Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
Monday Night Lecture Series | Spring 2020

Big Data & the Credibility of the Future

Julia Simon-Kerr • The University of Connecticut School of Law

March 23 @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/2771376308

Credibility is defined in legal dictionaries as “worthiness of belief,” and in practice attributes like a witness’s demeanor and perceived candor, as well as markers such as prior convictions are central to legal credibility. In this way, credibility doctrine entrenches a preference for certain performative or status-based aspects of believability. For those who are unable or unwilling to conform, this system is used to discount testimony, often silencing criminal defendants. Although there is little to suggest that credibility doctrine furthers the objective of assessing a person’s actual truthfulness, legal actors assume that credibility is or should be a measure of a witness’s propensity to lie.

This talk addresses the future of legal credibility, in which the disjunction between how credibility is performed and evaluated in courtrooms and the ideal of truthseeking presents two possible paths: the financial credit score in the United States and the emergent social credit scoring system in China offer alternative visions of credibility’s big data future. The former models a limited approach that might seek to unbundle the propensity for lying and focus on measuring that quality algorithmically. The latter models algorithmic credibility writ large — a system where the government makes choices about what attributes and behaviors should be accounted for algorithmically in order to manufacture a social credit, or in this case a credibility score.

Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
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