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Facebook Said It Would Stop Pushing Users to Join Partisan Political Groups. It Didn’t. - 29 janvier 2021
According to Citizen Browser data, the platform especially peppered Trump voters with political grouprecommendations
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Facebook said it was taking “emergency” measures to prevent people from using the platform to spread misinformation or coordinate violence. Among (...)
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In Georgia, Facebook’s Changes Brought Back a Partisan News Feed - 5 janvier 2021
Ahead of crucial senate runoffs, Facebook reversed its political ad ban, and the impact was visible on users’ feeds
As Georgians head to the polls to vote on their two U.S. Senators—and effectively, partisan control of Congress—on Tuesday, voters face an online landscape far different from what they saw in the weeks (...)
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Algorithms Behaving Badly - 1er janvier 2021
Computers are being asked to make more and more weighty decisions, even as their performance reviews are troubling
The perils of leaving important decisions to computer algorithms are pretty easily imagined (see, e.g., “Minority Report,” “I, Robot,” “War Games”). In recent years, however, algorithms’ job descriptions (...)
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Schools Are Buying Up Surveillance Technology to Fight COVID-19 - 9 septembre 2020
But will it actually prevent an outbreak ?
Fayette County Public Schools, a 24-school district in Georgia, reopened its classroom doors last month. As at many schools around the country, officials in Fayette have concerns about safely bringing students back to school amid a pandemic—and they’re turning to (...)
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Does Facebook Still Sell Discriminatory Ads ? - 30 août 2020
In May, a Wisconsin health care agency, Tenderness Health Care, posted a job ad on Facebook looking for personal care workers. According to Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this ad” pop-up, when the agency purchased the ad, it asked Facebook to not show it to anyone over 54 years of age. And they asked Facebook to show it (...)
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To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo - 7 août 2020
The Markup obtained internal documents that coach new employees to avoid creating “very real legal risks” in using words like “market” and “networkeffects”
As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has (...)
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Google Ad Portal Equated “Black Girls” with Porn - 7 août 2020
Searching Google’s ad buying portal for “Black girls” returned hundreds of terms leading to “adult content”
Google’s Keywords Planner, which helps advertisers choose which search terms to associate with their ads, offered hundreds of keyword suggestions related to “Black girls,” “Latina girls,” and “Asian Girls”—the (...)
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Google’s Top Search Result ? Surprise ! It’s Google - 28 juillet 2020
The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page
In Google’s early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 “blue links” that led to different websites. “We want to get you out of Google and to the (...)
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Is This Amazon Review Bullshit ? - 21 juillet 2020
Rebecca Jones, of London, recently pulled up Amazon.co.uk to search for a phone adapter.
She was reading through the reviews for one she was considering buying, when suddenly she started noticing mentions of what a great taco holder the product was.
“The taco holder got great reviews, but there wasn’t much for my (...)
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Swinging the Vote ? – The Markup - 2 mars 2020
Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.
Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent.
These aren’t poll (...)
