Many in the legal field tuned in to watch the UK House of Lords Constitution Committee hear evidence from Professor Richard Susskind on 11 January. While Professor Susskind extolled the capacity of technology to improve the lawmaking process in Westminster, the Committee raised questions about the automation of legislation, and also the potential for social media comment to influence Parliamentary deliberations, for better or for worse.
The Committee asked whether social media differed in any way, apart from volume, from traditional communications between citizens and their MP – for example face to face meetings or a phone call to the surgery. Professor Susskind mentioned that the convenience of social media is drawing more people into comment on the political process. But there’s also a difference in publicity. If I phone my MP nobody hears the conversation but me. If I tweet her, the whole world (on Twitter) might get to see it. That’s why many people intuit that tweeting a complaint will elicit a quicker response from a misbehaving business than writing to their head of customer service.
The Committee pointed out that Westminster MPs need to be wary of the extent to which they allow social media debate to influence the way they carry out the responsibilities delegated to them at the ballot box. But no-one raises an eyebrow at the idea of gathering constituents’ opinions on the doorstep. Can we reach a sufficient level of understanding and sophistication for social media to become just another tool for understanding public sentiment?
The challenges of the echo chamber, and of fake news, highlight the importance of news sources such as Reuters that publish with editorial integrity and impartiality. However they also underline the need for any kind of social media analysis to be done thoughtfully and sensitively. Nobody wants public policy decisions to be swayed by the loudest voices only, so how do we arrive at a more sophisticated level of understanding?
This experiment carried out by Thomson Reuters Labs illustrates potential methodologies for understanding baseline decisions.
Perhaps the real value of this type of analysis comes from understanding the baseline level of reaction, positive or negative, to a given event – say a policy announcement – and then examining how far the reaction level differs for future policy announcements.
Much of the rest of the hearing focused on the potential for technology in the legislative process itself. All were agreed that robots drafting legislation would be a bad thing. But to what extent can tech support the human legislator to produce legislation more efficiently? In the course of these discussions, it felt as though typical thoughts on replacing paper-based processes with digital competed for time with fascinating questions on the very fabric of legislation.
A key discussion focused on better tracking of Bills and their potential amendments, and both historical and forward consolidation of legislation (all available to legal users through Westlaw UK).
Lord Judge however raised an interesting question around the very process of legislating by amendment. What sort of investment, he wondered, would be required to produce each Act as a complete Act, with all relevant material in one place rather than distributed across multiple pieces of legislation? This felt like possibly the most radical idea of all: greater use in Westminster of codification by subject matter, an undertaking likely to depend on many factors besides adoption of technology.
For me the burning question was: why is the legislative process in Westminster still relatively old-fashioned? Is it a failure of leadership? Is it because of the complexity of the legislative process itself? Neither: per Professor Susskind, it’s more probable that that there is simply no compelling reason to introduce dramatic technological innovations – yet. The Courts system has been forced to modernise because of ballooning workloads, delays in justice and a reduction in the proportion of represented litigants, all of which have been extensively reported. We are working with the Open Data Institute to explore recommendations to improve case law data access for citizens. Is there an equivalent crisis in the legislative process? Without necessity, no invention.
