tech firms to set and enforce rights and freedoms on a global scale is an expression of their growing power over the public.
For example, when Facebook or Google moderate online content, they are making decisions on freedom of expression and other individual rights or public interest based on private standards that do not necessarily reflect constitutional safeguards. And these decisions are enforced directly by the company, not a court.
This situation has led to calls for transparency and accountability. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which highlighted the extensive collection of personal data for political advertising, and the recent revelations that Facebook's own research showed the potentially harmful effects of social media on young people's mental health, have increased the debate around the responsibilities of these big tech companies.
Addressing big tech powers
Constitutional democracies are still figuring out how to deal with tech firms' powers. And though they share the same global challenge, countries don't always react in the same way. Even if constitutional democracies generally protect rights and freedoms as part of everyday life in a democratic society, this does not mean that this protection is equal across the world.
But the US still sees self-regulation as the best approach to protect freedom of expression in the digital age. Even the US Supreme Court has underlined that the internet—and particularly social media—plays a critical role as a democratic forum.
As a result, online platforms have lost no time in consolidating their policy. The introduction of social media councils like the Facebook Oversight Board has been welcomed as a critical step for transparency and accountability. But this could also be seen as another step towards the consolidation of powers by adopting the veneer of more institutional system such as a "supreme court," as Facebook has also done.
Digital constitutionalism offers a variety of perspectives to analyze the protection of rights and the exercise of power by big tech companies. It should also prompt us to raise the debate about how individual rights and freedoms are not just subject to the powers of the state, but increasingly to big tech companies too.
Workers' share of annual premium for employer health plans nears $6,000
(HealthDay)—Health insurance has gotten slightly more expensive during the pandemic: A new survey shows that annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 4%, to an average of $22,221 this year.
Of that amount, employees paid an average of nearly $6,000 toward the cost of coverage, while employers paid the remainder of the premium.
But there was some good news: The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) survey of nearly 1,700 small and large companies also showed that there was an increase in workplace health benefits such as mental health services and telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"In a year when the pandemic continued to cause health and economic disruption, there were only modest changes in the cost of employer-provided health benefits," said Gary Claxton, KFF senior vice president and director of the Health Care Marketplace Project.
"Some employers adapted their plans to address mental health and other challenges facing their workers due to COVID-19," Claxton added in a KFF news release.
The 4% premium increase is close to the increase in workers' wages (5%) and inflation (1.9%) this year, but average family premiums have jumped 47% since 2011, outpacing increases in wages (31%) and inflation (19%), the survey found.
Meanwhile, the average single deductible is $1,669 for workers who have one, which isn't much more than in 2020 ($1,644) or 2019 ($1,655), but significantly higher than in 2011 ($991).
In 2021, 85% of covered workers had a deductible in their plan, compared with 74% a decade ago.
Overall, the burden of deductibles has increased by 92% among all covered workers over the past decade.
The journal Health Affairs is publishing an article with select survey findings online and in its December issue.
The brightest spot in the findings involved mental health coverage.
Among firms with at least 50 workers that offer health benefits, 39% said they made changes to their mental health and substance abuse benefits during the pandemic.
For example, 31% gave workers more ways to access mental health services—such as through telemedicine—and 16% offered new mental health resources, such as an employee assistance program.
Other changes included expansion of in-network mental health and substance abuse providers (6%), waiving or reducing cost-sharing for related services (4%), or increasing coverage for out-of-network services (3%).
Overall, 12% of employers with at least 50 workers that offer health benefits said there was an increase in their enrollees' use of mental-health services. Among the largest employers (1,000 or more workers), 38% reported such an increase.
"The expansions of telemedicine and mental health benefits were important in meeting the needs of employees and their families in difficult times," Claxton and colleagues said. "These types of changes made sense not because employers wants to spend more, but because employers want their employees to see their health benefit programs as 'benefits' and to value them as such."
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues have rattled consumers and the businesses they frequent. From Clorox wipes to semiconductors to computer chips, inventory of many products at big box stores, dealerships and even grocers is low or out of stock. The problem is creating growing concern as the U.S. inches toward Black Friday and the holiday season, the biggest spending period of the year.
Most supply chains were built to provide optimal value for relatively steady and predictable demand, but the pandemic and other factors have contributed to abrupt swings in demand patterns that long and extended supply chains are not designed to accommodate. Gurumurthi Ravishankar, a faculty member and supply chain expert at the Leeds School of Business, explains how supply chain woes started, what it means for consumers and how long it may take to repair the fractured system.
How did the supply chain become so fractured?
Over the last few decades, supply chains have become increasingly complex. Many links (companies) in the chain––many of which are based overseas––are driven by the desire for lower costs. Supply chains have also become quite lean with little inventory. Even the slightest hiccup anywhere within the chain causes a ripple effect that doesn't easily subside.
When and how did these problems start?
When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, people started falling sick and countries started locking down to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the production and delivery of countless materials slowed down or even stopped. This caused more than a ripple in the supply chain, it was a tsunami wave.
The pandemic also caused consumer spending patterns to change, which changed demand patterns (think back to toilet paper and Clorox wipe hoarding). This is classically known as the bullwhip effect in supply chain parlance. Online shopping skyrocketed, which put a lot of pressure on delivery services. Companies like Amazon were seeing buying volumes that resembled pre-Christmas in the middle of May.
How will these continued problems affect prices?
Higher prices are likely to be around for the foreseeable future because of a variety of factors. Shortages and increased demand invariably lead to prices going up, but this typically leads to temporary increases. It's also expected companies will stock up on inventory to avoid future shortages, which will increase costs as a result.
We're also seeing more permanent price increases as a byproduct of increased production costs, particularly because of labor woes. Wage rate increases have led to increased overhead, resulting in price increases to offset that cost. The pandemic has added to labor issues: fatalities, risk of falling ill, furloughs, businesses going under and people migrating with remote work or choosing to retire have all impacted the supply chain. In addition, the impact of stimulus checks, childcare credits, eviction moratoriums, decreased spending and migration to lower cost areas of the country adds to the changing financial condition of people, which has an impact on the labor pool.
Is there a solution? How long will it take?
How we "fix" the supply chain depends on what we want the supply chain to do. For example, we fixed the shortage of hand sanitizer fairly quickly as local supply increased and demand went down. However, it takes billions of dollars and many years to build local factories to produce the thousands of products in high demand (like semiconductors).
Conversely, if we continue to rely on goods exclusively produced overseas, shortages will continue and it will take a long time to return to normal supply. Factories overseas must first be able to produce material at a prepandemic pace, and then all the steps of the supply chain must be appropriately staffed in order to bring that product to the U.S.
Worker shortages in the U.S. are not an easy fix: It takes two to four years for gantry crane operators to learn how to properly operate a crane, and truck drivers must obtain a commercial driver's license and go through training before they can deliver goods across the country. Neither of those jobs are in high demand right now, which only exacerbates the problem.
