Looking Forward and Additional Recommendations

The previous four reports in this series outline a number of recommendations around how to promote greater fairness, accountability, and transparency around the use of algorithmic decision-making in specific categories of algorithmic content shaping systems and tools. These recommendations included: platforms should publicly share comprehensive information regarding the policies and practices that guide the creation, use, and recalibration of their algorithmic content shaping systems; platforms should provide users with digestible explanations of how these systems are implemented and access to a robust set of controls; and stakeholders in this space should further develop methods for evaluating and addressing bias, discrimination, and other concerning outcomes that can result from these systems. Based on the four reports we have published, as well as the event series we subsequently hosted, we have identified a number of additional cross-cutting recommendations that stakeholders should consider in order to further this work.

In particular, internet platforms should:

1. Establish corporate programs that enable pre-vetted researchers to access data related to algorithmic systems in order to further evaluation and research in the fairness, accountability, and transparency space.
2. Provide users with comprehensible and accessible explanations of how their data is being used to shape their online experiences and train algorithmic systems.
3. Enable users to determine if and how their data is collected and used by algorithmic systems to shape their online experiences, and featured in datasets that are used to train these systems. These tools should be accessible and comprehensible.
4. Solicit feedback from civil society organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders in order to continuously refine and develop user-focused controls and explanations.
5. Enable easy-to-use data portability, such as that demonstrated by the cross-industry Data Transfer Project, so that users have greater agency and control over which companies have access to and can use their personal data.

In addition, U.S. policymakers should:

1. Enact rights-respecting transparency and accountability requirements for internet platforms.
2. Pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation that provides users with rights over their information and limits how companies can use personal data. This legislation should protect civil rights, prevent unlawful discrimination, advance equal opportunity, and provide redress for privacy violations.
3. Clarify that all offline anti-discriminatory statutes, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, apply in the digital environment. Where necessary, Congress and state legislatures should enact appropriate legislation to fill gaps or clarify the applicability of such laws.

Internet platforms, researchers, civil society organizations, and policymakers should:

1. Ensure that efforts to develop approaches for promoting fairness, accountability, and transparency around the use of these algorithmic systems account for variations in the services internet platforms offer and the subsequent goals of these algorithmic systems.
2. Encourage tiered models of transparency and accountability that consider the differing intentions, needs, and levels of comprehension that different stakeholders such as users, researchers, and policymakers have.
3. Make proactive efforts to include and lift up voices and experiences of civil rights organizations and impacted communities in conversations around fairness, accountability, and transparency.

Artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools are pervasive in our online ecosystem, and their use cases are likely to continue growing. Although these systems can provide users with tailored platform experiences, researchers have documented numerous instances in which they can also generate harmful results that are often discriminatory and biased. Given that these algorithmic systems hold a significant amount of influence over how users see and engage with the world, internet platforms should do more to provide fairness, accountability, and transparency around how they build, use, and refine these tools. They should also provide greater insight into what the effects of these systems are. Simultaneously, researchers, civil society, civil rights organizations, and policymakers should do more to hold companies accountable for creating and using algorithmic tools in a responsible manner. Automated tools are rapidly and constantly changing the way we interact with the digital sphere. Internet platforms should adopt robust transparency and accountability mechanisms so that algorithmic systems will be rights-respecting, and subject to review and redress for any harmful consequences.