Month: August 2020

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/26/1007611/how-qanon-is-targeting-evangelicals/

The first family to quit Pastor Clark Frailey’s church during the pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a second young couple said they were doubting his leadership a week later, Frailey decided to risk seeing them in person, despite the threat of covid-19. 

It was late May, and things were starting to reopen in Oklahoma, so Frailey and the couple met in a near-empty fast food restaurant to talk it over. 

The congregants were worried about Frailey’s intentions. At Coffee Creek, his evangelical church outside Oklahoma City, he had preached on racial justice for the past three weeks. He says the couple didn’t appreciate his most recent sermon, which urged Christians to call out and challenge racism anywhere they saw it, including in their own church. Though Frailey tries to keep Coffee Creek from feeling too traditional—he wears jeans, and the church has a modern band and uses chairs instead of pews—he considers himself a theologically conservative Southern Baptist pastor. But at one point, the couple Frailey spoke to said they believed that he was becoming a “social justice warrior.” 

Pastors and congregants disagree all the time, and Frailey doesn’t want to be the sort of Christian leader whom people feel afraid to challenge. But in that restaurant, it felt to him as if he and they had read two different sacred texts. It was as if the couple were “believing internet memes over someone they’d had a relationship with for over five years,” Frailey says. 

At one point he brought up QAnon, the conspiracy theory holding that Donald Trump is fighting a secret Satanic pedophile ring run by liberal elites. When he asked what they thought about it, the response was worryingly ambiguous. “It wasn’t like, ‘I fully believe this,’” he says. “It was like, ‘I find it interesting.’ These people are dear to me and I love them. It’s just—it felt like there was someone else in the conversation that I didn’t know who they were.”

#SAVEOURCHILDREN MEME VIA INSTAGRAM

Frailey told me about another young person who used to regularly attend his church. She was sharing conspiracy-laden misinformation on Facebook “like it’s the gospel truth,” he said, including a quote falsely attributed to Senator Kamala Harris. He saw another post from this woman promoting the wild claim that Tom Hanks and other Hollywood celebrities are eating babies. 

Before the pandemic, Frailey knew a little bit about QAnon, but he hadn’t given such an easily debunked fringe theory much of his time. The posts he started seeing felt familiar, though: they reminded him of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, when rumors of secret occult rituals tormenting children in day-care centers spread quickly among conservative religious believers who were already anxious about changes in family structures. “The pedophile stuff, the satanic stuff, the eating babies—that’s all from the 1980s,” he says. 

That conspiracy-fueled frenzy was propelled in part by credulous mainstream news coverage, and by false accusations and even convictions of day-care owners. But evangelicals, in particular, embraced the claims, tuning in to a wave of televangelists who promised to help viewers spot secret satanic symbols and rituals in the secular world. 

If the panic was back with fresh branding as QAnon, it had a new ally in Facebook. And Frailey wasn’t sure where to turn for help. He posted in a private Facebook group for Oklahoma Baptist pastors, asking if anyone else was seeing what he was. The answer, repeatedly, was yes. 

The pastors traded links. Frailey read everything he could about QAnon. He listened to every episode of the New York Times podcast series Rabbit Hole, on ”what happens when our lives move online,” and devouring a story in the Atlantic that framed QAnon as a new religion infused with the language of Christianity. To Frailey, it felt more like a cult. 

He began to look further back into the Facebook history of the young former member who had posted the fake Harris quote. In the past, he remembered, she had posted about her kids every day. In June and July, he saw, that had shifted. Instead of talking about her family, she was now promoting QAnon—and one member of the couple that had met with him in May was there in the comments, posting in solidarity. 

Suddenly he understood that his efforts to protect his congregation from covid-19 had contributed to a different sort of infection. Like thousands of other church leaders across the United States, Frailey had shut down in-person services in March to help prevent the spread of the virus. Without these gatherings, some of his churchgoers had turned instead to Facebook, podcasts, and viral memes for guidance. And QAnon, a movement with its own equivalents of scripture, prophecies, and clergy, was there waiting for them.

“Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters.” —James 1:16

QAnon began in 2017 with a post on the /pol/ message board of 4chan—a particularly racist and abhorrent corner of a generally nasty online community where anyone can post anything anonymously. The poster, known only as “Q,” is QAnon’s prophet and source: the account is run by someone (or, most likely, a series of someones) who claims to have access to classified, inside information about Donald Trump’s true agenda, and a mission to spread that good news to the public. 

Q’s posts contain clues, and adherents are told to decipher the messages and do independent research to uncover the secrets. The information they supposedly hold, promising a reckoning for all Donald Trump’s liberal enemies, has been proved untrue again and again, but the game continues. QAnon is extremely good at providing followers with an endless supply of hope. New posts appear regularly, and if reality doesn’t match the predictions about when, or how, the storm is coming for the world’s liberal elites, adherents simply shift their focus to something else. 

The tenets of QAnon are specific: that Trump is the chosen one to finally destroy a ring of Satanic pedophiles long protected by access to elite positions of authority, and that Q will provide the clues to lead followers to the truth. But the movement has mingled with so many other conspiracist causes and ideologies that it is now possible to be a carrier of QAnon content online without actually knowing what you are spreading. QAnon is now driving anti-mask activism and health misinformation campaigns, for example. There are QAnon politicians running for Congress. The beliefs have an affinity with apocalyptic Christianity, too, and there are resonances with Christian nationalism. 

“QAnon is almost like a warehouse of different conspiracies that have been brought together and tied to a common warehouse owner,” says Ed Stetzer, a prominent evangelical author and the executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. 

Q has moved from site to site and now posts to a board called 8kun, whose predecessor 8chan was shut down after hosting multiple white supremacist manifestos and posts by mass shooters. QAnon is steeped in the extremism of its environment. The belief in “adrenochrome harvesting,” for example—that Hollywood elites are torturing children to derive a drug from their blood—is just another version of the ancient anti-Semitic blood libel. 

This environment might not always seem hospitable to religion: on 4chan, for example, those who adhere to Christian traditions too earnestly are called “biblefags.” But Q invoked God early, says Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change project, who has studied QAnon since almost the very beginning. 

STEPHEN MATUREN/GETTY IMAGES

“QAnon community construction, from the start, has emphasized a traditionalist American morality that is closely aligned with popular Christianity,” he says. “Q himself posts in a style that both invokes evangelical talking points and encourages deep scriptural research.” 

QAnon followers will often repeat a commandment they learned from Q: that in the presence of doubt, you should “do your own research.” And that impulse will feel especially familiar to evangelicals, says William Partin, a research analyst at Data & Society’s Disinformation Action Lab, who has been studying QAnon. “The kind of literacy that’s implied here—close reading and discussion of texts that are accepted as authoritative—has quite a bit in common with how evangelicals learn to read and interpret the Bible,” he says. 

Around a quarter of American adults identify themselves as evangelical Protestants, including parts of the Baptist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denominations. This makes evangelicalism larger than any other religious stream in the US, including Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. But although QAnon has always carried religious overtones, its rising presence in evangelical circles is a relatively new development. In late February, the last time Pew Research polled American adults on QAnon, just 2% of white evangelical Protestants said they’d heard a lot about it, and another 16% said they knew just a little. 

Kristen Howerton, a writer and family therapist who grew up evangelical, says that she began seeing more QAnon-related content from evangelical friends on Facebook about a year ago. Some were talking about Q, repeating and promoting the core tenets of the conspiracy theory. Many others, she guessed, didn’t know the totality of the QAnon beliefs, or even that the reason they were being exposed to the conspiracy theory was its vast social-media network. But they knew they agreed with what they were hearing—that liberals were evil, and that Trump was going to stop them—and they found that good enough reason to share QAnon’s ideas on their own social feeds, helping them spread. 

 “These are not the people who were spending time on 4chan or 8chan four years ago,” Howerton says. “They’re getting their info from other Facebook posts. it’s not a primary-source crowd.” 

This is why social media makes such a great mission field for QAnon. Facebook and Twitter give its evangelists the easiest and best chance of reaching new people with their message (or more mainstream-friendly versions of it)—powered by the platforms’ recommendation algorithms, which are designed to show people things they’re likely to have an affinity for.

The platforms have started trying to dampen the influence of QAnon, particularly after it began to intersect with pandemic conspiracy theories. Facebook shut down hundreds of QAnon pages and accounts last week after an internal study revealed that QAnon-associated groups had millions of members, while Twitter has banned thousands of accounts for “coordinated harmful activity.”

Some say it’s too late. QAnon has manipulated Twitter hashtags and been amplified by the president, who has retweeted QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts more than 200 times. It also has its own celebrities, a kind of priest class of influencers with YouTube channels and Patreons who promise to show their fans the way. Among them is David Hayes, “the Praying Medic,” whom the Atlantic called “one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet.” In one recent video, he told his 379,000 YouTube subscribers, “The movement that Q has started is drawing a lot of people to consider God.” 

Another popular QAnon influencer, Blessed2Teach, whose followers are known as “Christian Patriots,” recently told them in a YouTube livestream that “the cabal spends more money trying to infiltrate pastors than anything,” and that “many many of the megachurches have taken cabal funding.” As The Conversation noted in May, there are pastors who have begun bringing QAnon into their Zoom sermons. And Frailey, the Oklahoma pastor, found that even though many colleagues in the Facebook group where he had posted were worried about the spread of QAnon in their churches, others defended it.

Joe Carter, the executive pastor of McLean Bible Church Arlington in Virginia and an editor of the conservative Christian publication The Gospel Coalition, published an FAQ on QAnon in May. He decided to dig into the topic after hearing from dozens of pastors asking for advice on how to stop its growing influence in their communities, he told me. 

“Although this movement is still fringe, it is likely that someone in your church or social-media circles has either already bought into the conspiracy or thinks it’s plausible and worth exploring,” Carter wrote. 

“I can see people I care about, respect, are great, are just super-susceptible to this thing,” said a youth pastor who declined to be named in this piece for fear of retaliation from QAnon believers but has been raising the alarm at his conservative-leaning Lutheran church. “If we can get ahead of this, we might be able to do some damage control before it metastasizes.” 

Their task has been made more difficult as QAnon has started linking up with other conspiracy theories, particularly around the covid-19 pandemic: misinformation about masks, anti-vaccination theories, and claims that lockdowns are a liberal plot to control the population, for instance. And more recently, its believers have found even better vectors. 

“The name of the LORD is a fortified tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” —Proverbs 18:10 

One Friday in mid-July, Twitter saw a strange new hashtag rise up out of nowhere: #Wayfair, the name of an online furniture company. It was trending because of a baseless conspiracy theory that listings for suspiciously high-priced cabinets were named after missing children. Perhaps, the theory went, this was a method human traffickers and child abusers used to secretly signal and sell victims to one another. This was debunked numerous times, but the meme quickly spread to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. On each site, people moved by the very human impulse to care about vulnerable children began repeating what they saw to their friends and followers. 

For evangelicals, the Wayfair rumors exploded into a major online freakout. Howerton, the family therapist, was alarmed when she saw her friends posting about it, including members of the megachurch she used to attend. She’d used her platform for years to raise awareness about child trafficking, but with just a little rudimentary research, she quickly learned that the claims weren’t true. And then she spotted where they had originated. “I went down a lot of rabbit holes,” she says. “Then I got the QAnon connection.”

“It was Wayfair that really opened my eyes to which of my friends were really following the QAnon stuff. And it was a lot,” she says. 

The Wayfair conspiracy theory was a prelude to a much bigger social-media push: #SaveTheChildren. In July, as Mel Magazine has documented, this and other existing hashtags were flooded on Facebook and Instagram with QAnon memes about pedophile rings and the Clintons. That then inspired a series of rallies across the country. Some of them, NBC News reported, were organized by figures who implicitly or explicitly support QAnon, and some marchers brought signs with QAnon slogans. Some legitimate human-rights organizations have told the New York Times that they hope the wave of conspiracy-fueled interest could translate into genuine support for those who are trying to actually save children, but others have been overwhelmed with false reports and nonsense tips. 

Child abuse and human trafficking are, of course, real and terrible phenomena, and they are familiar topics in many evangelical churches. “Saving” children, whether by adoption, anti-trafficking activism, or opposition to abortion, drives a great deal of evangelical activism. It’s not uncommon for a church to partner for fundraising or support with a religious or secular nonprofit that helps trafficking victims. 

Carter, of the Gospel Coalition, says this well-meaning drive to help is also easily exploited. Among evangelicals, feelings about human trafficking are often so intense that people are only interested in hearing, and sharing, stories about how inhumane and widespread it is. In Carter’s experience, his audience is particularly hostile to being told that a trafficking story being shared isn’t true. “If it’s a problem, it has to be a huge problem. If you try to put it into context, it’s seen as downplaying the problem,” he says. 

Howerton believes it’s no accident that QAnon has taken hold among evangelicals now: they are facing tremendous cognitive dissonance. “I was raised evangelical Christian Republican. There is nothing that makes sense for Trump with any of the values that I was raised with,” she says. “There’s a part of me that thinks that this is a very elaborate false narrative to explain their continued loyalty to Trump.” 

Wheaton College’s Ed Stetzer says that QAnon resonates with Christian religious thought by presenting itself as a force for good, designed to destroy evil. But Jason Thacker, chair of research in technology ethics at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, says Christian followers of QAnon are wrong about what side it’s on. “QAnon is not about sex trafficking,” he says, but “taking advantage of gospel conventions and manipulating them for purposes of power.”

“It’s wrong. It’s evil,” he says. “The reason—Christians of all people should be the first to stand up and fight against these things—is that it’s not true.” 

“Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” —Psalm 34:13 

Over the years, QAnon has demonstrated some of the dangers of letting misinformation flourish online. The FBI has concluded that this and other extreme conspiracy theories carry a potential for inspiring violence. Some followers have already committed destructive, sometimes violent, acts in the name of their beliefs.

But Stetzer, of the Billy Graham Center, worries that evangelical Christians face a unique threat from QAnon. It might compromise their ability to do one of the most important things they can do: bear witness to what they believe, and share those beliefs with others.

“As an evangelical Christian, I’ve already got some things that I believe that the mainstream would consider conspiracy,” he says. When Christians believe and propagate foolish things like QAnon, they make it even harder for others to listen. 

Right now, the evangelical leaders who are concerned about QAnon and misinformation in their communities are running to catch up. Many of them are too busy helping their congregations deal with the direct impact of the pandemic to spend much time countering conspiracy theories. Howerton thinks they’re just beginning the process of figuring out what to do about QAnon. She was planning on writing a newsletter to help her readers understand what’s going on with their relatives who have fallen into this. But a bigger, organized effort still hasn’t formed. 

“I feel like a failure,” Frailey, the Oklahoma pastor, says. “We weren’t able to provide a good enough community in this time of separation. We weren’t able to provide what was needed. The technology wasn’t good enough.” Carter echoes him: “I’ve talked to a lot of pastors who assume I know what to do. And I definitely don’t.” 

The Bible provides some guidance on how to act online, Thacker notes: the Epistle of James, for instance, is about how to persevere through a crisis or trial. James 1:19 reads: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.”

“We should be the people who are slowing down online, in a culture that is going faster and faster,” Thacker says. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. 

For Frailey, the best thing he can do is keep his door open for all, including those who have left. Just because someone has descended into QAnon doesn’t mean they can’t come back from it. When we spoke, Frailey was torn between sharing his story, which he feels could help other pastors and Christians realize they aren’t alone, and making sure he isn’t shutting the door forever on the families who have walked away from his church. 

“I’m just trying to keep a line out here to say, ‘Hey, if you fall into this, you can come back,’” he says. So far, though, “there haven’t been any saves.”

—Some of the images in this story have been anonymized to protect the individuals who posted and interacted with them.

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August 26, 2020 at 04:25AM

https://www.engadget.com/nintendo-switch-4k-061428807.html

Sony and Microsoft have shown off the 4K-ready consoles they’ll deliver later this year with the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, but what is Nintendo working on? According to sources cited in a report by Bloomberg, while its convertible console tops the sales charts along with hit games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the company is planning to release an upgraded version next year.

The only word on what those upgrades may include is a note that it will support 4K graphics, but it may get a boost from new games. The other part of the report is that a “slew of games from Nintendo itself and related outside studios” could turn around this year’s relatively light release schedule.

A refreshed edition of the Switch with more battery life started shipping last year, while the Switch Lite ditched the original’s dock and removable Joy-Cons. The console is still based around a custom NVIDIA Tegra CPU and 4GB of RAM, so it will be interesting to see what might change to push those extra pixels.

With the Switch and Switch Lite consoles still hard to find in stores, releasing an upgraded version right now wouldn’t make sense, but by next year Nintendo might be right on time to catch gamers ready for a break from the ultra-realistic experiences of other consoles, as well as those who just want to do something other than pay off their loans from Tom Nook.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

August 25, 2020 at 01:24AM

https://www.wired.com/story/get-wired-podcast-6-ventilation-shutdown-factory-farms

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August 24, 2020 at 06:09AM

https://www.autoblog.com/2020/08/23/tesla-sensor-children-hot-car-safety/

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August 23, 2020 at 11:36AM

https://www.wired.com/story/an-algorithm-determined-uk-students-grades-chaos-ensued

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August 15, 2020 at 09:09AM

https://www.engadget.com/cavnue-michigan-corridor-221520625.html

The state of Michigan wants to build the autonomous roadway of the future. Normally that in itself would be interesting enough, but there’s also the company it’s partnering with to make the project a reality. The state will work with a firm called Cavnue. Cavnue’s parent company is Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), which itself is a spinoff of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs. If you’ve followed Engadget’s coverage of the recently canceled Toronto Smart City project, you’ll know all about Sidewalk Labs.

The partnership will see the company test out whether it’s viable to build a 40-mile corridor that will connect downtown Detroit to Ann Arbor, with arteries to local destinations like the University of Michigan, the Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Michigan Central Station.

The first phase of the project will see Cavnue testing potential technologies and roadway designs. The firm will work with other companies in the space, including Ford, GM, BMW, Toyota and fellow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to develop standards for use in future autonomous roadways across the country. According to the state, the goal of the project is to design something that is futureproof. What will start as a roadway for autonomous buses will hopefully one day allow work for freight and personal vehicles as well.  

"The action we’re taking today is good for our families, our businesses, and our economy as a whole. Here in Michigan, the state that put the world on wheels, we are taking the initial steps to build the infrastructure to help us test and deploy the cars of the future," said Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

Cavnue expects the initial phase of the project to take about 24 months. The important point here is that construction on the project won’t start, if it begins at all, until that part of the project is complete. It could be years before Cavnue builds the first parts of the corridor, but what comes out of the project could be transformational.    

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

August 14, 2020 at 05:24PM

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/13/1006573/digital-psychiatry-phenotyping-schizophrenia-bipolar-privacy/

When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. “I figured that people probably wouldn’t know what that was,” she says. 

The linguistic ambiguity was useful: she could conceal her embarrassment at the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while still being true to herself. “They just used to smile and go away,” she says. These days she’s happy to say Iranian again. 

We don’t all choose to use language as consciously as Rezaii did—but the words we use matter. Poets, detectives, and lawyers have long sifted through people’s language for clues to look for their motives and inner truths. Psychiatrists, too: perhaps psychiatrists especially. After all, while medicine now has a battery of tests and technical tools for diagnosing physical ailments, the chief tool of psychiatry is the same one employed centuries ago: the question “So how do you feel today?” Simple to ask, maybe—but not to answer.  

“In psychiatry we don’t even have a stethoscope,” says Rezaii, who is now a neuropsychiatry fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s 45 minutes of talking with a patient and then making a diagnosis on the basis of that conversation. There are no objective measures. No numbers.” 

There’s no blood test to diagnose depression, no brain scan that can pinpoint anxiety before it happens. Suicidal thoughts cannot be diagnosed by a biopsy, and even if psychiatrists are deeply concerned that the covid-19 pandemic will have severe impacts on mental health, they have no easy way to track that. In the language of medicine, there is not a single reliable biomarker that can be used to help diagnose any psychiatric condition. The search for shortcuts to finding corruption of thought keeps coming up empty—keeping much of psychiatry in the past and blocking the road to progress. It makes diagnosis a slow, difficult, subjective process and stops researchers from understanding the true nature and causes of the spectrum of mental maladies or developing better treatments.

But what if there were other ways? What if we didn’t just listen to words but measure them? Could that help psychiatrists follow the verbal clues that could lead back to our state of mind?

“That is basically what we’re after,” Rezaii says. “Finding some behavioral features that we can assign some numbers to. To be able to track them in a reliable manner and to use them for potential detection or diagnosis of mental disorders.”

In June 2019, Rezaii published a paper about a radical new approach that did exactly that. Her research showed that the way we speak and write can reveal early indications of psychosis, and that computers can help us spot those signs with unnerving accuracy. She followed the breadcrumbs of language to see where they led. 

Rezaii found that language analysis could predict with more than 90% accuracy which patients were likely to develop schizophrenia before any typical symptoms emerged.

People who are prone to hearing voices, it turns out, tend to talk about them. They don’t mention these auditory hallucinations explicitly, but they do use associated words—“sound,” “hear,” “chant,” “loud”—more often in regular conversation. The pattern is so subtle you wouldn’t be able to spot the spikes with the naked ear. But a computer can find them. And in tests with dozens of psychiatric patients, Rezaii found that language analysis could predict which of them were likely to develop schizophrenia with more than 90% accuracy, before any typical symptoms emerged. It promised a huge leap forward.

In the past, capturing information about somebody or analyzing a person’s statements to make a diagnosis relied on the skill, experience, and opinions of individual psychiatrists. But thanks to the omnipresence of smartphones and social media, people’s language has never been so easy to record, digitize, and analyze. And a growing number of researchers are sifting through the data we produce—from our choice of language or our sleep patterns to how often we call our friends and what we write on Twitter and Facebook—to look for signs of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other syndromes. 

To Rezaii and others, the ability to collect this data and analyze it is the next great advance in psychiatry. They call it “digital phenotyping.”

Weighing your words

In 1908, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler announced the name for a condition that he and his peers were studying: schizophrenia. He noted how the condition’s symptoms “find their expression in language” but added, “The abnormality lies not in language itself but what it has to say.”

Bleuler was among the first to focus on what are called the “negative” symptoms of schizophrenia, the absence of something seen in healthy people. These are less noticeable than the so-called positive symptoms, which indicate the presence of something extra, such as hallucinations. One of the most common negative symptoms is alogia, or speech poverty. Patients either speak less or say less when they speak, using vague, repetitive, stereotypical phrases. The result is what psychiatrists call low semantic density.

Low semantic density is a telltale sign that a patient might be at risk of psychosis. Schizophrenia, a common form of psychosis, tends to develop  in the late teens to early 20s for men and the late 20s to early 30s for women—but a preliminary stage with milder symptoms usually precedes the full-blown condition. A lot of research is carried out on people in this “prodromal” phase, and psychiatrists like Rezaii are using language and other measures of behavior to try to identify which prodromal patients go on to develop full schizophrenia and why. Building on other research projects suggesting, for example, that people at high risk of psychosis tend use fewer possessive pronouns like “my,” “his,” or “ours,” Rezaii and her colleagues wanted to see if a computer could spot low semantic density.

JAKE BELCHER

The researchers used recordings of conversations made over the last decade or so with two groups of schizophrenia patients at Emory University. They broke each spoken sentence down into a series of core ideas so that a computer could measure the semantic density. The sentence “Well, I think I do have strong feelings about politics” gets a high score, thanks to the words “strong,” “politics,” and “feelings.”

But a sentence like “Now, now I know how to be cool with people because it’s like not talking is like, is like, you know how to be cool with people it’s like now I know how to do that” has a very low semantic density. 

In a second test, they got the computer to count the number of times each patient used words associated with sound—looking for the clues about voices that they might be hearing but keeping secret. In both cases, the researchers gave the computer a baseline of “normal” speech by feeding it online conversations posted by 30,000 users of Reddit.

When psychiatrists meet people in the prodromal phase, they use a standard set of interviews and cognitive tests to predict which will go on to develop psychosis. They usually get it right 80% of the time. By combining the two analyses of speech patterns, Rezaii’s computer scored at least 90%.

She says there’s a long way to go before the discovery could be used in the clinic to help predict what will happen to patients. The study looked at the speech of just 40 people; the next step would be to increase the sample size. But she’s already working on software that could quickly analyze the conversations she has with patients. “So you hit the button and it gives you numbers. What is the semantic density of the speech of the patient? What were the subtle features that the patient talked about but did not necessarily express in an explicit way?” she says. “If it’s a way to get into the deeper, more subconscious layers, that would be very cool.” 

The results also have an obvious implication: If a computer can reliably detect such subtle changes, why not continuously monitor those at risk? 

More than just schizophrenia

Around one in four people across the world will suffer from a psychiatric syndrome during their lifetime. Two in four now own a smartphone. Using the gadgets to capture and analyze speech and text patterns could act as an early warning system. That would give doctors time to intervene with those at highest risk, perhaps to watch them more closely—or even to try therapies to reduce the chance of a psychotic event.

Patients could also use technology to monitor their own symptoms. Mental-health patients are often unreliable narrators when it comes to their health—unable or unwilling to identify their symptoms. Even digital monitoring of basic measurements like the number of hours of sleep somebody is getting can help, says Kit Huckvale, a postdoctoral fellow who works on digital health at the Black Dog Institute in Sydney, because it can warn patients when they might be most vulnerable to a downturn in their condition.

It’s not just schizophrenia that could be spotted with a machine. By studying people’s phones, psychiatrists have been able to pick up the subtle signs that precede a bipolar episode.

“Using these computers that we all carry around with us, maybe we do have access to information about changes in behavior, cognition, or experience that provide robust signals about future mental illness,” he says. “Or indeed, just the earliest stages of distress.”

And it’s not just schizophrenia that could be spotted with a machine. Probably the most advanced use of digital phenotyping is to predict the behaviors of people with bipolar disorder. By studying people’s phones, psychiatrists have been able to pick up the subtle signs that precede an episode. When a downswing in mood is coming, the GPS sensors in bipolar patients’ phones show that they tend to be less active. They answer incoming calls less, make fewer outgoing calls, and generally spend more time looking at the screen. In contrast, before a manic phase they move around more, send more text messages, and spend longer talking on the phone. 

Starting in March 2017, hundreds of patients discharged from psychiatric hospitals around Copenhagen have been loaned customized phones so doctors can remotely watch their activity and check for signs of low mood or mania. If the researchers spot unusual or worrying patterns, the patients are invited to speak with a nurse. By watching for and reacting to early warning signs in this way, the study aims to reduce the number of patients who experience a serious relapse.

Such projects seek consent from participants and promise to keep the data confidential. But as details on mental health get sucked into the world of big data, experts have raised concerns about privacy.

“The uptake of this technology is definitely outpacing legal regulation. It’s even outpacing public debate,” says Piers Gooding, who studies mental-health law and policies at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute in Australia. “There needs to be a serious public debate about the use of digital technologies in the mental-health context.”

Already, scientists have used videos posted by families to YouTube—without seeking explicit consent—to train computers to find distinctive body movements of children with autism. Others have sifted Twitter posts to help track behaviors associated with the transmission of HIV, while insurance companies in New York are officially allowed to study people’s Instagram feeds before calculating their life insurance premiums.

As technology tracks and analyzes our behaviors and lifestyles with ever more precision—sometimes with our knowledge and sometimes without—the opportunities for others to remotely monitor our mental state is growing fast. 

Privacy protections

In theory, privacy laws should prevent mental-health data from being passed around. In the US, the 24-year-old HIPAA statute regulates the sharing of medical data, and Europe’s data protection act, the GDPR, should theoretically stop it too. But a 2019 report from surveillance watchdog Privacy International found that popular websites about depression in France, Germany, and the UK shared user data with advertisers, data brokers, and large tech companies, while some websites offering depression tests leaked answers and test results to third parties.

Gooding points out that for several years Canadian police would pass details on people who attempted suicide to US border officials, who would then refuse them entry. In 2017, an investigation concluded that the practice was illegal, and it was stopped. 

Few would dispute that this was an invasion of privacy. Medical information is, after all, meant to be sacrosanct. Even when diagnoses of mental illness are made, laws around the world are supposed to prevent discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. 

But some ethicists worry that digital phenotyping blurs the lines on what could or should be classed, regulated, and protected as medical data. 

If the minutiae of our daily lives is sifted for clues to our mental health, then our “digital exhaust”—data on which words we choose, how quickly we respond to texts and calls, how often we swipe left, which posts we choose to like—could tell others at least as much about our state of mind as what’s in our confidential medical records. And it’s almost impossible to hide.

“The technology has pushed us beyond the traditional paradigms that were meant to protect certain types of information,” says Nicole Martinez-Martin, a bioethicist at Stanford. “When all data are potentially health data then there’s a lot of questions about whether that sort of health-information exceptionalism even makes sense anymore.”

Health-care information, she adds, used to be simple to classify—and therefore protect—because it was produced by health-care providers and held within health-care institutions, each of which had its own regulations to safeguard the needs and rights of its patients. Now, many ways of tracking and monitoring mental health using signals from our everyday actions are being developed by commercial firms, which don’t.

Facebook, for example, claims to use AI algorithms to find people at risk of suicide, by screening language in posts and concerned comments from friends and family. The company says it has alerted authorities to help people in at least 3,500 cases. But independent researchers complain it has not revealed how its system works or what it does with the data it gathers.

“Although suicide prevention efforts are vitally important, this is not the answer,” says Gooding. “There is zero research as to the accuracy, scale, or effectiveness of the initiative, nor information on what precisely the company does with the information following each apparent crisis. It’s basically hidden behind a curtain of trade secrecy laws.” 

The problems are not just in the private sector. Although researchers working in universities and research institutes are subject to a web of permissions to ensure consent, privacy, and ethical approval, some academic practices could actually encourage and enable the misuse of digital phenotyping, Rezaii points out.

“When I published my paper on predicting schizophrenia, the publishers wanted the code to be openly accessible, and I said fine because I was into liberal and free stuff. But then what if someone uses that to build an app and predict things on weird teenagers? That’s risky,” she says. “Journals have been advocating free publication of the algorithms. It has been downloaded 1,060 times so far. I do not know for what purpose, and that makes me uncomfortable.” 

Beyond privacy concerns, some worry that digital phenotyping is simply overhyped.

Serife Tekin, who studies the philosophy of psychiatry at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says psychiatrists have a long history of jumping on the latest technology as a way to try to make their diagnoses and treatments seem more evidence-based. From lobotomies to the colorful promise of brain scans, the field tends to move with huge surges of uncritical optimism that later proves to be unfounded, she says—and digital phenotyping could be simply the latest example. 

“Contemporary psychiatry is in crisis,” she says. “But whether the solution to the crisis in mental-health research is digital phenotyping is questionable. When we keep putting all of our eggs in one basket, that’s not really engaging with the complexity of the problem.”

Making mental health more modern?

Neguine Rezaii knows that she and others working on digital phenotyping are sometimes blinded by the bright potential of the technology. “There are things I haven’t thought about because we’re so excited about getting as much data as possible about this hidden signal in language,” she says.

But she also knows that psychiatry has relied for too long on little more than informed guesswork. “We don’t want to make some questionable inferences about what the patient might have said or meant if there is a way to objectively find out,” she says. “We want to record them, hit a button, and get some numbers. At the end of the appointment, we have the results. That’s the ideal. That’s what we’re working on.” 

To Rezaii, it’s natural that modern psychiatrists should want to use smartphones and other available technology. Discussions about ethics and privacy are important, she says, but so is an awareness that tech firms already harvest information on our behavior and use it—without our consent—for less noble purposes, such as deciding who will pay more for identical taxi rides or wait longer to be picked up. 

“We live in a digital world. Things can always be abused,” she says. “Once an algorithm is out there, then people can take it and use it on others. There’s no way to prevent that. At least in the medical world we ask for consent.”

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August 13, 2020 at 05:29AM