Nothing is “Neutral:” Passive Digital Footprints and the Perpetuation of Inequality
Guest Post by Kathryn LeBere
Have you ever paused to reflect on your passive online activity? How long you lingered on a post? Which links you clicked on while browsing?
We all make thousands of semi-unconscious decisions when using the Internet. Our digital presence, however, is never “neutral.” Passive Internet engagement—browsing, liking, geolocation, tagging—impacts digital footprints as much as intentional engagement.
By simply being online, we contribute to a system that influences others, while being influenced by the system ourselves. Through no fault of users, these passive activities can perpetuate real-world power imbalances in the digital world and even create new inequalities of their own.
Consumers or Commodities?
Why does your passive digital footprint matter? First, your data is constantly being collected online without your informed consent. According to an interview with Facebook’s “Trust Engineers,” every Facebook user is involved in approximately ten different experiments at any given moment.[1] In 2012, Facebook conducted one of its more notorious experiments, manipulating the News Feeds of 689 003 unknowing users to see if removing positive or negative posts could alter users’ moods.[2]
We are simultaneously treated as consumers and commodities. Our data are used to curate social media feeds, inform policy decisions, and study societal trends. Those with increased Internet access, however, are more likely to appear in certain datasets over others, skewing data to exclude those will less Internet access. The information that is collected can also lack nuance—motivations, emotions, and beliefs are reduced to numbers.[3]
Shifting Digital Divide
To understand the impact of our digital footprints, we need to situate them within the context of the digital divide—the gap between those with and without access to information technology. Today, this divide has become more than a person’s ability to access the Internet and includes a “second level”—the ability to use the Internet—and a new “third level”—the ability to benefit through Internet use.[4]
The advent of Influencer culture exemplifies this third level. People who are able to effectively promote themselves online can transform their digital selves into social, economic, and cultural capital through other users’ likes and shares. Today, a person or organization’s ability to harness this passive activity can result in material gain. Moreover, researchers have found that a person’s socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and age can affect their online experience and ability to reap these benefits.[5] Digital inequalities not only reflect and perpetuate the inequalities of “real” world, but create new ones of their own.[6]
Passive Digital Footprints
How exactly does your online activity contribute to the perpetuation of inequalities? Let’s examine three forms of passive participation: geolocation, liking, and tagging.
Geolocation
Geolocation data are used to create consumer behaviour profiles that can be used to create sexist, classist, and racist targeted online advertisements. Researchers discovered that women are targeted less by STEM job ads than men.[7] In 2015, The Princeton Review—an online test preparation company—used geographic pricing for their courses, which resulted in people of Asian descent being twice as likely to be offered a higher price.[8] Junk food advertising has also been found to disproportionately target poor communities, particularly those home to racialized children.[9]
Liking
Likes are used by platform algorithms called “recommender systems” to determine who the content should be pushed towards [10]. These systems can shape peoples’ preferences and behaviours, targeting people with lower digital literacy levels who may struggle to recognize misinformation. During COVID-19, celebrities and politicians with large online platforms were found to have a greater reach than mainstream news outlets, encouraging people to flout social distancing guidelines and reject the vaccine based on misinformation.[11]
Tagging
Users have less control over what is linked to their digital identity because they can be tagged in content by others. This function disproportionately harms low-income households since they are “disproportionately plagued with real-life physical safety threats,”[12] lessening their capacity to be concerned about their online safety. Privacy is a commodity—many people are unable to buy their own laptop, pay for a subscription to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), pay for personal Wi-fi, or pursue legal action when their privacy is compromised.
From Passive to Active
Given that “unplugging” today is virtually impossible, how can we address these digital inequalities? First, we need to reconceptualise the scale of the problem and advocate for the creation of policy to regulate the use of our data. Users should be aware of the extent to which organizations collect and exploit their information for their personal gain. Second, we need to continue to combat the digital divide. Not only should we support organizations like the Internet Society who are trying to make the Internet more accessible, but we should advocate for the creation of digital literacy programs within our own communities.
The boundary between the “digital world” and “real world” is blurred—if we want to combat inequality, we need to address its existence online.
Questions to Consider
- What kind of legislation would you like to see?
- What actions could you take to help combat digital inequality in your own community?
Reference
[1] Abumrad, J. & Krulwich, R. (2015, February 9). The Trust Engineers [Audio podcast episode]. Radiolab. WNYC Studios.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/trust-engineers
[2] Hill, Kashmir. (2014, June 28). Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/?sh=474acf51197c
[3] Crawford, K. (2013, April 1). The Hidden Biases in Big Data. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data
[4] Emerald Publishing. (2021, July 1). The Evolving Digital Divide: From the First to the Third Level. Emerald Publishing. https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/news-and-press-releases/evolving-digital-divide-first-third-level
[5] Robinson, L., Schulz, J., Blank, G., Ragnedda, M., Ono, H., Hogan, B., Mesch, G. S., Cotton, S. R., Kretchmer, S. B., Hale, T. M., Drabowicz, T., Yan, P., Wellman, B., Harper, M., Quan-Haase, A., Dunn, H. S., Casilli, A. A., Tubaro, P., Carveth, R., Chen, W., Wiest, J. B., Dodel, M., Stern, M. J., Ball, C., Huang, K., & Khilnani, A. (2020, July 6). Digital Inequalities 2.0: Legacy Inequalities in the Information Age. First Monday, 25(7). http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i7.10842
[6] Emerald Publishing. (2021, July 1). The Evolving Digital Divide: From the First to the Third Level. Emerald Publishing. https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/news-and-press-releases/evolving-digital-divide-first-third-level
[7] Dunphy, S. (2018, July 28). Women are Seeing Fewer STEM Job Ads than Men: Are Marketing Algorithms Promoting Gender Bias? European Scientist. https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/public/women-are-seeing-less-stem-job-ads-than-men-are-marketing-algorithms-promoting-gender-bias/
[8] Angwin, J., Mattu, S., & Larson, J. (2015, September 1). The Tiger Mom Tax: Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/asians-nearly-twice-as-likely-to-get-higher-price-from-princeton-review
[9] Mannan, H. (2019, May 16). Data Privacy Is a Human Right. MODUS. https://modus.medium.com/data-privacy-is-a-human-right-cf36e1b45859
[10] Adomavicius, G., Bockstedt, J., Curley, S. P., Zhang, J., & Ransbotham, S. (2018, November 13). The Hidden Side Effects of Recommendation Systems. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-hidden-side-effects-of-recommendation-systems/
[11] Waterson, J. (2020, April 8). Influencers Among “Key Distributors” of Coronavirus Misinformation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/08/influencers-being-key-distributors-of-coronavirus-fake-news
[12] Mannan, H. (2019, May 16). Data Privacy Is a Human Right. MODUS. https://modus.medium.com/data-privacy-is-a-human-right-cf36e1b45859
Written by: Kathryn LeBere, UBC, School of Information
Edited by: Brittanny Dzioba & Alex Kuskowski
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