Social media have changed the communication practices by creating an acute need for continuous interaction. The use of social chatbots is growing as an effective way to communicate with publics. Bots have become social actors and then, someone must account for their actions. Since responsibility is bounded to agency and rationality, it cannot be directly attributed to bots. Who should be held responsible for non-human beings' actions, particularly when the consequences of these actions are negative? We address this controversy from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Firstly, we discuss the adequacy of the notions of moral responsibility and accountability regarding non-human artificial agents, as they are ruled by complex, intentionally opaque and unpredictable interactions and processes. We do it from the two approaches currently predominant: context-dependent and structuralist. Secondly, we draw on the assumption that the failure of a computer system is an opportunity to gain knowledge about the interested powers behind its design and functioning. Then, taking the concept of media frame as an implicit way of spotting the agent of the story, we perform an exploratory analysis on how responsibility was attributed by the media in the paradigmatic case of the transformation of Tay, a chatbot launched by Microsoft in 2016, turned into a racist, Nazi and homophobic hate speaker. Our results illustrate the difficulties media experienced in consistently attributing the responsibility for the chatbots' malfunction. Results show the discourse is, in general, simplistic, non-critical and misleading, and tends to depict a reality that favors business's interests. We conclude that, while all the actors interacting with the chatbot share the responsibility of its actions, it is only Microsoft who must account for these actions, both retrospectively and prospectively.
en 2014 y master en Comunicación Social por la Universitat Pompeu Fabra en 2015. Desde 2014 investiga el impacto del fenómeno big data en la privacidad de las personas, especialmente en las redes sociales.
During the last decades populism has become a mainstream ideology in Western democracies (Mudde, 2004; 2016). At the same time, the popularisation of digital platforms has facilitated the process of political communication while social networks have become one of the preferred communicative tools for political populists to spread their messages. Drawing on the idea that computational technologies allow a particular performance of populism (Baldwin-Philippi, 2019), this paper aims to foster a better theoretical understanding of how innovation in communication technologies contribute to the success of populism. It is argued that the characteristics of populism (a focus on ‘the people’, technological savviness and chameleonism) allow it to overcome most of the obstacles put in place by digital networks. In particular, populism is in an ideal situation to deal with the phenomena of context collapse in social media (Boyd; Marwick, 2011). Finally, it is argued that in the era of personalized politics (Bennett, 2012), populists can make use of real-time data-driven techniques to develop successful communicative strategies addressed to mass audiences in order to construct the populist self in the image and likeness of the people. This form of populism is called data-driven populism.
Personal data are political. A feminist view on privacy and big dataLos datos personales son una cuestión política. Privacidad y big data en perspectiva feminista SARA SUÁREZ-GONZALO (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
A pocos les sorprenderá que el régimen chino utilice tecnologías digitales para vigilar y sancionar a la población. Lo que puede sorprender más es que este tipo de tecnologías de control también se están utilizando en el seno de democracias avanzadas como la nuestra.
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