Service: Automated analysis of social media content

Responsible organisation: Catalan Regional Government (Local Government)

In January 2018, the regional Government of Catalonia started a pilot project to try and measure the impact among the public of its STEMcat’s initiatives, a plan aimed at promoting scientific and technological vocations among young people. For a month and a half, the Catalan government used Citibeats. This text-analysis software used machine-learning algorithms to collect and analyze around 12,000 tweets that spoke about the STEM disciplines in Catalonia. One of the insights the authorities said that they had gained was that women were more responsive to messages about natural sciences than about technology, according to the Catalan government’s PR. The authorities then used that and other insights to “optimize their strategy and propose new initiatives” to make young people interested in the STEM disciplines. The project was part of SmartCAT, the Catalan government’s strategy to become a smart region (as noted in this chapter, regional governments in Spain have a high degree of autonomy to develop their policies). The SmartCAT director said the software had allowed them “to evaluate in a more objective way the impact of the (government’s) initiatives” to make people interested in science and technology. Citibeats, developed by Social Coin, a Barcelona-based start-up, was also used in December 2017 by the Barcelona municipality to gather people’s attitudes towards public transport and mobility in the city by analyzing around 30,000 comments by more than 15,000 people. In a case study of this project, Citibeats spoke of “citizens as sensors”. In the two cases described above, and while the authorities praise the software’s ability to gather and analyze thousands of online comments (something it would take much more time and money to do using traditional survey methods), it’s not clear how representative those samples are and how valid the conclusions might be; and there doesn’t seem to be any information on how those analyses then influenced public policy. Since March 2019, the regional government of Navarra has also been using the Citibeats software to detect online hate speech by analyzing text published on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As with other cases dealing with personal data, it’s not clear how the software works and what oversight mechanisms the public authority may have in place when using it.

Additional information

Source Open Innovation Regione Lombardia
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Start/end date 2018 -
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