Information intermediaries like search engines and social networks can represent a source of bias for recipients. Their algorithms, especially concerning filtering, sorting, and personalization, are assumed to skew the representation of news topics and thus create media effects in their own right. Largely as a result of methodological challenges, existing studies have often tested isolated hypotheses without covering the full effects chain from content production to reception by the user. However, the preselection of content performed by intermediaries is only relevant if users choose to rely on it, an assumption that so far lacks broad empirical evidence. Based on a broad review of existing study designs, this article develops a general intermediary effects model. From this model, researchers can derive empirical study designs that capture and differentiate the individual effects of filtering, sorting, and personalization. We then apply the model in an assessment of the news aggregator Reddit's change in capacity to influence its users’ information selection. Using counterfactual time series decomposition, we show that changing the sections of the website included in the start page by default can lead to large changes in attention paid to content. These findings substantiate existing assumptions about the power of information intermediaries to shape the information environments of their users.

Community capacity is used to monitor socioeconomic development. It is composed of a number of dimensions that can be measured to understand issues possibly arising in the implementation of a policy or of a project targeting a community. Measuring these dimensions is thus highly valuable for policymakers and local administrator, though expensive and time consuming. To address this issue, we evaluated their estimation through a machine learning technique—Random Forests—applied to secondary open government data and determined the most important variables for prediction. We focused on two dimensions: sense of community and participation. The variables included in the data sets used to train the predictive models complied with two criteria: nationwide availability and sufficiently fine‐grained geographic breakdown, that is, neighborhood level. Our resultant models are more accurate than others based on traditional statistics found in the literature, showing the feasibility of the approach. The most determinant variables in our models were only partially in agreement with the most influential factors for sense of community and participation according to the social science literature consulted, providing a starting point for future investigation under a social science perspective. Moreover, due to the lack of geographic detail of the outcome measures available, further research is required to apply the predictive models to a neighborhood level.

Policy analytics combines new data sources, such as from mobile smartphones, Internet of Everything devices, and electronic payment cards, with new data analytics techniques for informing and directing public policy. However, those who do not own these devices may be rendered digitally invisible if data from their daily actions are not captured. We explore the digitally invisible through an exploratory study of homeless individuals in Phoenix, Arizona, in the context of extreme heat exposure. Ten homeless research participants carried a temperature‐sensing device during an extreme heat week, with their individually experienced temperatures (IETs) compared to outdoor ambient temperatures. A nonhomeless, digitally connected sample of 10 university students was also observed, with their IETs analyzed in the same way. Surveys of participants complement the temperature measures. We found that homeless individuals and university students interact differently with the physical environment, experiencing substantial differences in individual temperatures relative to outdoor conditions, potentially leading to differentiated health risks and outcomes. They also interact differently with technology, with the homeless having fewer opportunities to benefit from digital services and lower likelihood to generate digital data that might influence policy analytics. Failing to account for these differences may result in biased policy analytics and misdirected policy interventions.

The role of the public in Internet governance debates is a critical issue for policymaking, even more so as Internet governance forums encounter crises of legitimacy. This article examines the role of the public in Internet governance debates, drawing connections between theories of the public, science and technology studies, and Internet governance. It examines the architecture of public inclusion at the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial). NETmundial emerged at a point when public legitimacy became particularly salient for the Internet governance community. So finding modes of inclusion for the rapidly growing, and increasingly diverse group of stakeholders in the governance debate was especially important for the meeting's success. This article links the debate to notions of the public sphere—both in shaping a discursivespacecentral to public debate, the Internet, and by championing a particularformof public discourse, multistakeholderism. By drawing out these connections, the article both reflects upon and challenges ideas about how to achieve public inclusion in Internet governance.

Social casino gaming, which simulates gambling games on social platforms, has become increasingly popular and is rapidly merging with the gambling industry. Advertisements for social casino games, however, are not bound by the same regulations as real money gambling, despite their similarities. We performed a content analysis of a sample of 115 unique social casino gaming advertisements captured by young adults during their regular Internet use. The results showed that the advertisement imagery typically featured images likely to appeal to young adults, such as bright colors, character images of young adults, cartoon animal characters, gambling and sporting activities, references to popular culture, and references to Las Vegas. Latent and manifest message themes included glamorization of gambling, winning, normalization of gambling, play for free, and a general encouragement to play. Notably, nearly 90 percent of the advertisements contained no responsible or problem gambling language, despite the gambling-like content. As young people are receptive of messages that encourage gambling, we recommend that gaming companies recognize the potential harms of advertisements and embrace corporate social responsibility standards. This includes adding warning messages to advertisements for gambling-themed games and ensuring that marketing messages do not encourage excessive gambling.

The Left–Right dimension is the most common way of conceptualizing ideological difference. It is based on the traditional cleavage in society between capital and labor. But in an ever more globalized world, are the concepts of Left and Right as relevant today as they were half a century ago? Following Kriesi et al. (2006) this article argues that the cleavage that exists in many European societies between “winners” and “losers” of globalization has engendered a new ideological dimension that pits “cosmopolitans” against “communitarians” and that draws on cultural issues relating to identity, rather than economic issues. This argument is tested by identifying latent dimensions from opinion data generated by two Voting Advice Applications deployed in England in 2014 and 2015 and by mapping the positions of party supporters with respect to these dimensions. It is found that in England the political space is defined by two main ideological dimensions: an economic Left–Right dimension and a cultural communitarian–cosmopolitan dimension. Finally, supporters of the newly formed United Kingdom Independence Party are found to be located near the communitarian pole of the cultural dimension.

In recent years, decision makers have reported difficulties in the use of official statistics in public policy: excessively long publication delays, insufficient coverage of topics of interest, and the top‐down process of data creation. The deluge of data available online represents a potential answer to these problems, with social media data in particular as a possible alternative to traditional data. In this article, we propose a definition of “Soft Data” to indicate data that are freely available on the Internet, and that are not controlled by a public administration but rather by public or private actors. The term Soft Data is not intended to replace those of “Big Data” and “Open Data,” but rather to highlight specific properties and research methods required to convert them into information of interest for decision makers. The analysis is based on a case study of Twitter data for urban policymaking carried out for a European research program aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of European cohesion policy. The article explores methodological issues and the possible impact of “Soft Data” on public policy, reporting on semistructured interviews carried out with nine European policymakers.

Narratives, or the telling of stories, are a powerful tool used to gain support for public policies. The advent of new social media, including YouTube, provides opportunities for less‐mainstream narratives of cooperation, but are these opportunities being realized? Using the Narrative Policy Framework and Schneider and Ingram's Social Construction of target populations as the theoretical basis, we analyzed 95 English and Spanish YouTube videos focusing on the U.S.–Mexico border and found they demonstrate a maintained focus on mainstream, divisive issues such as security and violence, immigration, and drugs. However, although new media often cover mainstream issues, YouTube videos appear to construct more favorable perspectives of the border region than traditional media: 52 percent of the videos constructed a sympathetic view of the border, including the people associated with it, while 48 percent of the videos constructed an unsympathetic view. Understanding the use of these narratives can have real‐world impacts for developing policy along the U.S.–Mexico border; possibly creating greater cooperation vital to solving many of the urgent problems border communities face on a day‐to‐day basis.