Abstract

Social media platforms curate access to information and opportunities, and so play a critical role in shaping public discourse today. The opaque nature of the algorithms these platforms use to curate content raises societal questions. Prior studies have used black-box methods led by experts or collaborative audits driven by everyday users to show that these algorithms can lead to biased or discriminatory outcomes. However, existing auditing methods face fundamental limitations because they function independent of the platforms. Concerns of potential harmful outcomes have prompted proposal of legislation in both the U.S. and the E.U. to mandate a new form of auditing where vetted external researchers get privileged access to social media platforms. Unfortunately, to date there have been no concrete technical proposals to provide such auditing, because auditing at scale risks disclosure of users' private data and …

Date

April 16, 2023

Authors

Basileal Imana, Aleksandra Korolova, John Heidemann

Journal

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Volume

7

Issue

CSCW1

Pages

1-33

Publisher

ACM