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November 2020
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To Prevent Free, Frictionless Access To Human Knowledge, Publishers Want Librarians To Be Afraid, Very Afraid

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After many years of fierce resistance to open access, academic publishers have largely embraced -- and extended -- the idea, ensuring that their 35-40% profit margins live on. In the light of this subversion of the original hopes for open access, people have come up with other ways to provide free and frictionless access to knowledge -- most of which is paid for by taxpayers around the world. One is preprints, which are increasingly used by researchers to disseminate their results widely, without needing to worry about payment or gatekeepers. The other is through sites that have taken it upon themselves to offer immediate access to large numbers of academic papers -- so-called "shadow libraries". The most famous of these sites is Sci-Hub, created by Alexandra Elbakyan. At the time of writing, Sci-Hub claims to hold 79 million papers.Even academics with access to publications through their institutional subscriptions often prefer to use Sci-Hub, because it is so much simpler and quicker. In this respect, Sci-Hub stands as a constant reproach to academic publishers, emphasizing that their products aren't very good in terms of serving libraries, which are paying expensive subscriptions for access. Not surprisingly, then, Sci-Hub has become Enemy No. 1 for academic publishers in general, and the leading company Elsevier in particular. The German site Netzpolitik has spotted the latest approach being taken by publishers to tackle this inconvenient and hugely successful rival, and other shadow libraries. At its heart lies the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI), which was founded by Elsevier and other large publishers earlier this year. Netzpolitik explains that the idea is to track and analyze every access to libraries, because "security":

Elsevier is campaigning for libraries to be upgraded with security technology. In a SNSI webinar entitled "Cybersecurity Landscape -- Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure", hosted by two high-ranking Elsevier managers, one speaker recommended that publishers develop their own proxy or a proxy plug-in for libraries to access more (usage) data ("develop or subsidize a low cost proxy or a plug-in to existing proxies").With the help of an "analysis engine", not only could the location of access be better narrowed down, but biometric data (e.g. typing speed) or conspicuous usage patterns (e.g. a pharmacy student suddenly interested in astrophysics) could also be recorded. Any doubts that this software could also be used -- if not primarily -- against shadow libraries were dispelled by the next speaker. An ex-FBI analyst and IT security consultant spoke about the security risks associated with the use of Sci-Hub.
Since academic publishers can't compete against Sci-Hub on ease of use or convenience, they are trying the old "security risk" angle -- also used by traditional software companies against open source in the early days. Yes, they say, Sci-Hub/open source may seem free and better, but think of the terrible security risks An FAQ on the main SNSI site provides an "explanation" of why Sci-Hub is supposedly a security risk:
Sci-Hub may fall into the category of state-sponsored actors. It hosts stolen research papers which have been harvested from publisher platforms often using stolen user credentials. According to the Washington Post, the US Justice Department is currently investigating the founder of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakayan, for links between her and Russian Intelligence. If there is substance to this investigation, then using Sci-Hub to access research papers could have much wider ramifications than just getting access to content that sits behind a paywall.
As Techdirt pointed out when that Washington Post article came out, there is no evidence of any connections between Elbakyan and Russian Intelligence. Indeed, it's hard not to see the investigation as simply the result of whining academic publishers making the same baseless accusation, and demanding that something be "done". An article in Research Information provides more details about what those "wider ramifications than just getting access to content that sits behind a paywall" might be:
In the specific case of Sci-Hub, academic content (journal articles and books) is illegally harvested using a variety of methods, such as abusing legitimate log in credentials to access the secure computer networks of major universities and by hijacking "proxy" credentials of legitimate users that facilitate off campus remote access to university computer systems and databases. These actions result in a front door being opened up into universities' networks through which Sci-Hub, and potentially others, can gain access to other valuable institutional databases such as personnel and medical records, patent information, and grant details.
But that's not how things work in this context. The credentials of legitimate users that Sci-Hub draws on -- often gladly "lent" by academics who believe papers should be made widely available -- are purely to access articles held on the system. They do not provide access to "other valuable institutional databases" -- and certainly not sensitive information such as "personnel and medical records" -- unless they are designed by complete idiots. That is pure scaremongering, while this further claim is just ridiculous:
Such activities threaten the scholarly communications ecosystem and the integrity of the academic record. Sci-Hub has no incentive to ensure the accuracy of the research articles being accessed, no incentive to ensure research meets ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct if issues arise.
Sci-Hub simply provides free, frictionless access for everyone to existing articles from academic publishers. The articles are still as accurate and ethical as they were when they first appeared. To accuse Sci-Hub of "threatening" the scholarly communications ecosystem by providing universal access is absurd. It's also revealing of the traditional publishers' attitude to the uncontrolled dissemination of publicly-funded human knowledge, which is what they really fear and are attacking with the new SNSI campaign.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

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posted at: 12:00am on 05-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Content Moderation Case Study: Moderating An Anonymous Social Network (2015)

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Summary: Between around 2013 and 2015 there was a sudden popularity of so-called anonymous social networks. A few had existed before, but suddenly the market was full of them: Whisper, Secret and Yik Yak received the most attention. All of them argued that by allowing people to post content anonymously, they were helping people, allowing them to express their true thoughts rather than repress them. Whisper and Secret both worked by letting people anonymously post short text, which would be shown over an image in the background.

In practice, many of the apps filled up with harassment, bullying, hateful content and the like. Whisper, as one of the bigger companies in the space, invested heavily in content moderation from early on, saying that it had set up an outsourced team (via TaskUs in the Philippines) to handle moderation. However, questions of scalability became an issue, and the company also built software to help with content moderation, called The Arbiter. In press reports, Whisper employees suggested The Arbiter was almost perfect:
On Whisper, the golden rule is don't be mean, don't be gross, and don't use Whisper to break the law, says the company's chief data officer, Ulas Bardak, who spearheaded development of the Arbiter along with data scientist Nick Stucky-Mack. That's not a philosophy that you can boil down to a simple list of banned words. The Arbiter is smart enough to deal with an array of situations, and even knows when it's not sure if a particular item meets the service's guidelines.
However, even with The Arbiter, the company insisted that it needed humans, since Arbiter learned from the human moderators.
In its first few months of operation, the Arbiter has had a huge impact on how Whisper moderates itself. But even though there's plenty of opportunity to fine-tune it over time, Whisper has no plans to eliminate the human touch in moderation altogether. After all, the only reason the Arbiter is effective is because it bases its decisions on those of human moderators. Which is why the company is continuing to shovel data from human-moderated Whispers into the software's knowledge bank.There's always going to be a hybrid approach, says Heyward. The truth is, the way we use people today is very different from the way we used them a year ago or six months ago. With the Arbiter humming along and handling much of the grunt work, the humans can focus more on the material that isn't an easy call. And maybe Whisper will be able to pull off the not-so-easy feat of improving the quality of its content even as its community continues to grow.
Another article about Whisper's approach to content moderation detailed how humans and the software work together.
Moderators look at Whispers surfaced by both machines and people: Users flag inappropriate posts and algorithms analyze text and images for anything that might have slipped through the cracks. That way, the company is less likely to miss cyberbullying, sex, and suicide messages. Moderators delete the bad stuff, shuffle cyberbullies into a posts-must-be-approved-before-publishing category, and stamp suicide Whispers with a watermark the number for the National Suicide Hotline.As you might imagine, the man power and operational systems required for that execution are huge. Whisper's content moderation manual is nearly 30 pages. The standards get into the nitty-gritty, specifying minutia like whether a picture of a man shirtless outside is appropriate, but a selfie shirtless indoors is not.When the TaskUs team comes across physical threats, it escalates the message to Whisper itself. If someone posts, 'I killed her and buried her in the backyard,' then that's a piece of content the company will report to the authorities, TaskUs CEO Bryce Maddock says. They're going to pull the UID on your cell phone from Verizon or AT&T and the FBI and local police will show up at your door. It happens quite a bit.
Even so there was significant controversy over how Whisper handled bullying and hateful content on its site, as well as how it maintained actual anonymity for its users. There were concerns raised that the app was not actually anonymous, and tracked its users. Whisper disputed some of these reports and claimed that some of the tracking was done both with permission and for good reasons (such as to do research on how to decrease suicide rates).Decisions to be made by Whisper:
  • How do you keep an anonymous social network from becoming abusive?
  • How aggressive should you be in moderating content on an anonymous social network?
  • What are the tradeoffs between tracking users to prevent bad behavior and providing true anonymity?
  • Can an algorithm successfully determine and block detrimental content on a platform like Whisper?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • Is an anonymous social media network net positive or net negative?
  • Does anonymity make content moderation more difficult?
  • How do you protect users on an anonymous social network?
Resolution: One interesting aspect of having an anonymous social media application is that users might not even realize if their content is restricted. An academic paper from 2014 that explored Whisper's content moderation features suggested that the app deleted significantly more content than other forms of social media.
Anonymity facilitates free speech, but also inevitably fosters abusive content and behavior. Like other anonymous communities, Whisper faces the same challenge of dealing with abusive content (e.g., nudity, pornography or obscenity) in their network.In addition to a crowdsourcing-based user reporting mechanism, Whisper also has dedicated employees to moderate whispers. Our basic measurements... also suggest this has a significant impact on the system, as we observed a large volume of whispers (>1.7 million) has been deleted during the 3 months of our study. The ratio of Whisper's deleted content (18%) is much higher than traditional social networks like Twitter (<4%)
The research dug into what kinds of content was deleted and from what types of users. Part of what it found is that people with deleted content often try to repost it (and frequently get the reposts blocked as well).
Finally, we take a closer look at the authors of deleted whispers to check for signs of suspicious behavior. In total, 263K users (25.4%) out of all users in our dataset have at least one deleted whisper. The distribution of deleted whispers is highly skewed across these users: 24% of users are responsible for 80% of all deleted whispers. The worst offender is a user who had 1230 whisper deleted during the time period of our study, while roughly half of the users only have a single deletion.We observed anecdotal evidence of duplicate whispers in the set of deleted whispers. We find that frequently reposted duplicate whispers are highly likely to be deleted. Among our 263K users with at least 1 deleted whisper, we find 25K users have posted duplicate whispers.
As for Whisper itself, the company has gone through many changes and problems. It's biggest competitors, Secret and YikYak, both shut down, but Whisper remains in business -- though not without problems. Whisper laid off a significant amount of its staff and all of its large institutional investors quit the board in 2017.In the spring of 2020, security researchers discovered that nearly all of Whisper's content was available for download via an unsecured database, allowing researchers to search through all of the content posted on the site. While the company insisted that the only data that was in the database was the same as what was publicly available through the app, they conceded that within the app, you did not have the ability to run queries on the database. Even years after the app was popular, it seems that concerns about anonymity and privacy remain.

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posted at: 12:00am on 05-Nov-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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