JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Since September 2020, the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app has been used to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in the UK. Since its launch, this app has been part of the discussion regarding the perceived social agency of decision-making algorithms. On the social media website Twitter, a plethora of views about the app have been found but only analysed for sentiment and topic trajectories thus far, leaving the perceived social agency of the app underexplored.

Objective:

We aimed to examine the discussion of social agency in social media public discourse regarding algorithmic-operated decisions, particularly when the AI agency responsible for specific information systems is not openly disclosed in an example such as the Covid-19 contact tracing app. To do this, we analysed the presentation of the NHS Covid-19 App on Twitter, focusing on the portrayal of social agency and the impact of its deployment on society. We also aimed to discover what the presentation of social agents communicates about the perceived responsibility of the app.

Methods:

Using Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, underpinned by Social Actor Representation, we used the link between grammatical and social agency and analysed a corpus of 118,316 tweets from September 2020 to July 2021 to see whether the app was portrayed as a social actor.

Results:

We found that active presentations of the app – seen mainly through personalisation and agency metaphor – dominated the discourse. The app was presented as a social actor in 96% of the cases considered and grew in proportion to passive presentations in time. These active presentations showed the app to be a social actor in five main ways: informing, instructing, providing permission, disrupting, and functioning. We found a small number of occasions where the app was presented passively, through backgrounding and exclusion.

Conclusions:

We concluded that Twitter users presented the NHS Covid-19 App as an active social actor with a clear sense of social agency. The study also revealed that Twitter users perceived the app as responsible for their welfare, especially when it provided instructions or permission, and this perception remained consistent throughout the discourse, particularly during significant events. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how social agency is discussed in social media discourse related to algorithmic-operated decisions.