Algorithms Impact measurement


 * (Panoptykon (2021)) Case study showing that disturbing ads are pushed at a vulnerable user. "The results of Panoptykon’s case study suggest that although Facebook has made some ad control tools available, users have no real possibility to influence how algorithms controlled by the platform shape their exposure to sponsored content."
 * (Avaaz (2021b)) "New Avaaz research finds that Facebook’s “related pages” algorithm continues to recommend pages that promote anti-vaccine content to users, despite the platform’s pledge to tackle COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, and its stated commitment to avoid making page recommendations that could be “low-quality, objectionable, or particularly sensitive.”"
 * (Avaaz (2020c)) "In 2015, YouTube launched a campaign to “help change the way people discuss climate change, so that the issue and its consequences could become more relevant and tangible to people around the world.” In addition, in Google’s February 2019 Whitepaper on fighting disinformation, YouTube’s parent company made it clear that: “We set out to prevent our systems from serving up content that could misinform users in a harmful way, particularly in domains that rely on veracity, such as science, medicine, news, or historical events. To that end, we introduced a higher bar for videos that are promoted through the YouTube homepage or that are surfaced to users through the “watch next” recommendations. Just because content is available on the site, it does not mean that it will display as prominently throughout the recommendation engine. ... We found that YouTube is driving millions of people to watch climate misinformation videos. These climate misinformation videos aren’t just being uploaded to YouTube and organically seen by interested audiences. Instead, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is giving these videos free promotion and showing misinformation to millions who wouldn’t have been exposed to it otherwise. Secondly, Avaaz found that YouTube is incentivizing this climate misinformation content via its monetization program. Every time an ad is shown on a YouTube video, the advertiser pays a fee,10 of which 55% goes to the video creator and the other 45% to YouTube. Avaaz found that some of the largest household brands in the world, including Samsung, L’Oréal, Warner Bros, Carrefour, and Danone as well as two of the largest environmental groups in the world, Greenpeace International and World Wildlife Fund, have advertisements running on these climate misinformation videos."
 * Measuring impact on human rights - Fundamental Rights and Algorithms Impact Assessment (FRAIA) - pdf