Dumb Data: From child abuse in plain sight to the politicisation of science

Abuse of others through digital technology takes many forms. Spamming, hateful messages and harassment are harms we understand. Spying, stalking and non-consensual surveillance, are things society is waking up to, and saying no!

However, there are other classes of harms that are barely recognised, and these are abuses of exposure and neglect.

For example, in the playground kids might use phones show images or videos to shock or "gross out" their friends. For some kids, this just hardens them to the messed-up world we live in. For others, it is distressing and causes withdrawal from school.

Like physical exposure, committed by exhibitionist "flashers" the aim is to offend and disgust as a means of wielding power. In its most childish, mischievous form it might be "Zoombombing porn". A nastier behaviour is sending links of gore or rape to vulnerable persons or victims with intent to cause distress.

At the same time, the ability to avoid information hazards requires maturity. Children, and many vulnerable adults are not adept at making good selections. They need effective stewarding and help to navigate the digital world.

Although advertising standards watchdogs are supposed to police broadcasts and billboards, there's plenty of examples of shock images used for commercial influence. Advertisers' behaviour and aims are on a continuum with other acts of aggression.

In the extreme, companies and agencies connected to the disgraced Cambridge Analytica have used direct influence techniques that range from exposing millions of people to subtle negative messaging, to highly targeted cloaked threats like sending videos of executions to key political candidates. This kind of exposure is better described as psychological warfare or (literally) terrorism.

A problem arises if we confuse this with consensual exposure to violence and pornography, such as in games and films. There are long-standing arguments and regulatory bodies (e.g. film and game age rating) set up to deal with this, and inconclusive scientific evidence about what harm elective exposure really does, Debate around this is emotionally driven, and cultures differ greatly. For example, Hollywood films depict wanton violence, torture and gore, while eschewing a bare nipple.

What I am interested in here is the forcing of images and sounds onto those who neither desire nor can control them. This can include noise pollution, graphical street billboards or advertising in other public places such as bus shelters and aeroplanes. It also includes unwanted exposure by other thoughtless technology users in public. A related problem is our unwillingness to call-out information hazards, or, through neglect, to allow those in our charge to suffer exposure.

Where annoyance or harms are experienced by a group, there is seldom critical mass to intervene and stop it.

There is a barrier, of social acceptability, to challenging tech abuse. In the first decade of this century it took a long time to become okay to ask noisy callers to take their mobile phone outside, or to ask managers to switch off TVs and advertising devices in public places. In 2020, the idea that not everyone wants to watch TV news from the latest war-zone while eating their breakfast has still not reached some restaurants,

One problem is that people are being conditioned to accept exposure as normal, partly on behalf of the relentless propaganda and advertising powers. Another problem is that large groups are less effective at organising because those who suffer are inhibited by a herd instinct. Unless outstanding leaders emerge, prepared to take risks or potentially rise to physical action, large crowds make a perfect target for abusers because of the bystander effect.

Child sexual abuse researcher Jimmy Hinton, building on the work of Dr. Stephen Macknik and Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde cite:Macknik10, has written extensively on how distraction, disengagement and socially normative conditions allow abusers to operate in crowds.

Contrary to the popular maxim, there is not 'safety in numbers'. The fact is, large crowds facilitate abuse. This works most potently upon stupefied and compliant groups - hence abusive exposure is slipped into a light entertainment context, when people's guard is down.

What Diana Taylor calls Percepticide cite:Taylor97, and writ large, what Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann names a Spiral of Silence cite:Noelle-Neumann73 has been well understood for decades, and these are phenomena closely related to the Asche, Bystander effects, and behaviours analysed in the Kitty Genovese murder cite:Asch56,Manning07,Darley68.

This is a subject I have discussed with students in the context of security engineering and game theory, with respect to the coordination problem in, for example, a hijack situation. Why do people so rarely rise up together to defeat tyrants?

With the exception of rare actions by outstanding characters such as Todd Beamer and the other passengers onboard UA Flight 93, even when they massively outnumber a handful of terrorists, people will allow themselves to be executed one by one, rather than rush and easily overpower the hijackers. Indeed the likelihood of resistance may be inversely proportional to the crowd size due to diffusion of responsibility effects.

There are cultural variations around 'herd protector' instincts. So for example in a big US city, a person could be bundled into a van by kidnappers in broad daylight while a group of 'friends' resume talking and drinking as if nothing had happened. In other cultures, total strangers will rush to assist in a public struggle, even challenging seemingly official actors like police.

This essay was inspired by personal experience. It's just an anecdote and may not be typical of everyday experience in Britain, but it is what it is. Here's what I saw;

It was a fairly typical day on the British railway system. The staff were on strike. The trains were running late or being cancelled. Hoards of angry, depressed and aggressive commuters packed the platforms listening with hope to the fractured announcements and mechanical apologies read in a dead computer voice. To make it worse families and schoolchildren were travelling back from a 'Black Friday' shopping frenzy. We were packed in like sardines ¹. I gave my seat to a older man, and stood at the head of the carriage, squashed shoulder to shoulder with some lads who initially seemed a bit rowdy, and drunk.

But as the doors closed and the train moved off a remarkable change occurred. As I looked down the carriage I saw a perfect row of little bluish lights. All heads turned downward. Even the chaps who stood beside me, who I had expected to be fully engaged in loud banter by now, were passively staring into their palms, thumbs twitching, eyes glazed, silent. It was as if someone had released a valve and filled the carriage with a narcotic gas.

On this trip there were no other reality junkies to make connection with. Even the old fella I had given my seat to was grinning into his screen. Some passengers were being spit-roasted by more than one device. A neurotic, bird-like woman was pecking alternately at two phones, while next to her a dumpy, sighing woman had opened an enormous laptop on her table, plus two separate tablets or smartphones that she juggled and shuffled.

Then I noticed the kid. He was about six or seven years old. Like me he was without a seat, or a screen. He stood between his mum, who was neither holding his hand nor talking to him, some other standing strangers who had their backs turned to him, and a snoring heap slumped in an adjacent seat.

In front of the sleeping guy, on the seat-back, at exactly the boys eye level, was a tablet playing a movie. Its bright screen strobed with seizure-inducing rhythms of a fast action edit. With each flicker it pulled in the attention of the kid. Yellow and orange explosions flashed as bodies flew apart. Meanwhile the cyborg ears of the slumbering man flashed to a slower, Bluetooth metronome. Their owner slept through the screams of war.

Back in reality, the helpless kid kept turning his face to the screen. By now someone was being garroted, strung upside down and tortured. Blood spatters ran down the camera lens in what is the vogue, modern production style, as if to give the film an authentic documentary feel, like a Jihadist snuff movie. The boy looked distressed. He kept looking to the screen, then looking up at his oblivious mum, then looking around the train for connection, and finally, helplessly, back to the screen again.

As he looked up to his mother, it was as if to say "Do something". But she was not there. Oddly, her head was not turned away, but it actually seemed to be looking right at her son… only not looking. She was grinning, swiping, grinning, fingering, grinning, twitching thumbs, and grinning, grinning, like an obscene jack-o-lantern, an orange faced plastic Halloween pumpkin - all humanity scooped out and made into soup.

Parental neglect caused by technology is a modern spectacle. I will never forget the look on her face, and the look on the boys face. It's what the word juxtaposition was invented for. If I never say 'juxtaposition' again in my life, it will have served its function, to describe that one moment on a British train. Nothing else can capture such a profound disconnect, such a tragic breaking of bonds.

There's a funny moment in Robert De Niro's Meet the Fockers ², when they come home to find the baby watching Scarface. This wasn't it.

Angry inside, I wanted to move up the train and wake the abuser. Maybe I could just push past, but it was hopeless. We were packed-in. Nobody could move. I shouted. "Hey", and again "Hey you". The eyes of a dozen phone-zombies scolded me. Their mouths smirked at the 'train loonie'. See! look! Some crazy guy with no phone is communicating in primitive vocal utterances!

Undeterred, I went for one more really loud "Hey asshole!", but the robotic dead voice interjected again, reminding passengers to hold on to their possessions, and that if they see anything that doesn't look right, to report it to a member of staff.

This definitely didn't look right. And the members of staff… were all on strike defending their jobs from robots. Perhaps so that one better day, a guard walking through a carriage might put a stop to this kind of thing.

Then I caught the kids eye again. He looked to me as the one responsible adult in the room, as if pleading. I slowly shook my head, disappointed at my own impotence, but acknowledging his distress. And to my surprise, he mirrored the gesture, in a most adult way. A part of me was communicating with a part of him, in a way that transcended age and time. A six year old kid was saying to me, in language older than civilisation, "What the hell is wrong with all these fucking people?", and I was saying "Yeah. I'm embarrassed to be here too, as a 'grown up', I'm as confused and frightened as you are."

Years later, I still haven't had 'space to unpack' this experience. I suspect it will trigger many insights at some point. But it goes far beyond issues of responsible use of technology. It is definitely related to my projects of Digital Self Defence and Digital Veganism, and strengthens my resolve to push forward, research, explore, educate and inform. When re-telling this story I heard from a friend that she had recently sat besides a guy openly watching pornography on a bus.

To their credit, the British Government, working with TfL and National Rail have since started poster and announcement campaigns warning that watching porn in public is an offence ³. But this cannot be effectively "policed", and surely responsibility also lies with all of us to stop exposure abuses using technology.

There are really two stories in here. It is wrong to allow technology you control to harmfully expose others to unsafe materials, but inattentive parents, or responsible "authority figures" who just ignore it, are also an increasing problem ⁴.

It's not that we don't know phones are bad for kids. Read through this "ledger of harms" for extensive peer reviewed scientific evidence ⁵. Nor are any of us without sin in occasionally using tech as digital pacifiers when we're busy. But sadly, some people still actually think they are good for children. I believe the scientific evidence shows that is quite untrue.

Imagine you have no idea what sulphuric acid or hydrogen peroxide are. Would you give a child some bottles of random chemicals to play with? But chemicals are good for children right - because they learn chemistry that way…

A chemistry set, being a kind of technology, is an age appropriate educational toy. But would a good parent let their kids have exposure to random unknown technology? According to our culture it's okay for kids to play unsupervised with connected digital technology because;

• They are all whizzes with it.
• It helps them learn technology.
• Learning "smart" technology is an unquestionably good thing.

As an educator and computer scientist I can't agree with any of that. It's pure urban folklore. We don't make the same mistake of exposing children to fire, knives, poisons, storms, deadly snakes, or bear traps so that "they'll learn by experimenting".

Something is amiss. Parents aren't stupid. Mobile phones are one of the rare things we consistently make this fundamental category error about. I think the problem is that we are just deliberately misinformed.

Those advertising images of a mentally healthy, functional family, all laughing and smiling together while using technology…. total crap. Have you ever seen that? In reality? Digital devices have an immediate and profound disconnecting effect that anyone can see.

I think the main reason that people do not intervene to stop their kids exposing themselves to digital harms is that they're too scared to challenge it. We are bombarded by relentless propaganda messages from the technology industry not to let our kids "be left behind". On top of that, we are embarrassed about our fear and ignorance, and our own excessive use - as evidenced in this article "In support of ignoring your kids to text" ⁶.

Some kids as young as the boy I saw are taking the fight-back on their own initiative. "Get off your phone mummy" is something I'm pleased to hear them say. And children who tell their teachers, "I don't want to use a damn tablet/laptop, it hurts my eyes, Fetch some paper and pens" They are our hope for the future.