Stories

Story, 13 September 2021

AlgorithmWatch forced to shut down Instagram monitoring project after threats from Facebook

Digital platforms play an ever-increasing role in structuring and influencing public debate. Civil society watchdogs, researchers and journalists need to be able to hold them to account. But Facebook is increasingly fighting those who try. It shut down New York University’s Ad Observatory in August, and went after AlgorithmWatch, too.

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Twitter's image cropping algorithm has been accused of racial bias. An experiment by students at Bern University of Applied Sciences shows that the issue might have been fixed., 12 March 2021

Twitter apparently fixed their picture cropping

This contribution was written by Matthias Hug, Martina Hunziker, Katharina Scheuner, master students in Multimedia Communication and Publishing at Bern University of Applied Sciences. It started with pictures of Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell and escalated quickly. In the fall 2020, a Twitter user posted portraits of these two men, paired on top of each…

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Racial Health Bias, 3 December 2020

Health algorithms discriminate against Black patients, also in Switzerland

Algorithms used to assess kidney function or predict heart failure use race as a central criterion. There is no scientific basis to do so, and the results discriminate against Blacks.

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