Social media monitoring offers opportunity but needs oversight, says former minister
Craig Leonard, the CEO of Eyesover Technologies Inc., has some retroactive advice for Craig Leonard, the New Brunswick cabinet minister.
"You have to make sure you get out of that bubble," Leonard told Information Morning Fredericton while discussing his new market research company, the role online data mining can play for governments and corporations and how more oversight can protect individuals.
As energy and mines minister for the David Alward government, Leonard had to handle several divisive energy issue, shale gas exploration. Now, looking back on his time in politics, he said a better understanding of opposing views would have helped him manage those issues.
"You have to be talking to everybody," he said. "You have to understand the size and scope of the issue and, particularly, if people are not in favour of what you're doing, you need to basically make sure you understand why they're not."
His firm, which provides market research and public opinion in real time, aims to broaden customers' horizons by analyzing the online conversation surrounding a certain issue, such as contentious government decisions or private-sector development that can often live or die with public opinion.
"If you're aren't understanding what's taking place at a grassroots level, you're going to run into trouble eventually," Leonard said.
Ethical concerns
The online media monitoring game comes with its fair share of ethical dilemmas, however. How online platforms harvest and share personal data is being scrutinized at a level never seen before following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In addition to having compromised of the data of about 87 million users, Facebook has been raked over the coals for the role it played in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The social media giant is now facing government regulation, and Leonard thinks it's a valid idea. He said third-party developers, like Eyesover Technologies, have to be responsible with the data they obtain, but the online platforms need to show more accountability.
"It's too powerful of a tool to let industry play on its own," he said. "There has to be some form of regulation that makes sure the data that's out there is valid and the way it's used is appropriate."
The firm is also working on technology to identify fake social media accounts and where they originate as a way to separate real online conversations from inflated ones exaggerated by bots and fake users.
How data is gathered
Eyesover can obtain data from "broadcast platforms" — think Twitter and YouTube — and text from public Facebook pages. Personal data, the kind used for targeted marketing campaigns, is "off limits" at the firm, Leonard said.
The data is gathered from feeds available to third parties from most social and news media platforms.
"Think of it as almost a Google search for social media, that we we tell the platforms what keywords, phrases we're interested in picking up and we will get the content that actually has the words and phrases included," he said.
Eyesover was founded by Leonard and Dr. Ali Ghorbani, a cybersecurity expert and former dean of computer science at the University of New Brunswick. Leonard said the project really fit what he had been through when handling contentious government issues.
