Spin Control and Freedom of Information: Lessons for the United Kingdom from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Kingdom's new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is intended to empower citizens by granting a right to government documents. However, the law will be implemented by a government that has developed highly centralized structures for controlling the communications activity of its departments. How will the revolutionary potential of the FOIA be squared with government's concern for ‘message discipline’? Experience in implementing Canada's Access to Information Act may provide an answer. The Canadian law was intended to constrain executive authority, but officials developed internal routines and technologies to minimize its disruptive potential. These practices restrict the right to information for certain types of stakeholders, such as journalists or representatives of political parties. The conflict between public expectations of transparency and elite concerns about governability may not be adequately accounted for during implementation of the UK Freedom of Information Act.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".