Making Science Resilient to Threats from Governments & Corporations
How can we make critically-important data resilient to threats from governments and corporations? One essential answer is community/citizen science.
When I was a gradstudent, I was inspired by Public Lab’s work to collect environmental data on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill despite corporate and government resistance. So when founding the Citizens and Technology Lab to study our digital environments, I decided to prioritize industry-independent community science. By organizing alongside affected communities, Public Lab circumvented restrictions on science. We do the same.
For a snapshot of my thinking then, see this 2014 Atlantic article that launched the lab.
Years later when tech companies including Twitter and Meta cracked down on research in what Deen Freelon calls the “post-API age,” CAT Lab had zero disruptions to the active research infrastructures we use to study online behavior at scale. We and our community partners continued our research unperturbed. This freed us to co-organize with many other, more-disrupted researchers to create the Coalition for Independent Tech Research.
When critics question the reliability or sustainability of community/citizen science, they often have in mind an idealized policy environment where well-resourced institutions enable and support science. Where those institutions exist, they are indeed valuable. Also, those idealized situations are sadly often the exception, and scientific institutions can also become single points of failure.
As we head into a period of concern about the resilience of government-supported data, I’m glad to see so much effort to protect and sustain official data sources. I’m also grateful to all the community/citizen scientists out there who will keep collecting data to advance the public good whether or not governments or institutions have our backs. We’re going to need this work more than ever. ❤
