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Misleading Ads Fueled Rapid Growth of Online Mental Health Companies
In a four-week period spanning October and November, about 20 companies ran more than 2,100 ads on Facebook and Instagram that described benefits of prescription drugs without citing risks, promoted drugs for unapproved uses or featured testimonials without disclosing whether they came from actors or company employees, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of…
Fossil Fuel Companies Are ‘Talking Green but Acting Dirty,’ Harvard Researchers Find
Harvard researchers published a report last week analyzing how European fossil fuel, car, and airline companies use social media to market their work as environmentally friendly. Geoffrey J.S. Supran, a research fellow in the Department of History of Science, led the project in collaboration with the Algorithmic Transparency Institute. The research was commissioned by the…
Three Shades of Greenwashing
Download the Full Report We report the results of a pilot study as a first step towards establishing a major new research initiative that will monitor, analyze, and expose digital climate discourse and deception. This initiative will be directed by Dr. Geoffrey Supran at the University of Miami in collaboration with computer scientists at the…
TikTok’s Black Box Obscures Its Role in Russia’s War
Earlier this month, researcher Cameron Hickey found he could not expand his flock of TikTok bots, because his method for logging into newly spawned accounts was blocked by the platform. “This research is fraught,” says Hickey, director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, a research project at nonprofit the National Conference on Citizenship. “But it’s critical…
YouTube, TikTok And Snap Go To Congress Tuesday. Here’s Why Their Fates May Vary
TikTok videos are shorter than a typical one on YouTube, usually a minute or less. This lets users see more TikTok videos more quickly, a rate of increased consumption that then carries an increased risk of landing on sludgy content, says Cameron Hickey, the project director for algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship.…
We’re “particularly” angry
In a front-page story for the New York Times by Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel, ATI Director Cameron Hickey told reporter Davey Alba about his feelings regarding the impending dismantling of CrowdTangle: For academics who relied on CrowdTangle, it was a blow. Cameron Hickey, a misinformation researcher at the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonprofit…
How The Daily Wire Uses Facebook’s Targeted Advertising to Build Its Brand
“What you’ve shown here is clear evidence of the way in which the radicalization of our society is built on many facets of the algorithm, including the tools provided for ad targeting,” said Cameron Hickey, project director for algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship. The Markup | August 2021, Corin Faife
Vaccine Misinformation Is Spreading Among Kids, Too — Especially On Social Media
TikTok is, in some ways, primed to take advantage of that peer influence, said Cameron Hickey, director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship, who studies and writes about TikTok. “The messages that are the most potent and the most impactful when we are at that age are the ones coming from the…
Tools to combat misinformation with Cameron Hickey
Cameron Hickey joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career and what he’s learned about our online misinformation problem and the tools he’s developed to help track and combat it. The Great Battlefield podcast | June 2021