Connecting the Dots: Themes And Emerging Issues Across the NoC’s Global Views of COVID-19 Essay Collection
By Nagla Rizk, Amar Ashar, Melyssa Eigen
There is no single COVID-19 experience. Globally, COVID-19 has impacted all of us in one way or another, leaving no country unaffected, no industry untouched, and no person unchanged. Imagining these diverse impacts beyond a personal or local context can be difficult. Understanding them from a global perspective is valuable — it enables us to examine the similar and divergent ways in which the pandemic has changed our lives, and offers a sense of global community and an opportunity to learn from each other.
Individuals associated with the Global Network of Internet and Society Centers (NoC) collaborated on an essay series intended to couple the local and the global against the backdrop of COVID-19 and by doing so bridged the institutional network with personal observations and human narratives. Researchers, advocates, and interdisciplinary scholars shared personal narratives from around the world, often posing thought-provoking questions prompted by personal reflections on COVID-19.
All the essays in this series provide a unique perspective on COVID-19 beyond an examination of the public health crisis. Some pieces were written as personal reflections, some as research findings conducted as projects at their respective institutions, and others as evaluations of local government responses. Certain shared themes sit across these diverse essays, in both a research sense — for example, the myriad of privacy concerns during a pandemic — but also less tangibly, where we may observe changing societal values prompted by secondary effects of COVID-19.
The essays in this series are meant to capture real-time insights on how COVID-19 has impacted the work of scholars across the globe during the spring of 2020. It offers an initial picture likely to change over time. We identified a few shared themes and questions across a number of the essays, many of which are (unsurprisingly) core research areas for institutions that participate in the NoC, and which include: the state’s role in a public health crisis; greater information and power asymmetries; data, visibility, and inclusion; open access, knowledge, and science; and disruption and accelerated digital transformation. We explore these themes below.
State and Platform Responses to a Public Health Crisis
Since the onset of the pandemic we have observed uneven responses to the crisis by governments across the globe. Some chose to employ large-scale testing and surveillance tactics while others relied on hands-off private sector led approaches, sometimes complemented by locally driven community-based decisions. We have witnessed tensions between exertion of government control and the desire to protect human autonomy. We have asked ourselves what the right level of government intervention should be and who should control a country’s response to a public health crisis. We have praised the successes of organized, swift responses and lamented the failures of disjointed, slow responses.
A number of essays in the collection explored the role of the state vis a vis platforms. Authors probed issues beyond crisis management techniques as they reflected on COVID-19’s impact in their respective regions. Juan Carlos De Martin’s essay, “Why The Topic of Contact Tracing Apps Has Been So Controversial”, touched on the tension between the role of the state during this pandemic and private companies in Italy, particularly how predominant technology companies may use the crisis to entrench platform power in the wake of COVID-19. De Martin estimated that 10 million students in Italy have used online platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams in the past few months. Education, which is predominantly a state function in the country, illustrates how Italy is now significantly dependent on tools deployed by private companies prompting a discussion about whether and how states should facilitate the creation of a more robust digital public sphere.
Although the government power seemed to wane in some places, it expanded in others, often through increased surveillance measures and adjacent legislative acts. Both Andrew Lowenthal’s essay, “Disrupted Geographics”, and Natalia Langenegger’s and Celina Bottino’s co-authored essay, “The Renewed Important and Data — and Data Protection — in Times of COVID-19”, described this dynamic. Lowenthal’s essay focused on political fragility in Southeast Asia, where stability and unity are lacking among different government responses to the pandemic. Lowenthal described a “democratic regression” in some of these countries, which in the absence of legal protections and western intervention, has led to an increase in surveillance and, further, authoritarian-like control by the government.
In Brazil, as described by Langenegger and Bottino, data protection regulations were actually written prior to COVID-19. But the law has not yet been enacted. Brazilian political leaders have used virus-related data collection as a proxy for political discourse, leveraging the crisis as a means of consolidating power. Langenegger and Bottino described how the data protection law favors intra-state political gains rather than an expansion of individual protections against state power. Brazil’s President, Congress and even their Supreme Court have weighed in on the matter, and there’s still uncertainty about when or even if the law, originally set for August 2020, will be enacted.
In addition to legislation, we have also seen states assume an entirely different role around crisis communications and information sharing. Lowenthal’s essay introduces this theme which features more prominently in China’s response to COVID-19 as described by Issac Mao in his essay, “A Lesson Hopeful From the Pandemic Caused by Censorship and Worsened by Disinformation”. Mao described China as a “disinformation farm” in an “information war”, making it an imperative to search for truth. His account detailed the power and perils of a centralized response and how disinformation and censorship can extend beyond borders in unanticipated ways. But he also explained how we can see systems of disinformation operate and use that to identify strategies to inoculate ourselves against media manipulation.
Greater Information and Power Asymmetries
One core theme across the series is how the crisis has highlighted asymmetries of information and power, and how these dynamics affect groups and countries differently. Beyond asymmetries of resources, there are asymmetries in data availability, particularly in Global South countries such as Nigeria. Babatunde Okunoye discussed this in his essay, “Data and International Development: Insights From Online Information Seeking on the Coronavirus in Nigeria”. The infrastructural asymmetry of information in Nigeria, largely driven by a lack of government-based financial support, has led to a strong reliance on free internet search engines for information during this pandemic while more granular, “small data” points are scarce though may be just as important. Figures in Okunoye’s essay showed a spike in COVID-19 related search queries during the past few months. Without other meaningful forms of information, Nigerians are overly reliant on what they find online, further placing limits on communities already facing obstacles to internet connectivity and mobile access.
Asymmetries also exist intra-country between communities of different means. Nagla Rizk, in her essay, “Vulnerabilities Exposed: COVID-19 and Informal Livelihoods in Egypt”, described the Egyptian landscape where “formal” and “informal” workers are treated differently, the latter experiencing a far more adverse effect from COVID-19. “Informal” workers, who Rizk said make up 60% of Egypt’s workforce, were amongst the first to lose their jobs. Their living situations cannot accommodate social distancing, and without a job, many of these workers lack the means for basic necessities. With a flawed national healthcare system, forcing Egyptians to pay high out of pocket costs, Egypt’s experience with COVID-19 has been anything but uniform. The difference between public and private healthcare, for those who can afford it, is astounding and detrimental to these poorer communities.
Data, Visibility, and Inclusion
Rizk’s essay not only demonstrated economic and labor market asymmetries, but highlighted the myriad of ways representation of marginalized groups is often blurred or erased. The digital world we live in makes digital representation incredibly important in order to create an inclusive society, even more so during COVID-19. Currently in Egypt, official narratives and statistical data render informal laborers, informal urban dwellers, and some women as invisible. Rural communities, as mentioned in Okunoye’s essay about Nigeria, are also often invisible in national statistical data. Very little data has been collected about underrepresented groups to date, creating barriers to meaningful inclusivity and triggering potential harm by algorithms that exclude the uncounted.
Armando Guio’s essay, “Why Artificial Intelligence Is More Relevant Than Ever”, spoke to this idea of representation through data from a Colombian perspective. He explained the importance of promoting social justice, creating new job opportunities, and improving the economy, which can only be effective when we have representative information about all of our people.
How can we collect more representative data in contexts where resources may be scarce, standards uneven, and where technologies that are deployed and used are designed in the Global North? How do we make sure that data is accurate when working with rural areas in the Global South? Guio and Rizk both connected their work in AI to the question of inclusivity. Through inclusive, accountable algorithms that rely on accurate and disaggregated data, technologists may help to shape public policy in more positive ways. Guio and Rizk pointed to the larger role technology research can play in our society beyond the current crisis to advance inclusive development. The problem is also not limited to countries in the Global South, as CDC data in the United States recently went “dark” only to be restored after an outcry from researchers, public health officials, and activists.
The above essays offer new perspectives about data representation. Equally important to this idea of getting data from the people during a pandemic is getting the information to people. Both essays by Okunoye and Mao emphasized the importance of timely information during a pandemic. They described barriers to creating informed publics who need up-to-date and accurate information, and where research communities and evidence-based policymaking can serve as key enablers, discussed in the following section.
Open Access, Knowledge, and Science
Access to data and publications for researchers during a pandemic is critical. The authors handled this topic from diverse angles, but they all touched on the law and its pertinence to data. For instance, both Julia Reda in her essay, “Copyright Clashes With COVID-19 Response”, and Tobias Schonwetter in his essay, “How COVID-19 Reinforces the Need for IP Reform and Research in South Africa”, stressed the importance of adaptable intellectual property (IP) laws. Reda, a former Member of the European Parliament from Germany, discussed how inflexible copyright laws impede information sharing especially during a public health crisis. For example, medical companies are sending takedown notices about useful information posted freely online because they violate current copyright provisions. According to Reda, these laws are too narrowly construed to accommodate for the unique circumstances posed by COVID-19.
Similar conversations have been taking place in South Africa for quite some time, but are heightened by COVID-19. Schonwetter, an IP scholar in South Africa, described the country’s copyright law as outdated and originally exacted in the 1970’s. The laws cannot account for today’s typical online activity, let alone an expanded digital world (and accompanying problems) during a pandemic. Schonwetter invoked the AIDS crisis, where access to scientific publications and vaccine progress were of keen interest to the public, but outdated copyright laws prevented meaningful access to these resources. In his essay about Italy, De Martin also pointed out the problems related to copyright law and crafting effective remote learning experiences, where existing laws currently prevent Italian students from accessing essential course material — and with libraries closed, online resources have become the only option for many.
Our authors championed open access initiatives and approaches to mediate some of the harms described by existing legal requirements. Reda called this moment “the hour of open science”. She discussed the openVirus project, which is run by software engineers and scientists. The project catalogs lesser-known research about the pandemic and makes it accessible to the public. Benedikt Fecher, also based in Germany, shared a similar sentiment in his essay, “The Great Update of Research”. Like Reda, Fecher believes that now more than ever we are in critical need of open access to scientific information related to COVID-19. His own research described “closed access”, mainly pay-per-view publications, as the current norm for scientific research. In addition to barriers to public access, existing regimes hinder improvement to healthcare systems, outcomes, and the state of knowledge, especially in countries like Southeast Asia or Nigeria or Egypt where regulatory reform could promote access to treatment and vaccine information and save more lives.
Another essay written by Andrew Zahuranec and Stefaan Verhulst, “Mapping How Data Can Help Address COVID19”, further emphasized the importance of making data available to the public to help address issues highlighted by COVID-19. The authors addressed both data availability and effective use of data to answer the most pressing research questions. For instance, they shared how data could help identify sources of additional medical supplies in communities with shortages and also how better data may help protect human rights by addressing where governments can improve services. This will only happen if we’re asking the right research questions and using data in more effective ways.
Zahuranec and Stefaan also discussed concerns around data in information-rich environments, such as the risk of misinformation, and more generally, how to ask and direct better research questions to use data more effectively. Relatedly, in Fecher’s essay, he warned us about risks around open access for non-peer-reviewed articles, non-replicated studies, and to the potential harms that may result if research groups are not representative or inclusive of their subjects of study. Quality assurance must be considered, he said, a sentiment echoed by Mao in his essay about China. With the potential for falsification and disinformation, we must be careful to filter and create better methods to promote information integrity. Even within the academic community, we must exercise caution during emergencies for non-peer reviewed or replicated studies, where demand for knowledge is high.
Disruption and Accelerated Digital Transformation
One final theme that we observed across essays is how disruption is augmented or thwarted by the pandemic. COVID-19 has changed all of our lives, but it did so in varying degrees of magnitude and speed throughout the world.
Lowenthal, Rizk, and Langenegger and Bottino all wrote about their experiences with disruption and technological progress. For instance, Lowenthal’s essay explained how the COVID-19 pandemic severed physical connection between non-profit organizations and Southeast Asia. Without the ability to travel to many countries easily accessed in the region before, digitally mediated technologies are now the only means of contact. This creates difficulty for collaboration and co-design efforts, especially in countries where internet infrastructure is lacking and political dynamics make certain forms of online communication unsafe. Lowenthal also illustrated a divide, both through the swift arrival of new surveillance tools in the region’s politically-fragile countries, but also through varied responses and resiliency between countries. He predicted that the region may take years to recover even after a vaccine becomes available, and compared it to the presence of malaria in certain countries.
In Egypt, the pandemic halted tourism, which occupies a large share of the country’s economy and links to multiple related industries and services. The life-altering disruption to the economy and increase in unemployment that resulted shed light on the need for a more diverse resource-based economy and representative policy. This is especially true of healthcare access and information. In Brazil, the pandemic disrupted progress on personal data protection regulations. This gap has allowed for its government to increase surveillance measures in response to COVID-19, allowing greater data collection without protection. In all of these places, the pandemic’s disruption also led to accelerated digital transformation and have allowed millions to stay connected, to access crucial information, and track infection spread.
Similar to Brazil, legal reform has been disrupted in South Africa, written about in Schonwetter’s essay. Years of progress made on technology-specific regulation was disrupted by the pandemic, which now sits on the backburner. In both countries, accelerated digital transformation has accentuated the need for regulation, government response greatly differs. In Brazil, the date the law was supposed to come into force was pushed back. As we discussed above, political instability in Brazil manifested through this issue makes it uncertain if it will ever be enforced, despite the need to protect communities during a time of increased data collection. In South Africa, an emphasis on education may push the government towards renewed progress on their IP reform. Despite the initial disruption, proponents in these countries hope that the immediacy of human needs recenter governmental efforts.
Disruption works on a smaller, more personal scale as well. Guio spoke to this in his essay. He wrote about an internal debate that perhaps many of us in the technology world have about whether or not our work is relevant. COVID-19 forced him to take a step back from his work in AI and ask himself whether he is making a real social impact in Colombia, a country where the poverty level has been magnified by the torrential effects of the pandemic. He contemplated new and creative ways to repurpose his knowledge. His own journey prompts reflections on core values, especially in a time of crisis. He reminds us that we can always do more good and must think beyond our immediate communities, so that we get through this together.
Conclusion
Originally inspired during a conversation with the Network of Internet & Society Centers focused on global perspectives to crisis response with the head of the ICRC, the essays in the collection offer a multitude of narratives emerging from scholars and researchers across disciplines and across borders. Networked perspectives — those emerging from individual nodes in the network as well as the ways in which these narratives are connected — demonstrate shared challenges and mutual areas of questions about the shape and direction of digital research and collaboration among academic partners. As scholars begin to unpack the sea of change and impact COVID-19 has had on our lives and work, we believe networked approaches and cross-cultural and disciplinary cooperation will help to promote understanding, exchange, and trust — features of a community that will help us build and design better and more hopeful futures for what is ahead.
Amar Ashar is an Assistant Director of Research at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Nagla Rizk is the Director of the Access to Knowledge for Development Center. Melyssa Eigen is a research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center.
