Vian Bakir

• BA (Hons) Oxon, MA, PhD.
• Professor at Bangor University

With growing commercial, regulatory and scholarly interest in use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to profile and interact with human emotion (“emotional AI”), attention is turning to its capacity for manipulating people, relating to factors impacting on a person’s decisions and behavior. Given prior social disquiet about AI and profiling technologi...

This research was initiated by the UK Emotional AI Lab with Japanese universities (Chuo, Ritsumeikan, Meiji). Studies were about : (1) growth in AI technology to gauge and interact with emotion, (2) public opinion about its deployment, and (3) legal and philosophical questions about governance of these technologies. Comparative work (UK-Japan) esta...

This paper considers what liberal philosopher Michael Sandel coins the ‘moral limits of markets’ in relation to the idea of paying people for data about their biometrics and emotions. With Sandel arguing that certain aspects of human life (such as our bodies and body parts) should be beyond monetisation and exchange, others argue that emerging tech...

Opening Part II of this book on how to strengthen the civic body against the rising tide of optimisation of emotion and its incubation of false information online, this chapter examines six core social and democratic harms arising from false information online. Firstly (1) it produces wrongly informed citizens that (2) in certain circumstances, for...

To understand how the optimisation of emotion incubates false information online, this chapter examines profiling and targeting in citizen-political communications. Profiling and targeting are how emotion is understood, harnessed, amplified, dampened, manipulated and optimised. This chapter focuses on profiling and targeting in political campaignin...

False information is incubated across complex, interconnected communication and technological environments, imbricating individuals and society. This chapter introduces two key concepts. The first is the economics of emotion : namely, the optimisation of datafied emotional content for financial gain. The second concept is the politics of emotion :...

This chapter focuses on the nature of disinformation (false information spread with intent to deceive) and misinformation (false information spread without specific deceptive intent), inquiring into processes that increase their circulation online. As befits any study of media systems, it addresses interconnections between technologies, media forms...

To better understand the mechanics of how false information challenges the health of the civic body , this chapter explores the economics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for financial gain) and the politics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for political gain) under different affective contexts wo...

This chapter accounts for the energising role of affect, emotions and moods in circulating false information throughout the civic body . It starts by charting the trajectory of the role of feelings in understanding citizen-political communications. Their persuasive importance was recognised millennia ago and have been recognised anew in recent deca...

We have established that false information online harms the civic body , driven by the economics of emotion and the politics of emotion . What should be done about this? Multi-stakeholder solutions have been proffered by various countries’ governmental inquiries into disinformation and fake news, and by supranational bodies including the United Nat...

Emotion plays an important role in modern societies, especially given circulation of knowingly and unwittingly spread false information. Opening Part I of this book that deconstructs core features of contemporary false information online, this chapter makes the case that false information is prevalent online, causing real-world civic harms; that em...

This final chapter draws out more substantive answers to strengthen the civic body against the harms arising from the optimisation of datafied emotion, as the bandwidth for the datafication, and optimisation, of emotion expands beyond web-based platforms to include bodies through biometrics. First, the chapter teases out core shifts discernable fro...

Humancentric sociotechnical relationships are key to living well with artificial intelligence (AI). In this chapter, the authors focus on two nations advanced in AI: Japan and the UK. Their methods are diverse, including engagement with emotional AI, policy and municipal stakeholders in the UK and Japan; comparative cross‐cultural UK and Japan anal...

1. Overview 1.1 This submission focuses on the following questions posed by the DCMS Committee inquiry into reality TV: What is the future for reality TV of this kind? How does it accord with our understanding of, and evolving attitudes to, mental health? 1.2 We offer a cautionary note on a likely future of reality media-where the media industry ma...

This paper explores whether psychographic profiling and targeting married with big data and deployed in digital political campaigns is a form of psychological operations (“psy-ops”). Informed by studies on deception, coercion, and influence activities from propaganda, persuasion, policy making, cognitive psychology, information, and marketing schol...

The APPG on AI is interested in face and emotion recognition technologies, and how regulations can protect citizens and their privacy. This briefing paper acknowledges the increasingly vast work on live facial recognition, but focuses on emotion recognition technologies. Key issues addressed are: 1. What are the technologies and how are they being...

From the sophists of ancient Greece, chastised by Plato (360 bc) for their specious rhetoric, through to the sixteenth- century realpolitik of Machiavelli and the twentieth- century advocacy of the necessity of deception in politics by thinkers such as Leo Strauss (1958, 1975), the issues of lying and deception have been perennials of politics. The...

The Internet provides fast and ubiquitous communication that enables all kinds of communities and provides citizens with easy access to vast amounts of information, although the information is not necessarily verified and may present a distorted view of real events or facts. The Internet’s power as an instant source of mass information can be used...

The Internet provides fast and ubiquitous communication that enables all kinds of communities and provides citizens with easy access to vast amounts of information, although the information is not necessarily verified and may present a distorted view of real events or facts. The Internet’s power as an instant source of mass information can be used...

This book provides a definitive overview of the relationships of influence between civil society and intelligence elites. The secrecy surrounding intelligence means that publication of intelligence is highly restricted, barring occasional whistle-blowing and sanitised official leaks. These characteristics mean that intelligence, if publicised, can...

Organized persuasive communication is essential to the exercise of power at national and global levels. It has been studied extensively by scholars of public relations, promotional culture and propaganda. There exists, however, considerable confusion and conceptual limitations across these fields: scholars of PR largely focus on what they perceive...

We analyse the UK Parliament Fake News Inquiry’s 79 written submissions (published in April 2017) and assess their solutions to fake news.

This paper examines the 2016 US presidential election campaign to identify problems with, causes of and solutions to the contemporary fake news phenomenon. To achieve this, we employ textual analysis and feedback from engagement, meetings and panels with technologists, journalists, editors, non-profits, public relations firms, analytics firms and a...

Introducing the Special Theme on Veillance and Transparency: A Critical Examination of Mutual Watching in the Post-Snowden, Big Data Era, this article presents a series of provocations and practices on veillance and transparency in the context of Big Data in a post-Snowden period. In introducing the theoretical and empirical research papers, artist...

A core problem of the contemporary fake news phenomenon is that professional persuaders and influencers have engaged in propaganda for so long that many people no longer trust mainstream news to communicate truthful and accurate information. We therefore need professional persuaders and influencers to develop less propagandistic modes of persuasion...

We examine the economic underpinnings of the contemporary phenomenon of fake news – namely, news that is either wholly false or that has deliberately misleading elements incorporated within its content. At heart, the problem of fake news is about the economics of attention: specifically, how viewing time converts to revenue from advertisers. We sug...

This article explores whether the contemporary press adequately holds political-intelligence elites accountable when facing Strategic Political Communication (SPC) during those long periods when whistle-blowers are absent (‘journalism-as-usual’). It develops an original benchmark of public accountability demands of political-intelligence elites tha...

Drawing on the debates in the ongoing ESRC-funded seminar series (2015-2016), 'Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements: Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust' (DATA-PSST!), we identify stances on transparency in the post-Snowden leak era held by participants. Participants comprise academics from diverse disciplines, and stakeholders invol...

The academic field examining the relationship between the news media and the intelligence community is extremely small and fragmented, with sustained academic analysis limited to a handful of publications. Not only is the field small, but it occupies tiny patches of turf in disparate disciplines that rarely talk to each other, spanning Media, Journ...

This chapter provides an introduction to propaganda in relation to war and conflict. We start by outlining the importance of these activities to the contemporary generation of policymakers and noting also the relevance and significance of deception as a political strategy. We then map three distinct areas in which propaganda plays a key role in con...

The Snowden leaks indicate the extent, nature, and means of contemporary mass digital surveillance of citizens by their intelligence agencies and the role of public oversight mechanisms in holding intelligence agencies to account. As such, they form a rich case study on the interactions of “veillance” (mutual watching) involving citizens, journalis...

Reflecting on Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelations regarding indiscriminate online and telephone surveillance and social media manipulation by signals intelligence agencies, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, this article highlights the hitherto limited nature of public knowledge of, and internationally uneven concern r...

Overview: This book examines in depth the agenda-building struggles of the Bush and Blair political administrations (and those of their successors in the US and UK) over their use of torture to gain intelligence for the War on Terror (2001-12). Given that the Bush Administration’s torture-for-intelligence policy initiated soon after 9/11 was kept...

Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication: Iraq, USA, UK aims to understand the limits of control over Strategic Political Communication (SPC) in the newly emerged era of web-­‐based participatory media (‘Web 2.0’) across the first decade of the twenty-­‐first century. In the era of top-­‐down media (pre-­‐Web 1.0), challenging eli...

A macro‐view of the field of media and risk is offered by examining four main routes of media‐risk research. These routes are the media’s role in: providing risk knowledge to inform citizens; modulating public acceptability of different risks; motivating the public to take responsibility for, and action regarding, risks; and providing imaginative s...

This paper examines two disturbing, post-2003 Iraq War representations of Saddam Hussein – the televised inspection of his disheveled body on his capture (December 2003) and television and internet footage of his execution (December 2006). These representations epitomize two very different examples of government control of information within the em...

The danger with news, especially television broadcast news, is that it is regarded as wholly real, devoid of manipulation and transparent. Whilst a critical media audience understands that immediacy, liveness and authoritatively stated presentations are manipulable and edited, constant vigilance and attention to content and framing is required in t...

This edited collection explores and interrogates the relationship between media and trust. It begins by examining the decline of trust in key institutions and the relationship between Trust Studies and Media Studies. Fourteen international contributions follow, focusing on a variety of genres and examining a number of media forms. Can we speak of T...

As Chapter 1 demonstrated, trust is conspicuously absent in a wide range of political, economic and media institutions. As such, trust is an increasingly studied phenomenon. We have adopted the moniker of ‘trust studies’, and this chapter will outline the growth of this field, the relative absence of reference to media therein and areas where there...

In considering the relationship between trust and a range of media genres and forms, the fourteen contributions in this volume reflect events in a number of continents and span a period from the first decades of the 20th century to the early years of the 21st century. The contemporary mediated public communications environment is far removed from t...

The generalised mood of modern times is that trust is on the wane and that this is problematic (Misztal, 1996; Duffy, Williams and Hall, 2004). A widespread consciousness has emerged that existing bases for social cooperation, solidarity and consensus have been eroded. When this erosion began is hard to pinpoint. Some suggest the 1980s, with its de...

This chapter examines how international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Greenpeace, and multi-national oil and gas corporation, Royal-Dutch Shell, attempted to generate trust from various audiences through news-oriented rhetorical strategies. Two risk issues are explored where Greenpeace sought international attention in the 1990s and which ge...

In this paper we critique grounded theory’s ability to fulfil its aim of offering a practical vehicle for prediction, change, and control as stipulated in grounded theory’s original formulation by Glaser and Strauss, and later developed by Strauss. We do this through a case study approach, whereby we develop a grounded theory of leisure and cultura...

Purpose The dominant strategy discourse projects strategy as rational and calculable. However, leading academics conclude that strategy is “elusive” and “complex”. The purpose of this paper is to unravel strategy's elusiveness and unpack its complexity through empirical hermeneutic investigation. Design/methodology/approach Strauss' grounded theor...

This article uses a qualitative case study approach to examine policy-oriented risk communication in the battle between Greenpeace and Shell over the disposal of the Brent Spar oil structure. Policy-agenda-setting literature is fused with literature from the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) and transnational advocacy networks to genera...

This paper examines the usefulness of the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) in understanding the media's role in risk communication. Since the SARF was created in 1988, it has been both further developed and critiqued for (amongst other things) its: static conception of communication; lack of attention towards how key actors use the med...

What is sousveillance? Sousveillance is a concept developed by Steve Mann, a Canadian inventor and academic, to explore the philosophical and techno-social issues arising from human-centered capture, processing and transmission of sensory information. It was developed in conjunction with his pioneering research on wearable computing and wearable ca...