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Mysociety – Written Evidence (DAD0024) mySociety – written evidence (DAD0024) Dr Rebecca Rumbul & Alex Parsons As one of the world’s first civic technology companies, mySociety has a broad understanding of the themes raised in this consultation. The submission is longer than requested, in order to fully explore the questions raised and to make distinctions between the range of digital tools being used for democratic engagement, and their various merits. This submission covers the majority of questions raised in the consultation document, and provides balanced opinions based upon research and evidence. 1 About mySociety mySociety is an international not-for-profit social enterprise based in the UK and working internationally. We provide technology, research and data that give people the power to get things changed and help them to be active citizens. We work internationally to support partners who use our technology and data in over 40 countries around the world. As one of the first civic technology organisations in the world, we are committed to building the civic technology community and undertaking rigorous research that tests our actions, assumptions and impacts. Summary As one of the world’s first civic technology companies, mySociety has a broad understanding of the themes raised in this consultation. The submission is longer than requested, in order to fully explore the questions raised and to make distinctions between the range of digital tools being used for democratic engagement, and their various merits. This submission covers the majority of questions raised in the consultation document, and provides balanced opinions based upon research and evidence. The key points raised include: 1. The need to make a clear distinction between for-profit and social media platforms, and non-profit purpose-built democracy platforms. Different platforms have different virtues, and digital tools for democracy cannot be judged equally. 2. The inherent difficulty in engaging in democratic debate on digital platforms not designed for such interactions. The levels of toxicity on certain platforms demonstrate definite negative impacts upon diversity of debate and quality of engagement. 3. The improbability of achieving meaningful regulation of commercial digital platforms (however desirable), given the speed with which platforms and algorithms evolve. Parliament has neither the expertise nor the agility to properly regulate digital platforms over the long term. 4. The enduring digital divide and embedded biases in digital engagement. Large sections of the population remain offline, and the profile of those actively engaging in democratic debate online does not adequately represent national demographic breakdown. 5. The feedback loop between citizen and institution needs to be closed in order to rebuild trust. Digital platforms that foster high quality interactions and responses demonstrate significantly higher positive impact than interactions on social media. General How has digital technology changed the way that democracy works in the UK and has this been a net positive or negative effect? 1) Digital technologies have significantly altered the way in which individuals, organisations and institutions experience and make sense of democracy in the UK. The nature of communication between citizens and their institutions, officials and politicians has evolved significantly, to a state that would have seemed impossible (and not necessarily wholly desirable) only 30 years ago. Whereas correspondence via letter or in person through a constituency surgery or other formal channel would have been the only way for the general citizenry to make direct contact with their officials in the past, multiple digital channels now exist to communicate information back and forth directly and at scale. The apparatus of political campaigns has gone through waves of digital transformation, hugely affecting how people engage with parties and candidates at election time. 2) In understanding how ‘digital technology’ has changed democracy, it is important to understand what a wide array of technologies are being referred to in practice. Digital technologies that affect democracy exist on a wide and varied spectrum, and a wholesale judgement on whether they are beneficial or not is overly simplistic and unhelpful. Digital technologies relevant to democracy include (but are not limited to): a) Email (eg Gmail, Outlook) b) Websites: i) official (eg individual MP websites, political party websites) ii) unofficial (eg campaigning sites) iii) traditional media (eg BBC, Daily Mail, The Guardian) iv) non-traditional media / blogs (eg Guido Fawkes) c) Social media: i) public broadcast (eg Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) ii) non-public interaction (eg WhatsApp, Snapchat) 1 d) Petitioning platforms - low level, mass contribution (eg Change.org) e) Civic technologies: i) monitoring platforms (eg TheyWorkForYou.com) ii) reporting platforms (eg FixMyStreet.com) iii) deliberative platforms (eg online consultations) f) GovTech (eg GovTech Catalyst) 3) These digital platforms overlap and interact, creating a vast and fluid network of information publication and dissemination, through which individual consumers can navigate unique paths. While something may be widely shared on social media, it may have originated on a completely different platform (often screenshots from one social network recirculate on others). 4) Digital communication allows for anyone, anywhere, to create and mass- distribute political content, in a way that was traditionally only accessible to professional journalists and broadcasters. No formal qualifications, quality control processes or consideration of ethical issues are now needed for individuals or groups to author and disseminate information. That said, it is important not to overstate the ethical or quality standards of publications prior to the internet — and one boon of the internet, from the 2000s blogosphere to the current Twittersphere is that it is a space to articulate the critiques of previously hard-to-challenge institutions. All that can really be said is that the cost of publishing has dropped dramatically, to the benefit of honest and dishonest motivations alike. 5) Democratic services have also been transformed. At a basic and important level, the process of registering to vote has been greatly simplified through online technology. This has made it easier for groups that move more often (eg renters) to claim their right to participate in the process. In the 2017 election this arguably contributed to the increase in renter turnout which had a practical impact on the result (Bloomberg, 2018). This demonstrates a fundamental issue when evaluating whether digital tools are good for “democracy”: unless a specific change increases everyone’s capacity equally, they are likely to have an effect on outcome. This means that arguments about democracy can often be proxy arguments about changes in outcomes (or “politics”) and have to be examined carefully. 6) Understanding these emerging issues is extremely complex, and landmark data manipulation scandals such as Cambridge Analytica's supposed influence on Brexit or the USA's allegation of Russian digital influence in the 2016 US Presidential election, have demonstrated not only the new ways in which political and official information can be manipulated and disseminated, but how the digital effect on democracy cannot be isolated as a single variable, and is tightly bound in other contested issues. These stories illuminate the importance of subtlety, context and social ties in introducing and disseminating information relating to politics and government, and show that communication of information is necessarily different across different nations, identities, cultures, demographics and environments. 2 7) As explored in our research on digital tools being used for democratic participation, these tools have enormous positive potential: they “can allow simple transactional actions to be performed more cheaply, can make it easy to engage with individuals simultaneously based in different geographic regions, shift what was previously one-to-one communication to one-to- many, and such a shift opens up opportunities for novel forms of participation to be explored”. (mySociety, 2019) 8) However, positives are not automatic and there are significant potential pitfalls. Generally when tools make it easier for those excluded from the democratic process to engage, they also make it easier for those already well represented. Expanding the reach of a consultation through digital means may not shift the demographics if it also means that the kind of groups already likely to reply, simply reply more. While the early hope for the internet was as a democratic medium that allowed more people a voice, in many cases debates can still be dominated by those who have the time and resources to engage. While social media platforms make it far easier for, say, women and ethnic minorities to take part in public discourse (compared, for instance, to alternative routes of being elected or becoming employed by media organisations), those people can also then receive abuse that other members of the platform do not. This means that technologically neutral platforms in reality are not neutral in terms of the kind of person they help to enter public discourse. Digital spaces do not offer an escape from the societies that they exist in and in some cases have recreated their worst aspects in new forms. 9) Examining the effects of civic technology, this reveals how evaluations
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