How to audit algorithms online?

In this episode Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss with Juhi Kulshrestha (Assistant Professor at U Konstanz) what makes algorithms online a research object. We touch on topics like filter bubbles and echo chambers, biases, how to investigate algorithms, the role of platforms and companies, data sources and possible effects of algorithmic curation. Last but not least, we discuss how far this field of resesarch has come by now and which future directions might be fruitful.

References

Friedman, B., & Nissenbaum, H. (1996). Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 14(3), 330–347.

Kulshrestha, J., Eslami, M., Messias, J., Zafar, M. B., Ghosh, S., Gummadi, K. P., & Karahalios, K. (2019). Search bias quantification: Investigating political bias in social media and web search. Information Retrieval Journal, 22(1), 188–227.

Urman, A., Makhortykh, M., Ulloa, R., & Kulshrestha, J. (2021). Where the Earth is flat and 9/11 is an inside job: A comparative algorithm audit of conspiratorial information in web search results. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.01278.