Event overview
Professor Dhiraj Murthy on "Exploring social media search algorithm bias based on age and gender: a case study of e-cigarette–related searches on YouTube"
Algorithmic personalization based on even simple demographic attributes affect what content people are exposed to. Algorithmic power and information bias are real, but it can be challenging to affect platform accountability without hard empirical evidence. As a case study, we created a set of fictitious profiles on YouTube and examined whether accounts with varying demographic attributes received different electronic cigarette-related search results.
Our results indicate that demographic attributes factor into YouTube’s algorithmic systems. Specifically, differences in the age and sex attributes of user profiles do result in variance in both the videos presented in YouTube search results as well as in the types of these videos. We also found that underage user profiles were exposed to e-cigarette content despite YouTube’s age-restriction policy that ostensibly prohibits certain e-cigarette content.
Though part of future work, I also discuss our initial results on the effect of race on search results. Machine learning methods ultimately present one avenue to audit how YouTube’s search and recommendation algorithm customizes content based on demographic attributes and I make clear that these methods can’t replace qualitative audits.
Dhiraj Murthy is Professor of Journalism and Media Studies (in the Moody College of Communication), Sociology (by courtesy), and School of Information (by courtesy) at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, qualitative/mixed methods, machine learning, and virtual organizations. He has edited 3 journal special issues and authored over 85 articles, book chapters, and papers; he wrote the first scholarly book about Twitter (second edition published by Polity Press, 2018). Dr. Murthy founded and directs the Computational Media Lab and is co-editor of the journal Big Data & Society.
The talk is organised by the Digital Culture Unit, Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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14 Mar 2024 | 5:00pm - 6:30pm |
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