Dag Elgesem

What is special about the ethical issuesin online research

In the analysis of the ethicalproblems of online research, there is much tobe learned from the work that has already beendone on research ethics in the socialsciences and the humanities. I discuss thestructure of norms in the Norwegian ethicalguidelines for research in the social scienceswith respect to their relevance for the ethicalissues of Internet research. A four-stepprocedure for the ethical evaluation ofresearch is suggested. I argue that eventhough, at one level, the problems of onlineresearch are very similar to those we find intraditional areas of social scientificresearch, there still are some issues that areunique to research online. A general model forthe analysis of privacy and data protection issuggested. This model is then used tocharacterize the special problems pertaining tothe protection of privacy in online contexts,and to argue that one cannot assume a simpledistinction between the private and the publicwhen researching in such contexts.

Why Trust is not Proportional to Risk

Trust is inherently related to risk, but for trust assessment to be integrated with the management of the risks involved in trust based cooperation, the exact relation must be well understood. Existing literature on trust management is neither clear nor unambiguous on this issue. This paper discusses notions of trust as presented within the disciplines of sociology and economics for the purpose of motivating trust management. A critical survey of state of the art literature on trust management is provided, where weaknesses and ambiguities with respect to clarifying the notion of trust are discussed. An analysis and explanation of the exact relationship between risk and trust is presented, and implications of the subjectivity of trust relations are accounted for

Structure and Content of the Discourse on Climate Change in the Blogosphere: The Big Picture

Based on the texts of 1.3 million blog posts and the structure of the links between the blogs in which these posts appeared, this study presents an analysis of the discourse on climate change in the English-language blogosphere. Our approach combines community detection with probabilistic topic modeling to show how topics related to climate change are discussed across various parts of the blogosphere. We find that there is one community of predominantly climate skeptical blogs but several accepter communities. The topic analysis reveals a series of issues that are characteristic of the climate change discourse in the blogosphere. Two topics, one related to climate change science and one related to climate change politics, are particularly important for characterizing the discourse. We also find that the distribution of topics over the communities cuts across the divide between skeptics and non-skeptics (accepters) and that there are differences in the patterns of interactions between the skeptics and different groups of accepters.

Search engines and the public use of reason

How should the policies of search engines and other information intermediaries be ethically evaluated? It is argued that Kant’s principles for the public use of reason are useful starting points for the formulation of criteria for such an evaluation. The suggestion is, furthermore, that a search engine can be seen to provide a testimony to the user concerning what information that is most relevant to her query. This suggestion is used as the basis for the development of a broadly Kantian account of a rational searcher. It is argued that the search engine companies are morally required to publish their information policies and act in accordance with them but given the threat of search engine spam they can have no obligation to publish the details of their algorithms.

On fairness: User perspectives on social media data mining

What do social media users think about social media data mining? To date, this question has been researched through quantitative studies that produce diverse findings and qualitative studies adopting either a privacy or a surveillance perspective. In this article, we argue that qualitative research which moves beyond these dominant paradigms can contribute to answering this question, and we demonstrate this by reporting on focus group research in three European countries (the United Kingdom, Norway and Spain). Our method created a space in which to make sense of the diverse findings of quantitative studies, which relate to individual differences (such as extent of social media use or awareness of social media data mining) and differences in social media data mining practices themselves (such as the type of data gathered, the purpose for which data are mined and whether transparent information about data mining is available). Moving beyond privacy and surveillance made it possible to identify a concern for fairness as a common trope among users, which informed their varying viewpoints on distinct data mining practices. We argue that this concern for fairness can be understood as contextual integrity in practice (Nissenbaum, 2009) and as part of broader concerns about well-being and social justice.

Normative structures in trust management

The modelling of trust for the purpose of trust management gives rise to a puzzle that opens up fundamental questions concerning the relationship between trust and calculative reason as the basis for cooperation. It is argued that, ironically, trust management seem not to maximise trust but, instead, to reduce the need for trust. This conclusion is used to argue that the normative aspects of trust must be given a central role in the modelling of trust and trust management. The following question is addressed: What can an agent R infer about the future actions of another agent E, if R assumes that E is trustworthy? It is suggested that a generalised version of Barwise and Seligmans theory of information flow can be used to model the role of normative structures in reasoning in trust relationships. Implications for trust management are discussed.

Topically-focused Blog Corpora for Multiple Languages

This paper describes the construction of three corpora, intended for use in social science research, comprising English-language, Frenchlanguage and Norwegian-language blogs related to the topic of climate change. The approach, techniques and lessons learnt should be applicable for creating other topically-focused blog corpora.

Bloggers' Responses to the Snowden Affair: Combining Automated and Manual Methods in the Analysis of News Blogging

The Snowden affair gave rise to a huge public debate about not only the legitimacy of the secret surveillance programs he revealed but also about Snowden himself and about the accuracy of the information he leaked. In this paper we present an analysis of how the affair was discussed in the English language blogosphere, based on a corpus of 15,000 blog posts written about Snowden and published from June 2013 to June 2014, as a sub-corpus of a larger corpus of 100,000 blog posts on the topic of surveillance, written during the period 2006–2014. Automated tools are used to identify the topics that characterize the blogging about surveillance and the posts about the Snowden affair. Through an in-depth analysis of the blog posts that commented on Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM program for surveillance of social media users, we chart how bloggers responded to Snowden and his role in this disclosure, whether they found the information credible, and the extent to which they expressed criticism of the surveillance practices. The analysis is used as a basis for discussing the role of blogs in the civic engagement during the first phase of the Snowden affair.

Polarization in Blogging About the Paris Meeting on Climate Change

To what extent was the blogging about the recent Paris meeting on climate change polarized? This paper addresses this question by way of a series of analyses of a comprehensive corpus of English language blog posts about the negotiations to reach an agreement to mitigate climate change. We identify two groups of bloggers, the engaged bloggers and the contrarian bloggers and use the contents of their blog posts and the patterns in their linking to sources to characterize and compare the two groups. The paper combines computational methods and manual analyses and uses co-citation networks in an innovative way to characterize and compare the contexts of the linking in the two groups. We address challenges that using computational methods to study polarization in blogs raises. We argue that the ideological profiles of the sources the blogs link to are clear signals of polarization.

The Concept of a Routine in Segerberg’s Philosophy of Action

The notion of a routine for acting plays a fundamental role in Krister Segeberg’s philosophy of action and he uses it in a series of papers as the basis for the formulation of logics of intentional action. The present chapter is an attempt to provide a critical assessment of Segerberg’s program. First, an exposition of the central elements of Segerberg’s account of routines is given and its roles in his philosophy of action are discussed. It is argued that Segerberg’s notion of routines provides a very productive perspective on intentional agency and that it gives rise to a series of challenges to attempts to construct logics of intentional action. It is then argued that Segerberg’s own formal theories of intentional action do not fully meet these challenges. Finally, it is suggested a way in which the challenges can be met if the concept of a routine is brought explicitly into the semantic framework for the logic of intentions and actions.