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Bots and Government/Political Staff

Sun, May 28, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua 309

Abstract

Wikiedits bots are thought to promote more transparent, accountable government because they expose the Wikipedia editing practices of public officials, especially important when those edits are part of partisan battles between political staff, or enable the spread of misinformation and propaganda by properly neutral public servants. However, far from bolstering democratic accountability, these bots may have a perverse effect on democratic governance. Early evidence suggests that the Canadian Wikiedits bot (@gccaedits) may be contributing to a chilling effect wherein public servants and political staff are editing Wikipedia less or editing in ways that are harder to track in order to avoid the scrutiny that these bots enable (Ford et al, 2016). The extent to which this chilling effect shapes public officials’ willingness to edit Wikipedia openly (or at all), and the role the bot plays in inducing this chilling effect, remain open questions ripe for investigation. Focusing on the bot tracking activity in the Government of Canada (@gccaedits), this paper reports on the findings of in-depth interviews with public and political officials responsible for Wikipedia edits as well as analysis of internal government documents related to the bot (retrieved through Access to Information requests).

We find that internal institutional policies, constraints of the Westminster system of democracy (which demands public servants remain anonymous, and that all communications be tightly managed in strict hierarchical chains of command), paired with primarily negative media reporting of the @gccaedits bot, have inhibited Wikipedia editing. This poses risks to the quality of democratic governance in Canada. First, many edits revealed by the bot are in fact useful contributions to knowledge, and reflect the elite and early insider insight of public officials. At a larger level, these edits represent novel and significant disruptions to a public sector communications culture that has not kept pace with the networked models of information production and dissemination that characterize the digital age. In this sense, the administrative and journalistic response to the bot’s reporting sets back important efforts to bolster Open Government and digital era public service renewal. Detailing these costs, and analysing the role of the bot and human responses to it, this paper suggests how wikiedit bots shape digital era governance.

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