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…
Category: News
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
Shadow Bans, Dopamine Hits, and Viral Videos, All in the Life of TikTok Creators
Cameron Hickey, project director for algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship, studies the spread of disinformation on TikTok and other social media platforms and believes all of these sites do some sort of algorithmic downgrading. Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have also been accused of shadow bans. “Are they shadow-banning? I’m sure of it,” Hickey said. “How…
TikTok Played a Key Role in MAGA Radicalization
Our team at the National Conference on Citizenship has been monitoring content on Parler continuously for the past few months, and what we saw generally mirrors what others have reported: The platform was a hotbed of misinformation, conspiracy theories, hate, and incitements to violence. There was also a lot of spam and junk. Parler was,…
The strange, violent death of Parler
And now the world is left to pick through Parler’s remains. “This was a platform that served for casual conversation, amplification and radicalisation,” says Cameron Hickey, director of algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship, a non-partisan non-profit. But Parler wasn’t, Hickey argues, a platform where organisation took place. Wired UK | James Temperton,…