No Arabic abstract
User beliefs about algorithmic systems are constantly co-produced through user interaction and the complex socio-technical systems that generate recommendations. Identifying these beliefs is crucial because they influence how users interact with recommendation algorithms. With no prior work on user beliefs of algorithmic video recommendations, practitioners lack relevant knowledge to improve the user experience of such systems. To address this problem, we conducted semi-structured interviews with middle-aged YouTube video consumers to analyze their user beliefs about the video recommendation system. Our analysis revealed different factors that users believe influence their recommendations. Based on these factors, we identified four groups of user beliefs: Previous Actions, Social Media, Recommender System, and Company Policy. Additionally, we propose a framework to distinguish the four main actors that users believe influence their video recommendations: the current user, other users, the algorithm, and the organization. This framework provides a new lens to explore design suggestions based on the agency of these four actors. It also exposes a novel aspect previously unexplored: the effect of corporate decisions on the interaction with algorithmic recommendations. While we found that users are aware of the existence of the recommendation system on YouTube, we show that their understanding of this system is limited.
Inappropriate and profane content on social media is exponentially increasing and big corporations are becoming more aware of the type of content on which they are advertising and how it may affect their brand reputation. But with a huge surge in content being posted online it becomes seemingly difficult to filter out related videos on which they can run their ads without compromising brand name. Advertising on youtube videos generates a huge amount of revenue for corporations. It becomes increasingly important for such corporations to advertise on only the videos that dont hurt the feelings, community or harmony of the audience at large. In this paper, we propose a system to identify inappropriate content on YouTube and leverage it to perform a first of its kind, large scale, quantitative characterization that reveals some of the risks of YouTube ads consumption on inappropriate videos. Customization of the architecture have also been included to serve different requirements of corporations. Our analysis reveals that YouTube is still plagued by such disturbing videos and its currently deployed countermeasures are ineffective in terms of detecting them in a timely manner. Our framework tries to fill this gap by providing a handy, add on solution to filter the videos and help corporations and companies to push ads on the platform without worrying about the content on which the ads are displayed.
With YouTubes growing importance as a news platform, its recommendation system came under increased scrutiny. Recognizing YouTubes recommendation system as a broadcaster of media, we explore the applicability of laws that require broadcasters to give important political, ideological, and social groups adequate opportunity to express themselves in the broadcasted program of the service. We present audits as an important tool to enforce such laws and to ensure that a system operates in the publics interest. To examine whether YouTube is enacting certain biases, we collected video recommendations about political topics by following chains of ten recommendations per video. Our findings suggest that YouTubes recommendation system is enacting important biases. We find that YouTube is recommending increasingly popular but topically unrelated videos. The sadness evoked by the recommended videos decreases while the happiness increases. We discuss the strong popularity bias we identified and analyze the link between the popularity of content and emotions. We also discuss how audits empower researchers and civic hackers to monitor complex machine learning (ML)-based systems like YouTubes recommendation system.
In this position paper, I provide a socio-technical perspective on machine learning-based systems. I also explain why systematic audits may be preferable to explainable AI systems. I make concrete recommendations for how institutions governed by public law akin to the German TUV and Stiftung Warentest can ensure that ML systems operate in the interest of the public.
While decision makers have begun to employ machine learning, machine learning models may make predictions that bias against certain demographic groups. Semi-automated bias detection tools often present reports of automatically-detected biases using a recommendation list or visual cues. However, there is a lack of guidance concerning which presentation style to use in what scenarios. We conducted a small lab study with 16 participants to investigate how presentation style might affect user behaviors in reviewing bias reports. Participants used both a prototype with a recommendation list and a prototype with visual cues for bias detection. We found that participants often wanted to investigate the performance measures that were not automatically detected as biases. Yet, when using the prototype with a recommendation list, they tended to give less consideration to such measures. Grounded in the findings, we propose information load and comprehensiveness as two axes for characterizing bias detection tasks and illustrate how the two axes could be adopted to reason about when to use a recommendation list or visual cues.
Data-driven decision-making consequential to individuals raises important questions of accountability and justice. Indeed, European law provides individuals limited rights to meaningful information about the logic behind significant, autonomous decisions such as loan approvals, insurance quotes, and CV filtering. We undertake three experimental studies examining peoples perceptions of justice in algorithmic decision-making under different scenarios and explanation styles. Dimensions of justice previously observed in response to human decision-making appear similarly engaged in response to algorithmic decisions. Qualitative analysis identified several concerns and heuristics involved in justice perceptions including arbitrariness, generalisation, and (in)dignity. Quantitative analysis indicates that explanation styles primarily matter to justice perceptions only when subjects are exposed to multiple different styles---under repeated exposure of one style, scenario effects obscure any explanation effects. Our results suggests there may be no best approach to explaining algorithmic decisions, and that reflection on their automated nature both implicates and mitigates justice dimensions.