Tomorrow I’m joining a discussion panel as part of launch celebrations for Prof Kath Albury’s final report on her ARC Future Fellowship on Digital and Data Capabilities for Sexual and Reproductive Health. I’ve been asked to briefly detail a wicked problem from my practice in digital sexual health promotion.
I’m well known for speaking in paragraphs so I need to get this all on the table as quickly and cleanly as possible, so I’m going to speak from notes to keep me on track. I also have a disability that sometimes causes problems with speech production, and this is one of those weeks, so I thought I might blog my notes.
There is a social theorist I like called Klaus Eder, who wrote a great monograph titled ‘Societies learn and yet the world is hard to change’ (Eder, 1999). In a nutshell, he distinguishes the evolution of behaviour in complex systems from the collective and intersubjective narrative processes that constitute learning. (It’s a macadamia nutshell — completely impenetrable!)
I’m citing him because it’s well understood that every wicked problem has a complex system that maintains its conditions of reproduction and reorganises itself to preserve the status quo every time you attempt to intervene in it.
To understand the difficulty, Eder recommends paying attention to social processes of selection and aggregation that distinguish, mediate and produce the different levels we are working on, from the individual to the interpersonal through to networks and communities and cultures right up to policy, legislation, politics and the social determinants of health.
Okay, that’s all the social theory I’m going to do — now let me give you a case study. A couple of years ago NAPWHA developed a GREAT campaign called ‘Can’t pass it on’ that was rejected for display on major social networks despite being very benign, even classy — it could have been sponsored by BedThreads!
The problem was that people who stigmatise HIV-affected communities are now organised into little hate collectives on sites like Reddit — that’s one process of aggregation right there — and there are enough of those people that the second our campaign went live, they posted about seeing it, and began organising what’s known as a brigade to coordinate a campaign of spurious complaints against the boosted posts — that’s a second process of aggregation. Enough complaints, you can lose your personal and organisational accounts to suspensions that are almost impossible to protest or challenge.
So brigading is the more specific wicked problem I want health promotion org managers and leadership to know about, because we need to counter-organise against these vicious cycles.
Eder also talked about selection — the processes through which changes on one level can be selected for amplification so they exert influence on higher levels in the socio-ecological system we call society. Brigading works because social media platforms are doing a terrible job of selection. They probably now use AI to make automated decisions based on vague guidelines and I doubt they use statistical methods to identify brigading.
So that selection process can’t sift out the legit complaints from the spurious mass-produced objections, and it relies on majority rules to decide the entire platform’s policy on SRH campaign activities.
All of these processes are currently working in sync to ratchet down the discursive headroom available for frank, sexy, funny, innovative sexual health promotion activities on social media platforms. Wicked problems are always produced by complex systems that maintain and reinforce the status quo, and we should be really worried about this one.
Facing this threat, sexual and reproductive health organisations can now turn to this incredible resource, DDCSRH.com, that has been created by Prof Albury and her team at Swinburne including Dr Samantha Mannix and Dr Caitlin Learmonth. It will take your team members, your managers, even your senior org leaders by the hand and walk them through models that clearly explain the digital and data capabilities organisations need to develop to tackle wicked problems like this one.
Applying this framework to the case study I’ve offered in this post, I want to draw a line across the diagram that loops in seemingly disparate capabilities:
- Under ‘Access and Infrastructure,’ we can begin with participating in vernacular platforms and technologies (like being a competent user of Facebook, but also being aware of other platforms — like Reddit and 4Chan and Discord — where hate groups often coordinate their activities)
- It is tempting to loop in risk management because the case study describes harms, but I would circle the entire ‘Governance’ capability — for organisations with little ongoing outreach to their constituencies beyond their FB pages, the consequences of brigading pose an existential risk to the org and its mission.
- And within ‘Governance’ I would close the loop by drawing particular attention to ethics and inclusivity (consent, lived experience) because there is so much we can learn from sex workers, porn consumers, people who use drugs, people with mental illness (the list goes on) about these risks and how they can be governed. But we can only do that if we recognise and value that lived experience/expertise.
I’m excited to share that Prof Albury, through her roles with Swinburne University’s Social Innovation Research Institute (SIRI) and the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), is continuing a long-standing (20 year!) collaboration with NAPWHA to help us understand and work out how to respond to the challenges we face in social media spaces. If you are involved with a NAPWHA member organisation I’d love to hear from you to ensure we understand your needs and where you’re at with *gestures* all this.