With Facebook under scrutiny for allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest millions of users’ personal data, among other privacy crises, some people are hanging onto Zeynep Tufekci’s every word.
Tufekci, an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies technological change. Back in 2012, when many Americans were celebrating President Obama’s re-election, she was getting worried.
The Obama campaign had deployed a data-analytics strategy to target voters and get them to the polls in droves. But no one seemed to be talking about the downsides of such methods, Tufekci says: “The way Facebook targeting works, the way social media works, the way other parts of the online ecology work — this is really open to misinformation and misuse.”
An op-ed that November in The New York Times helped make her one of the most prominent academic voices on how Facebook and other companies collect data and threaten privacy. Tufekci now writes regularly for the Times and has done three TED Talks, written a book, and has nearly 300,000 Twitter followers.
A lot of early warnings about social media’s impact on the public sphere came from academics for a reason.
But the professor, who is Turkish and has a background in both social science and programming, plays down her star status. She simply uses scholarship to try to make sense of the recent digital transformation of society, she says, and because she’s from the Middle East, she’s particularly sensitive to authoritarianism.
Tufekci spoke with The Chronicle about how she balances her public presence with her career and how higher education might call attention to the tactics of technology giants.
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It’s taken us most of 2018 to connect for this interview because your schedule as the go-to scholar on digital transformation is so busy. Do you wish there were more of you?
The academy is full of people whose work in this area is crucial, though not all of them do public writing. Who else but an independent academy is going to do what we can do? If you go work for the companies, you have nondisclosure agreements. And if you work for Facebook, you’re basically focused on ad targeting. Whereas if you’re in our space, you say, How can we do this better? You’re not trying to make someone money, you’re trying to think about the public good. There’s no other group like us, that has this deep level of understanding informed from history and from the social sciences, the things that might get lost in Silicon Valley’s push for stock options and the next IPO. So I try to go on social media and point people to more resources. It’s the least I can do.
A lot of people in the technology space make their living from selling books, which means that you have to write another book every year. And it often has to appeal to certain sentiments. It’s hard in this day and age to make a lot of money writing books that have complicated messages. As an academic, I can do this. I can say what I think needs to be said because I’m not trying to keep an audience. I’m trying to reach them, but I just want to say what’s most helpful and useful.
Does higher education have a responsibility to take on companies like Facebook?
We have a responsibility to bring our conceptual and empirical understanding of the transformation into the public sphere. We have a responsibility to say, Here are the downsides if you retain this much data, if you use artificial intelligence to analyze and target your audience, if you do it in a way that’s not transparent, if you have an algorithm that favors misinformation at times and has biases in terms of what easily goes viral, if you have this hands-off approach to fact-checking.
Where I am, in North Carolina, the state motto is “To be, rather than to seem.” My understanding of it is, instead of claiming that we as academics are relevant, we should show why we’re relevant. A lot of early warnings about social media’s impact on the public sphere came from academics for a reason. People could have just walked off to join one of these big companies, but they stayed and tried to be a watchdog of sorts. Did we succeed? Probably not. But at least there was a significant effort.
Going to college is, in part, about critical thinking and personal development. Can colleges educate students about the digital economy?
Of course. The other thing colleges can do is fill the enormous need for interdisciplinary thinking. That’s quite useful in dealing with the world as it is right now, with technological change and sociological change and politics and power. You have to think through all of it at the same time, to try to grapple with it. Colleges can foster that explicitly.
My classrooms are interdisciplinary places. I’ve got people in my classroom who have written machine-learning algorithms and others who have never coded, but they’ve taken psychology. It makes some of the work in the classroom slightly more time-consuming, but the upside is that the students add an enormous amount to one another.
Is it challenging to balance your public presence with your faculty life?
I still do my day job. I go teach, I serve on committees, I do all of the things that an academic does. It’s not as visible, because I’m not tweeting about the faculty meeting, or “I’m at a dissertation defense.” But that’s what I do most of the time.
There’s a push right now to do what I do, to be more public. And there are two important things that chairs and deans need to understand. One is obvious: The day is 24 hours, and if you do this, that time is going to come out of something else. I’ve never had an issue with that. My department chairs and deans realize that I have a chance to do high-profile work, and sometimes it means there are trade-offs.
The other thing, and this is especially true for scholars of color, is you get targeted attacks. Something you say gets taken out of context, and all of a sudden 500 people are calling your chair. So while we should encourage academics to be more public — I’m a great believer in that — we have to think, How do we support this? If this person is writing about something that’s of public interest, and especially if they are a scholar of color or a woman, what is the institutional support structure if something they say ticks somebody off?
Has that targeting changed how you present yourself online?
A lot of times, if somebody just thinks something I said is stupid, I’m like, all right, it’s a big world. I don’t even block those people most of the time. I’m not writing to please everyone, and you can’t. There have been cases, of course, where things escalate more.
You do worry. Who among us doesn’t have a tweet that is open to misinterpretation? I try to say, “That isn’t what I meant,” and just move on.
One of the things I try to think about when I tweet is, I have students. I don’t want any of my students to feel uncomfortable with anything I say. It’s really important to maintain the classroom as a space where people can disagree, where we try to foster critical thinking. You have to treat that space with respect.
The classroom and the public presence are more joined than you might think. When I’m writing, I’m thinking, How do I explain this to people who don’t necessarily have the same academic preparation as I do? That’s what teaching is.
Colleges use predictive analytics themselves, often with good intentions — retaining students, for instance. Do the ends justify the means?
The classroom-management system we use, Sakai, comes with this massive surveillance infrastructure. You can see what students clicked on, and you can see what they did. Early in the semester, I show students all of the tools that follow them around, and we talk about it.
I tell them, I’m not going to look. I don’t want to decide whether or not you read something based on whether you clicked on the article. I don’t want to play these surveillance games. I just want to see, did you write something thoughtful in the forum?
We use it to start a conversation about what it means to be a student in this day and age. They usually have no idea that their professors can see every click.
You said you’ve had to make trade-offs. What do you wish you had more time for?
This is going to sound funny, but I really like coding and doing statistical work. I wouldn’t mind more of those stereotypical professor days, where you just have stacks of paper, and code on your screen, and you haven’t brushed your hair, and you’re just eating from the vending machine. I find myself missing that a little bit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.
