Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Photography Writing

Structured Thoughts on Social Media

College & Manning, Toronto, 2024

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, put out a call last month where he asked listeners to the podcast to offer some thoughts about social media. The episode that arose from listeners’ considerations is live and I’ve provided my (slightly edited) full response to Neale below.

By way of background, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about social media professionally in a number of ways, used it professionally to affect political change, and have also used it personally now for over 20 years at this point.

How do you use it?

One of my many positive early memories of social media is how, over 10 years ago, I and a series of cybersecurity researchers used Twitter to coordinate an incident response that led us to realise that the government of Iran was intercepting Google traffic being delivered to residents of Iran. That led to the resolution of the issue and stopped that government from conducting surveillance of its residents using the technique in question. So a good thing! Overall, up until about a year ago I used Twitter constantly for professional purposes.

However, the implosion of Twitter under Elon Musk, combined with moving into a privacy regulator’s office, has meant that I’ve stepped back from the same professional presence. I’ve trained the LinkedIn algorithm so it surfaces valuable professional content in my current role, but I don’t really use other social media professionally at this point.

Personally, the only truly valuable social media service that I use, and participate on, is Glass. It’s a small and paid photo sharing site. The community is positive and active, and it features interesting photography from around the world. I’ve also been blogging, now, since the 2002, and continue to keep that up as another outlet.1

Do you engage more, or less, with social media than you once did?

Less than in the past. Some of this is time. Some of it is, as mentioned, due to changes in the networks (e.g., Twitter) or the scattering of the communities (see again: Twitter) and the changing of my job.

I continue to use Glass, however, with a high degree of frequency and visit once or twice a day to see new images and I post one image per day.

What is your favourite platform and why?

For photographic purposes, Glass. It’s not as interactive as some other services which is fine, really, because I can go in and see things/comments, and then leave. There isn’t an algorithm that’s trying to keep me interested in perpetuity. It’s a healthier way for me to interact with other people online.

Explain your feelings about the currency of likes…

They’re…not good? I mean, they give quite the dopamine hit! But it also interferes with why you might create work, or explore producing new kinds of work. We know that certain kinds of images will get more likes due to smaller screens and shorter attention spans as we skim images; removing likes — or at least deprioritizing them in the user interface — can have the effect of encouraging people to explore different kinds of practice and without a sense that the new isn’t less liked.

What has it done for photography?

It’s easy to say that likes have done bad things to photography. But I really don’t know that that’s fair or even necessarily correct.

There are a lot more people making photographs than ever before. And part of the process tends to be learning how other people tried to make images: how many of us spent time to figure out how to make silhouettes? And with the ‘like’ metric you can get a rough guesstimate of whether you’re getting better and better at this kind of classic image. The same is true for lots of other ‘standard’ kinds of images. I think that’s great! People are better photographers on average, today, than ever before. We should celebrate that more often than we tend to.

Where I think that likes can be harmful is that they can stunt photographic growth or exploration. Also, due to how algorithms work, ‘low like’ content might be hidden and thus prevent the artist from receiving feedback on positive areas to improve towards. And, of course, there can be mental health issues when individuals ‘bully’ one another by providing or depriving individuals of likes. All of those aren’t great outcomes.

What would the perfect platform look like?

Utopia and dystopia: both places that don’t exist in reality, and neither of which is a place that you likely ever want to end up in.

All of which is to say, I think there are different characteristics of social media sites and you can dial those characteristics up or down and you create different kinds of sites and experiences. A few ‘dials’:

  • How ‘chatty’ or conversational is the environment? Does ‘community’ involve direct messages?
  • How compressed are the images? Is it build for phone screens, tablet screens, monitors, or…?
  • How effectively are you introduced to/able to discover new photographers?
  • What is the information density — how much is on the screen at once?
  • What is/isn’t made public? And how? Do you list numbers of followers, likes, etc?
  • How much are you appealing to the masses vs dedicated photography enthusiasts?
  • Monetized by users paying money, or monetizing the users?
  • Is it a ‘hot’ medium (e.g., sound and video) or a bit ‘colder’ of a medium (e.g., photographs and text)?
  • How personalized is the experience (i.e., lots of algorithmic engagement vs just find it on your own)?
  • Is there an assertive and active safety team that blocks certain content from appearing on the site?

When you adjust just some of those dials you affect the nature of the site, the number of users that you need to be revenue neutral, and affect how people will interact with one another. What I think is better will be worse for others, and vice versa.

I actually think that there should, ideally, be a diversity of experiences. And that it’s fine if different little groups form across the Internet that enjoy their parts of the Internet differently. There’s no reason why a half-dozen different photographic social media sites cannot exist, as an example, nor is it really a problem if you aren’t engaging with all of them. Find a site that has the ‘dials’ adjusted to your tastes and you’ll have hopefully found an environment — and user base — that you can enjoy and thrive with.

Tell me about the good bits, the bad bits, and all the bits in between…

I’m sure that I could go on in more depth but won’t drag on. Suffice to say that I think — hell, I know based on my professional experiences — that social media can be powerful and important and enable lots of good things in the world. But, at the same time, it can foster anti-social behaviours, be used to fuel genocide, and just be a depressive hellscape.

This isn’t to say that technology is neutral, however: all technologies as they are designed have particular affordances. Those affordances are linked to how those dials are turned. And there are certainly some ways of turning the dials that are not particularly good for humans, even if we enjoy those sites like sugary food, and other ways that are better, which are more like a banana or apple or something that has a modicum of healthiness.

We shouldn’t demand that everything is digitally healthy — we should be able to enjoy cheeseburgers and poutine now and again!! — but the totality of our dining establishments shouldn’t be fast food and deep fried food. Because we know that it’s really not good for us.

  1. Though all those earlier blogs have long since been scrubbed from the Internet and archived in a place no-one can find in storage. Which is a relief as no-one needs to be reminded of what I was like online in the early 2000s! ↩︎
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Aside Writing

2024.6.27

For the past many months I’ve had the joy of working with, and learning from, a truly terrific set of colleagues. One of the files we’ve handled has been around law reform in Ontario and specifically Bill 194, the Strengthening Cyber Security and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act.

Our organization’s submission focuses on ways to further improve the legislation by way of offering 28 recommendations that apply to Schedule 1 (concerning cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and technologies affecting individuals under the age of 18) and Schedule 2 (amendments to FIPPA). Broadly, our recommendations concern the levels of accountability, transparency, and oversight that are needed in a rapidly changing world.

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Photography Writing

WWDC 2024 What Do I (Still….) Want To See?

A couple years ago I posted what I wanted for WWDC 2022. I figured that I’d go through the past list and cross off the items that have arrived over the past two major updates to iOS.

And then I’m going to sketch out how I’d like to see Apple actually adopt more AI/ML into their operating systems.

Photos

This was a low point in iOS and remains so. I really want Apple to improve the Photos application given how regularly I use it.

  • The ability to search photos by different cameras and/or focal lengths
  • The ability to select a point on a photo to set the white point for exposure balancing when editing photos
  • Better/faster sync across devices
  • Enable ability to edit geolocation
  • Enable tags in photos

All of these are basically just aiming to have the iOS Photos app getting brought up to the same standards as Photos on MacOS.

Camera

There is so much potential that’s in the Camera application. I look at this from the perspective of a photographer, while recognizing that Apple has done a lot to really improve the state of things for videographers.

  • Set burst mode to activate by holding the shutter button; this was how things used to be and I want the option to go back to the way things were!
  • Advanced metering modes, such as the ability to set center, multi-zone, spot, and expose for highlights!
  • Set and forget auto-focus points in the frame; not focus lock, but focus zones
  • Zone focusing
  • Working (virtual) spirit level!

Maps

I actually like Maps. I use it a lot. But I definitely want things to be much more collaborative and less focused on Yelp data. I really do like the privacy aspects associated with Maps over some competing applications.1

  • Ability to collaborate on a guide
  • Option to select who’s restaurant data is running underneath the app (I never will install Yelp which is the current app linked in Maps)

Music

Music is fine on the whole. Still want to have something like multiple libraries, though.

  • Ability to collaborate on a playlist
  • Have multiple libraries: I want one ‘primary’ or ‘all albums’ and others with selected albums. I do not want to just make playlists

Reminders

While it’s getting better there’s still some things to do, though apparently the second item may be coming this WWDC which would be pretty great.

  • Speed up sync across shared reminders; this matters for things like shared grocery shopping!
  • Integrate reminders’ date/time in calendar, as well as with whom reminders are shared

Messages

These are both covered off!

  • Emoji reactions
  • Integration with Giphy!

News

I’ll be honest: I’ve given up on the RSS feed idea and just rely on Reeder. But I use News a lot and so it’d be nice to more fully block publications from coming up.

  • When I block a publication actually block it instead of giving me the option to see stories from publications I’ve blocked
  • It’d be great to see News updated so I can add my own RSS feeds

Fitness

The number one issue with Fitness is that I can’t log rest days. I’ve actually started to use Streaks to be more forgiving and stopped worrying so much about maintaining my streaks in Fitness. But it’s absurd that Apple hasn’t integrated this feature that’s widely requested by its user base.

  • Need ability to have off days; when sick or travelling or something it can be impossible to maintain streaks which is incredibly frustrating if you regularly live a semi-active life

Health

This still isn’t great. There is no good year over year data that you can compare against. I don’t understand why the UI isn’t better and I hope that it gets better soon.

  • Show long-term data (e.g. year vs year vs year) in a user friendly way; currently this requires third-party apps and should be default and native

And one more thing…

There is a lot of time and attention being paid to how Apple will show off artificial intelligence functionality in forthcoming operating systems. I tend to agree with Joe Rosensteel about what Apple shouldn’t do: no spying AI systems and instead a focus on useful AI-enabled functionalities.

For Photos I want to propose a pretty useful option for people that would leverage some existing iPhone capabilities. Imagine if you could take a photo (or use the measurement application built into Apple’s mobile OSes) to determine how large a photo would fit in a frame along with the aspect ratio and, then, prompted you to select photos for the frame. That selection could either automatically select just photos of the right aspect range or could show what an AI-determined best aspect ratio crop would look like.

If something like this were bundled up in a kickass UI I can see this being phenomenally helpful and solving a real world annoyance for anyone who wants to print photos.

We create far too many digital photos and print far too few. Physical photos are part of building longterm and vibrant memories: Apple should lean into enabling its customers to make these kinds of mementos.

  1. Rather than requesting a route from A to B, Apple Maps sends off multiple requests with multiple identifiers that masks where you’re trying to go. The app also converts your precise location to a less-exact one after 24 hours, and Apple itself doesn’t store any information about where you’ve been or what you’ve been searching for. Plus none of the information that reaches an external server is associated with your Apple ID. Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/google-maps-vs-apple-maps ↩︎
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Aside

2024.5.23

About a year or so ago I switched the theme on this blog. It was the first time I was really diving into a more visual front end, with featured images creating a neat visual aesthetic for each post. ​

It was cool but just didn’t align with how I make material for the web. I’ve been blogging since the late 90s and am very much an elder millennial, and still like some of those older 1 blog styles. So I’ve reverted back to a much more typical blog format that still displays photos acceptably.2​

It’s just slightly above a lateral move, but does include some things that I like:

  • Anyone who accesses the website from the web will see full posts
  • A decent search option is at the top of the website
  • It’s hopefully more apparent how multi-level menus ‘work’

I’ve also gone through and cleaned up my tags once more. I did this about a year ago but another pass should make things more consistent. Really, the key value is in recommending related posts over anything else.

  1. Some could say classic or ‘retro aesthetics ↩︎
  2. And the current theme displays captions correctly….why is this such an issue for WordPress themes!?’ ↩︎
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Writing

What Does It Mean To “Search”

Are we approaching “Google zero”, where Google searches will use generative AI systems to summarize responses to queries, thus ending the reason for people to visit website? And if that happens what is lost?

These are common questions that have been building month over month as more advanced foundational models are built, deployed, and iterated upon. But there has been relatively little assessment in public forums around the social dimensions of making a web search. Instead, the focus has tended to be on loss of traffic and subsequent economic effects of this transition.

A 2022 paper entitled “Situating Search” identifies what a search engine does, and what it is used for, in order for the authors to argue that search that only provides specific requested information (often inaccurately) fails to account for the broader range of things that people use search for.

Specifically, when people search they:

  • lookup
  • learn
  • investigate

When a ChatGPT or Gemini approach to search is applied, however, it limits the range of options before a user. Specifically, in binding search to conversational responses we may impair individuals from conducting search/learning in ways that expand domain knowledge or that rely on sensemaking of results to come to a given conclusion.

Page 227 of the paper has a helpful overview of the dimensions of Information Seeking Strategies (ISS), which explain the links between search and the kinds of activities in which individuals engage. Why, also, might chat-based (or other multimodal) search be a problem?

  • it can come across as too authoritative
  • by synthesizing data from multiple sources and masking the available range of sources, it cuts the individual’s ability to expose the broader knowledge space
  • LLMs, in synthesizing text, may provide results that are not true

All of the above issues are compounded in situations where individuals have low information literacy and, thus, are challenged in their ability to recognize deficient responses from an AI-based search system.

The authors ultimately conclude with the following:

…we should be looking to build tools that help users find and make sense of information rather than tools that purport to do it all for them. We should also acknowledge that the search systems are used and will continue to be used for tasks other than simply finding an answer to a question; that there is tremendous value in information seekers exploring, stumbling, and learning through the process of querying and discovery through these systems.

As we race to upend the systems we use, today, we should avoid moving quickly and breaking things and instead opt to enhance and improve our knowledge ecosystem. There is a place for these emerging technologies but rather than bolting them onto–and into–all of our information technologies we should determine when they are or are not fit for a given purpose.

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Writing

Establishing Confidence Ratings in Policy Assessments

Few government policy analysts are trained in assessing evidence in a structured way and then assigning confidence ratings when providing formal advice to decision makers. This lack of training can be particularly problematic when certain language (“likely,” “probable,” “believe,” etc) is used in an unstructured way because these words can lead decision makers to conclude that recommended actions have a heft of evidence and assessment that, in fact, may not be present in the assessment.

Put simply: we don’t train people to clinically assess the evidence provided to them in a rigorous and structured way, and upon which they make analyses. This has the effect of potentially driving certain decisions that otherwise might not be made.

The government analysts who do have this training tend to come from the intelligence community, which has spend decades (if not centuries) attempting to divine how reliable or confident assessments are because the sources of their data are often partial or questionable.

I have to wonder just what can be done to address this kind of training gap. It doesn’t make sense to send all policy analysts to an intelligence training camp because the needs are not the same. But there should be some kind of training that’s widely and commonly available.

Robert Lee, who works in private practice these days but was formerly in intelligence, set out some high-level framings for how private threat intelligence companies might delineate between different confidence ratings in a blog he posted a few years ago. His categories (and descriptions) were:

Low Confidence: A hypothesis that is supported with available information. The information is likely single sourced and there are known collection/information gaps. However, this is a good assessment that is supported. It may not be finished intelligence though and may not be appropriate to be the only factor in making a decision.

Moderate Confidence: A hypothesis that is supported with multiple pieces of available information and collection gaps are significantly reduced. The information may still be single sourced but there’s multiple pieces of data or information supporting this hypothesis. We have accounted for the collection/information gaps even if we haven’t been able to address all of them.

High Confidence: A hypothesis is supported by a predominant amount of the available data and information, it is supported through multiple sources, and the risk of collection gaps are all but eliminated. High confidence assessments are almost never single sourced. There will likely always be a collection gap even if we do not know what it is but we have accounted for everything possible and reduced the risk of that collection gap; i.e. even if we cannot get collection/information in a certain area it’s all but certain to not change the outcome of the assessment.

While this kind of categorization helps to clarify intelligence products I’m less certain how effective it is when it comes to more general policy advice. In these situations assessments of likely behaviours may be predicated on ‘softer’ sources of data such as a policy actor’s past behaviours. The result is that predictions may sometimes be based less on specific and novel data points and, instead, on a broader psychographic or historical understanding of how an actor is likely to behave in certain situations and conditions.

Example from Kent’s Words of Estimative Probability

Lee, also, provided the estimation probability that was developed in the early 1980s for CIA assessments. And I think that I like the Kent Word approach more if only because it provides a broader kind of language around “why” a given assessment is more or less accurate.

While I understand and appreciate that threat intelligence companies are often working with specific datapoints and this is what can lead to analytic determinations, most policy work is much softer than this and consequently doesn’t (to me) clearly align with the more robust efforts to achieve confidence ratings that we see today. Nevertheless, some kind of more robust approach to providing recommendations to decision makers is needed so that executives have a strong sense of an analyst’s confidence in any recommendation, and especially when there may be competing policy options at play. While intuition drives a considerable amount of policy work at least a little more formalized structure and analysis would almost certainly benefit public policy decision making processes.

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Aside Links

Liberal Fictions, AI technologies, and Human Rights

Although we talk the talk of individual consent and control, such liberal fictions are no longer sufficient to provide the protection needed to ensure that individuals and the communities to which they belong are not exploited through the data harvested from them. This is why acknowledging the role that data protection law plays in protecting human rights, autonomy and dignity is so important. This is why the human rights dimension of privacy should not just be a ‘factor’ to take into account alongside stimulating innovation and lowering the regulatory burden on industry. It is the starting point and the baseline. Innovation is good, but it cannot be at the expense of human rights.

— Prof. Teresa Scassa, “Bill C-27 and a human rights-based approach to data protection”

It’s notable that Prof. Scassa speaks about the way in which Bill C-27’s preamble was supplemented with language about human rights as a way to assuage some public critique of the legislation. Preambles, however, lack the force of law and do not compel judges to interpret legislation,action in a particular way. They are often better read as a way to explain legislation to a public or strike up discussions with the judiciary when legislation repudiates a court decision.

For a long form analysis of the utility of preambles see Prof. Kent Roaches, “The Uses and Audiences of Preambles in Legislation.”

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Aside

2024.5.15

The start of a week and a half off begins with the delivery of my new iPad Pro (2024). The screen is just phenomenal and I can’t believe how much faster and lighter it is compared to my 2018 iPad Pro.

Waiting this many generations means I can really tell how much nicer this one is to use!

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Links

Instagram’s Ongoing Trust and Safety Problem

A New York Times investigation reveals how Instagram promotes posts that include young girls to male users, including sexual predators.

Aside from reaching a surprisingly large proportion of men, the ads got direct responses from dozens of Instagram users, including phone calls from two accused sex offenders, offers to pay the child for sexual acts and professions of love.

The results suggest that the platform’s algorithms play an important role in directing men to photos of children. And they echo concerns about the prevalence of men who use Instagram to follow and contact minors, including those who have been arrested for using social media to solicit children for sex.

…

… though The Times chose topics that the company estimated were dominated by women, the ads were shown, on average, to men about 80 percent of the time, according to a Times analysis of Instagram’s audience data. In one group of tests, photos showing the child went to men 95 percent of the time, on average, while photos of the items alone went to men 64 percent of the time.

These findings are deeply disturbing to say the absolute least.

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Aside

2024.5.12

Really looking forward to the new iPad I’ve ordered. Went with the 1TB/16GB RAM iPad Pro, with a new pencil and folio case. Delivery date is Wednesday! (I expect I’ll end up buying a keyboards, too, in a few weeks.)

My primary use case is editing photos and doing light writing. And my 2018 iPad Pro is starting to show its age on some tasks, like editing large photo files. I’m looking forward to this big step up.

I have to wonder: what will the next iPad I buy, in 5-6 years, be like or include in excess of the current ones?