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A Social Graph is how Facebook represents
all its data and how they're able to relate different users.
all its data and how they're able to relate different users.
This project aims to understand the way we consume information online and the way it is presented to us, revealing the role of personalization algorithms in this process.
By sharing an incredible amount of personal information online, in the name of freedom of choice and freedom of expression, individuals become vulnerable psychopolitical control and behavioural forecasting. Excess consumption leaves them restless for more information, but they lack the power of judgment to process and understand it all correctly. The concept of "reality" is inevitably affected and becomes blurred, given the biased way in which information is filtered and targeted.
The project addresses this issue from 4 points of view: Who wins? The goal is to consider those who abuse and control our data, addressing the role of states, institutions, and corporations; Who loses? The focus is how artificial intelligence uses our information to perfect its systems, turning us into the new generation of lab rats; Who pays? The intention is to expose who more seriously suffers the consequences, addressing forms of digital colonialism and exoticization enabled by algorithms that are intrinsically racist, xenophobic, sexist and elitist; What’s next? Finally, tackling what are the predictable effects of these developments on our way of being and communicating, or perceiving reality.
*This website was developed by Marta Azevedo for the Masters in Design Communication, Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, Project I 2022/23.
I was inspired to learn more about this topic after discovering real-life examples of how biased and harmful the algorithms responsible for search engines, artificial intelligence systems and content personalization are.
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Data-driven policing carries a higher risk of bias—it’s more reflective of police decisions, as opposed to actual reported crimes.
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This image represents pupils at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, part of a larger federally-funded effort to ethnically cleanse Native Americans. AI tools are missing cultural data, and the traditions of millions of communities are not being recognized.
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UNESCO said that female voice assistants have been programmed to “greet verbal abuse with flirtation” and even “thanked users for sexual harassment”.
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If a woman in the United States gets into the driver’s seat of most cars, she is 73% more likely than a male driver to be severely injured if the car crashes and 17% more likely to die.
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An algorithm widely used in US hospitals is less likely to refer black people than white people who were equally sick to programmes that aim to improve care for patients with complex medical needs.
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Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic and racist remarks and started repeating these sentiments back to users.
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These autocomplete suggestions aren't hard-coded by Google. They're the result of Google's algorithmic scans of the entire world of content and its assessment of what people want to know when they search for a generic term.
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Photos of some of the people who were arrested in Massachusetts during May, 2022. The names, the arrest stories, as well as several mug shots, can easily be found online.
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Robotic vacuums collect data as they clean. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that they share with Amazon, Apple or Google.