Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University.
Department of Political Science, Northeastern University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2024 Sep;19(5):749-757. doi: 10.1177/17456916231186779. Epub 2023 Nov 27.
It is critical to understand how algorithms structure the information people see and how those algorithms support or undermine society's core values. We offer a normative framework for the assessment of the information curation algorithms that determine much of what people see on the internet. The framework presents two levels of assessment: one for individual-level effects and another for systemic effects. With regard to individual-level effects we discuss whether (a) the information is aligned with the user's interests, (b) the information is accurate, and (c) the information is so appealing that it is difficult for a person's self-regulatory resources to ignore ("agency hacking"). At the systemic level we discuss whether (a) there are adverse civic-level effects on a system-level variable, such as political polarization; (b) there are negative distributional or discriminatory effects; and (c) there are anticompetitive effects, with the information providing an advantage to the platform. The objective of this framework is both to inform the direction of future scholarship as well as to offer tools for intervention for policymakers.
了解算法如何构建人们所看到的信息，以及这些算法如何支持或破坏社会的核心价值观，这一点至关重要。我们为评估信息策展算法提供了一个规范框架，这些算法决定了人们在互联网上看到的大部分内容。该框架提出了两个层面的评估：一个是针对个人层面的影响，另一个是针对系统层面的影响。在个人层面的影响方面，我们讨论了以下三个方面：(a) 信息是否与用户的兴趣一致；(b) 信息是否准确；(c) 信息是否具有如此大的吸引力，以至于用户的自我调节资源难以忽视（“代理黑客”）。在系统层面，我们讨论了以下三个方面：(a) 是否会对系统层面的变量（如政治两极化）产生不利的公民层面的影响；(b) 是否存在负面的分配或歧视性影响；(c) 是否存在反竞争影响，信息是否为平台提供了优势。该框架的目的既是为未来的学术研究指明方向，也是为政策制定者提供干预工具。
