GUY: Big Data and Bigger Ambitions
HOW ONE COMPANY IS TRYING TO USE
BIG DATA FOR GOOD
DECEMBER 31, 2020 — HANNAH RICHTER
“We have reached a point in time where being mean on social media is actually being rewarded.”
In 2018, it was calculated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created daily across the world (that’s 18 zeros!). It was predicted that by this year, 1.7MB of data would be created every second by every person. And this prediction is only increasing. After the 2016 American elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we know that data can be used to influence people. So it’s about time that we question how much data is kept on an individual that they were not aware of, and how that data might be used to influence them, to misinform them, and to create a polarising society.
Watch our interview with Guy here, or read the article as it continues below:
Guy De Pauw is the CEO of TextGain, a ‘big data’ company from Antwerp, Belgium. According to De Pauw, technology is mostly used for commercial benefits, but through their tools, they are trying to use technology for the benefit of society, or, at least, “to understand what is going on in society”. TextGain have developed social media monitoring tools that are able to automatically detect disinformation and polarisation on social media, tracking the huge amounts of data that an individual is unable to see all of for themselves. Through automated scraping of social media, they offer a visualisation of the data in an interactive dashboard, allowing individuals to stay updated on the trends in the landscape of polarisation.
De Pauw believes it is important to tackle disinformation and polarisation as “we have reached a point in time where being mean on social media is actually being rewarded”. He discusses this as being a part of human nature, a way to increase your social status. But we shouldn’t accept that, as a society, we have a mean streak in us. We need to find more constructive ways of arguing with each other, because, as De Pauw says, “there is always room for debate, even if it is a heated debate, that’s important. But it should never be toxic”. Without this, polarisation will continue to rise, and our society will become more divided than ever.
“We need to know how it works and we need to understand why people are angry and what triggers toxicity.”
Since March 2020, De Pauw has seen that a lot more data is being generated. As this coincides with the beginning of lockdowns across Europe, it is no surprise that many say the pandemic has turned into an infodemic. For TextGain, the surge in disinformation, and in turn, polarisation, during this period is no longer manageable. When asked what precautions they are taking, De Pauw says all they are able to do is keep on observing it the best they can. They will keep trying to counter the infodemic no matter what and, in the meantime, try to learn from it. This is hard however, because De Pauw believes that data is “the root cause of the problem”. In order to counteract polarisation, “we need to know how it works and we need to understand why people are angry and what triggers toxicity.”
The way that we use data has changed immensely over the last few years, and certainly decades. Whereas previously it used to be difficult to gain access to documents and texts, you can now find them with a simple click of your finger. De Pauw stresses that society has also managed to make huge, positive advances thanks to big data technologies: “For example, AI and machine learning algorithms are being used extensively in medical and pharmaceutical science to find out which components are beneficial in a health context. There's a lot of new galaxies and planets being discovered through machine learning techniques. I think these are very exciting new uses of data”. De Paw also mentions colleagues from the University of Nairobi who track elephants to see where they are going through the seasons, using geolocation data to help wildlife preservation. He says “it’s those kinds of applications that you wouldn't normally imagine that are really lovely to observe”.
“The best we can do is to stay outside, observe what is going on, and try to intervene when things get too rough.”
It’s difficult to imagine a world without data now, and with so many positive advances occurring across different fields thanks to data, would we ever want to live in a world without it? Perhaps we need to look at it from a different perspective, and identify what we can do to improve the problems we currently face instead. As De Pauw mentioned, it seems the issue lies with how unmanageable the data appears to be. And the lack of restrictions on how our personal and private data is used continues to cause problems on social media and beyond.
You would expect governments to regulate it, but they are unable to keep up with how quickly it’s changing. De Pauw says it’s too tricky: “there are some governments who are going to want [social media platforms] to be a lot more regulated than others”. Although he agrees there is a need for better regulations, he doesn’t think it is clear yet how we can create these in a way that will fix the problems of data misuse, especially on social media.
For De Pauw, the best we can do is to “stay outside, observe what is going on, and try to intervene when things get too rough”.