Social Foundations of Computation


2024


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Integration of Generative AI in the Digital Markets Act: Contestability and Fairness from a Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Yasar, A. G., Chong, A., Dong, E., Gilbert, T., Hladikova, S., Mougan, C., Shen, X., Singh, S., Stoica, A., Thais, S.

LSE Legal Studies Working Paper, March 2024 (article)

Abstract
The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) aims to address the lack of contestability and unfair practices in digital markets. But the current framework of the DMA does not adequately cover the rapid advance of generative AI. As the EU adopts AI-specific rules and considers possible amendments to the DMA, this paper suggests that generative AI should be added to the DMA’s list of core platform services. This amendment is the first necessary step to address the emergence of entrenched and durable positions in the generative AI industry.

link (url) [BibTex]

2024

link (url) [BibTex]


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The Fairness-Quality Trade-off in Clustering

Hakim, R., Stoica, A., Papadimitriou, C. H., Yannakakis, M.

arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10002, 2024 (article) Submitted

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]

2022


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Algorithmic Amplification of Politics on Twitter

Huszár, F., Ktena, S. I., O’Brien, C., Belli, L., Schlaikjer, A., Hardt, M.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), National Academy of Sciences, January 2022 (article)

Abstract
Content on Twitter’s home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There’s been intense public and scholarly debate about the possibility that some political groups benefit more from algorithmic amplification than others. We provide quantitative evidence from a long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment on the Twitter platform that committed a randomized control group including nearly 2 million daily active accounts to a reverse-chronological content feed free of algorithmic personalization. We present two sets of findings. First, we studied tweets by elected legislators from major political parties in seven countries. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the US media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favors right-leaning news sources. We further looked at whether algorithms amplify far-left and far-right political groups more than moderate ones; contrary to prevailing public belief, we did not find evidence to support this hypothesis. We hope our findings will contribute to an evidence-based debate on the role personalization algorithms play in shaping political content consumption.

link (url) [BibTex]

2022

link (url) [BibTex]