Month: June 2014

In Daniel Berman’s view, the rift created by Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah’s allegations of widespread irregularities favoring his rival Ashraf Ghani casts the country’s entire future into doubt:

While it seems almost certain now that Ghani has/will win, with recent rumors putting his total as high as 59%, the United States and NATO, perhaps distracted by Ukraine, have done little or nothing to respond to Abdullah’s blackmail. This is worrying because behind it lies a more serious threat. With the impending withdrawal of American forces and fears of a Taliban resurgence among Tajiks, Afghans affiliated with the former Northern Alliance have begun rearming, placing their future in their own hands rather than with Kabul’s. In many ways Abdullah’s candidacy is being sold as their last overture to national unity; the victory of a Pashtun candidate, even one as  liberal as Ghani may well be treated as a signal to withdraw from the national government in Kabul.

The result would be devastating, the current events in Iraq enacted on a smaller scale. Without the need to conciliate non-Pashtuns, the national government would become increasingly infiltrated by pseudo-Taliban elements, likely backed by the Pakistani ISI. This in turn would reinforce the Tajiks in their determination not to have anything to do with it. This political death spiral can still be prevented by American pressure. But the opening to do so is vanishing rapidly. And if America’s focus remains dead set on Iraq, it may well find itself implicated in a second Civil War.

Last week, Leela Jacinto plumbed the depths of the controversy:

[T]he figures the Abdullah campaign has been citing are initial, regional IEC tallies. Preliminary runoff results are only due on July 2, and final results on July 22. The sheer ferocity of Abdullah’s premature response has sparked questions over whether the former mujahideen-era leader is simply trying to cover up his loss. Reports of the ongoing vote count suggest that Ghani has made a surprise comeback after finishing behind Abdullah in the April 5 first round.

Ghani contends that a successful voter mobilization campaign ahead of the latest vote is responsible for the last-minute surge in ballot casting. That could be true. Or it could just be a cover-up for dubiously magnified figures. With suspicions feeding the Kabul rumor mills, there have even been mumblings that the Taliban did not stage attacks on election day because the Pashtun militant group favors a Ghani victory. There’s no proof of this, of course. And even if it were true that the Taliban has an insidious, unacknowledged stake in favoring one candidate over another, it may not necessarily be disastrous for Afghanistan.

Ashley Jackson just hopes the election authorities can sort out the mess:

In my conversations with Afghan friends and colleagues in Kabul over the past few days, no one disputes that there has been widespread fraud and many are disillusioned with the way the process has played out. Few think the accusations should be brushed under the rug. But they also think it is up to the election bodies, with the international community’s support, to investigate and address discrepancies — however long it takes.

So far, the international community is sounding the right notes with the deputy head of the U.N., Nicholas Haysom, affirming the protestors’ rights but urging calm. Karzai has also voiced support for the U.N. in mediating the crisis, but this is ultimately a dispute that must be settled by Afghans.

(Photo: Supporters of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah shout slogans during a demonstration in Kabul on June 27, 2014. Abdullah led thousands of demonstrators at a noisy rally through Kabul, upping the stakes in his protest against alleged election fraud that has triggered a political crisis. Abdullah has vowed to reject the election result, saying he was the victim of massive ballot-box stuffing in the June 14 election with vote counting reportedly putting him far behind his poll rival Ashraf Ghani. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Above are the results of a controversial study in which Facebook altered the News Feeds of its users in order to determine if “emotional states [could] be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” Robinson Meyer explains:

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. …

Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.

Katie Collins notes:

In the Code of Ethics and Conduct published by the British Psychological Society, it is stated that psychologists should: “Ensure that clients, particularly children and vulnerable adults, are given ample opportunity to understand the nature, purpose, and anticipated consequences of any professional services or research participation, so that they may give informed consent to the extent that their capabilities allow.”

Adrienne LeFrance reports that the study did go through an institutional review board – a tool used by the scientific community to assess the conduct of researchers when their experiments involve humans. The approval was “on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time”. Ha! Laurie Penny rings the alarm:

Nobody has ever had this sort of power before. No dictator in their wildest dreams has been able to subtly manipulate the daily emotions of more than a billion humans so effectively.

There are no precedents for what Facebook is doing here. Facebook itself is the precedent. What the company does now will influence how the corporate powers of the future understand and monetise human emotion. Dr Adam Kramer, the man behind the study and a longtime member of the company’s research team, commented in an excited Q & A that “Facebook data constitutes the largest field study in the history of the world.” …

Emotional engineering is, and always has been, Facebook’s business model. It is the practice of making itself socially indispensable that has ensured that, for many millions of people, Facebook has become the default front page of the internet. Their newsfeed is literally that – it’s the first place many of us go to find out what’s been happening in the world, and in the worlds of those we love, those we like, and those we once met at a party and got an awkward friend request from two weeks later.

Bershidsky reminds us that Facebook’s ongoing daily behavior isn’t exactly beyond reproach either:

An algorithm called EdgeRank scores each post on a number of criteria; such as how frequently a News Feed owner interacts with its author and the quality of that interaction (a comment is more valuable than a “like”). The higher-ranked posts go to the top of the feed. That’s why a typical user doesn’t see everything her friends are posting — just what Facebook decides she’d be interested in seeing, plus paid advertising (which is also supposed to be targeted). You can tweak the settings to make posts appear in their “natural” order, but few people bother to do it, just as hardly anyone ever reads Facebook’s data use policy: buried among these 9000 words, there is a sentence that says research is a legitimate use. … Facebook manipulates what its users see as a matter of policy.

Kashmir Hill raises an eyebrow at the site’s response to the backlash:

Mid-day on Sunday, Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer who helped run the study also commented on it through a post on his Facebook page. … Kramer says, essentially, that the reason he and his co-researchers did this study was to make Facebook better. “[W]e care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,” he writes. “We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

Kramer sounded a wee bit apologetic: “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.” He said that Facebook is working on improving its internal review practices for approving experiments like this and that it will “incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper.”

Meanwhile, Charlie Warzel flags some pointed criticism on whether the study was even effective:

Dr. John Grohol, founder of the psychology site, Psych Central said he sees there two major flaws in the study, starting with the use of its sentiment analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC 2007). It’s a software program linguists and others psychologist commonly use in their research and it’s a well-understood tool that’s been pretty widely use but it was never designed to be used for small bits of text. …

Furthermore, Grohol said, the study, while focused on exploring emotional contagion, doesn’t actually measure the moods it’s trying to capture. “They never went to Facebook users and had them fill out a mood questionnaire. Instead the authors were making strange judgement calls based on content of status updates to predict a user mood,” he says, noting that the authors would likely need some other tool or survey to accurately gauge something as complex as emotional state.

And Cowen wonders if we should even care:

Clearly plenty of ads try to manipulative us with positive emotions, and without telling us.  There are also plenty of sad songs, or for that matter sad movies and sad advertisements, again running an agenda for their own manipulative purposes.  Is the problem with Facebook its market power?  Or is the the sheer and unavoidable transparency of the notion that Facebook is inducing us to pass along similar emotions to our network of contacts, thus making us manipulators too, and in a way which is hard to us to avoid thinking about?

Scott Anderson traces the origins of the present crisis in Iraq back to World War I:

For nearly 400 years prior to World War I, the lands of Iraq existed as three distinct semi-autonomous provinces, or vilayets, within the Ottoman Empire. In each of these vilayets, one of the three religious or ethnic groups that predominated in the region – Shiite, Sunni and Kurd – held sway, with the veneer of Ottoman rule resting atop a complex network of local clan and tribal alliances. This delicate system was undone by the West, and for an all-too-predictable reason: oil.

In order to raise an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, who had joined with Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, Great Britain forged a wartime alliance with Emir Hussein of the Hejaz region of Arabia, now the western edge of Saudi Arabia bordered by the Red Sea. The 1915 pact was a mutually advantageous one.  Since Hussein was an extremely prominent Islamic religious figure, the guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the alliance inoculated the British against the Ottoman accusation that they were coming into the Middle East as Christian Crusaders. In return, Britain’s promises to Hussein were extravagant: independence for virtually the entire Arab world.

But oil was discovered in all three of these vilayets, and so “the ‘nation’ of Iraq was created by fusing the three Ottoman provinces into one and put under direct British control.” Unrest predictably ensued, setting in motion the dynamics we’re still grappling with today:

In a belated effort to defuse the crises in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East – throughout the region, Arabs seethed at having traded their Ottoman overseers for European ones – the British government hastily appointed Winston Churchill as Colonial Secretary in early 1921.  One of the first people Churchill turned to for help was Lawrence the war hero and champion of the Arab independence cause. As a result of the Cairo Conference that March, one of Emir Hussein’s sons, Faisal, was made king of Iraq, while another son, Abdullah, was placed on the throne of the newly-created kingdom of Jordan.

But whereas the ‘artificial nation’ of Jordan would eventually achieve some degree of political stability and cohesion, the same could never truly be said of its Iraq counterpart.  Instead, its history would be marked by a series of violent coups and rebellions, with its political domination by the Sunni minority simply deepening its sectarian fault lines. After repeatedly intervening to defend their fragile creation, the British were finally cast out of Iraq in the late 1950s, their local allies murdered by vengeful mobs.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s for very good reason: the disastrous British playbook of 1920 was almost precisely replicated by the United States in 2003.

Recent Dish on the First World War’s impact on Middle Eastern politics here.

(Image: British troops entering Baghdad in 1917, via Wikimedia Commons)