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  1. Algorithmic neutrality.Milo Phillips-Brown - manuscript
    Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over the jobs we get, the loans we're granted, the information we see online. Algorithms can and often do wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has been largely neglected. I investigate algorithmic neutrality, tackling three questions: What is algorithmic neutrality? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?
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  2. Ethical pitfalls for natural language processing in psychology.Mark Alfano, Emily Sullivan & Amir Ebrahimi Fard - forthcoming - In Morteza Dehghani & Ryan Boyd (eds.), The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology. Guilford Press.
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge about human psychology is increasingly being produced using natural language processing (NLP) and related techniques. The power that accompanies and harnesses this knowledge should be subject to ethical controls and oversight. In this chapter, we address the ethical pitfalls that are likely to be encountered in the context of such research. These pitfalls occur at various stages of the NLP pipeline, including data acquisition, enrichment, analysis, storage, and sharing. We also address secondary uses of the results (...)
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  3. Building Epistemically Healthier Platforms.Dallas Amico-Korby, Maralee Harrell & David Danks - forthcoming - Episteme.
    When thinking about designing social media platforms, we often focus on factors such as usability, functionality, aesthetics, ethics, and so forth. Epistemic considerations have rarely been given the same level of attention in design discussions. This paper aims to rectify this neglect. We begin by arguing that there are epistemic norms that govern environments, including social media environments. Next, we provide a framework for applying these norms to the question of platform design. We then apply this framework to the real-world (...)
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  4. The Harm of Social Media to Public Reason.Paige Benton & Michael W. Schmidt - forthcoming - Topoi.
    It is commonly agreed that so-called echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, associated with social media, are detrimental to liberal democracies. Drawing on John Rawls’s political liberalism, we offer a novel explanation of why social media platforms amplifying echo chambers and epistemic bubbles are likely contributing to the violation of the democratic norms connected to the ideal of public reason. These norms are clarified with reference to the method of (full) reflective equilibrium, which we argue should be cultivated as a civic (...)
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  5. Mental Integrity in the Attention Economy: in Search of the Right to Attention.Bartek Chomanski - forthcoming - Neuroethics.
    Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – that there is (...)
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  6. Online consent: how much do we need to know?Bartek Chomanski & Lode Lauwaert - forthcoming - AI and Society.
    This paper argues, against the prevailing view, that consent to privacy policies that regular internet users usually give is largely unproblematic from the moral point of view. To substantiate this claim, we rely on the idea of the right not to know (RNTK), as developed by bioethicists. Defenders of the RNTK in bioethical literature on informed consent claim that patients generally have the right to refuse medically relevant information. In this article we extend the application of the RNTK to online (...)
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  7. Regulating Misinformation: Political Irrationality as a Feasibility Constraint.Bartlomiej Chomanski - forthcoming - Topoi:1-16.
    This paper argues that the well-established fact of political irrationality imposes substantial constraints on how governments may combat the threat of political misinformation. Though attempts at regulating misinformation are becoming increasingly popular, both among policymakers and theorists, I intend to show that, for a wide range of anti-misinformation interventions (collectively termed “debunking” and “source labeling”), these attempts ought to be abandoned. My argument relies primarily on the fact that most people process politically-relevant information in biased and motivated ways. Since debunking (...)
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  8. Emotion and Ethics in Virtual Reality.Alex Fisher - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    It is controversial whether virtual reality should be considered fictional or real. Virtual fictionalists claim that objects and events within virtual reality are merely fictional: they are imagined and do not exist. Virtual realists argue that virtual objects and events really exist. This metaphysical debate might appear important for some of the practical questions that arise regarding how to morally evaluate and legally regulate virtual reality. For instance, one advantage claimed of virtual realism is that only by taking virtual objects (...)
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  9. On Subtweeting.Eleonore Neufeld & Elise Woodard - forthcoming - In Patrick Connolly, Sandy Goldberg & Jennifer Saul (eds.), Conversations Online. Oxford University Press.
    In paradigmatic cases of subtweeting, one Twitter user critically or mockingly tweets about another person without mentioning their username or their name. In this chapter, we give an account of the strategic aims of subtweeting and the mechanics through which it achieves them. We thereby hope to shed light on the distinctive communicative and moral texture of subtweeting while filling in a gap in the philosophical literature on strategic speech in social media. We first specify what subtweets are and identify (...)
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  10. Automated Influence and the Challenge of Cognitive Security.Sarah Rajtmajer & Daniel Susser - forthcoming - HoTSoS: ACM Symposium on Hot Topics in the Science of Security.
    Advances in AI are powering increasingly precise and widespread computational propaganda, posing serious threats to national security. The military and intelligence communities are starting to discuss ways to engage in this space, but the path forward is still unclear. These developments raise pressing ethical questions, about which existing ethics frameworks are silent. Understanding these challenges through the lens of “cognitive security,” we argue, offers a promising approach.
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  11. Reimagining Digital Well-Being. Report for Designers & Policymakers.Daan Annemans, Matthew Dennis, , Gunter Bombaerts, Lily E. Frank, Tom Hannes, Laura Moradbakhti, Anna Puzio, Lyanne Uhlhorn, Titiksha Vashist, , Anastasia Dedyukhina, Ellen Gilbert, Iliana Grosse-Buening & Kenneth Schlenker - 2024 - Report for Designers and Policymakers.
    This report aims to offer insights into cutting-edge research on digital well-being. Many of these insights come from a 2-day academic-impact event, The Future of Digital Well-Being, hosted by a team of researchers working with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in February 2024. Today, achieving and maintaining well-being in the face of online technologies is a multifaceted challenge that we believe requires using theoretical resources of different research disciplines. This report explores diverse perspectives on how digital (...)
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  12. Not Just A Tool: Why Social-Media Use Is Bad and Bad For Us, and The Duty to Quit.Douglas R. Campbell - 2024 - Journal of Global Ethics 20 (1):107-112.
    With an eye on the future of global ethics, I argue that social-media technologies are not morally neutral tools but are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of agent. They nudge us to do things that are bad for us. Moreover, I argue that we have a duty to quit using social-media platforms, not just on account of possible duties to preserve our own well-being but because users are akin to test subjects on whom developers are testing new nudges, (...)
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  13. Digital privacy and the law: the challenge of regulatory capture.Bartek Chomanski & Lode Lauwaert - 2024 - AI and Society.
    Digital privacy scholars tend to bemoan ordinary people’s limited knowledge of and lukewarm interest in what happens to their digital data. This general lack of interest and knowledge is often taken as a consideration in favor of legislation aiming to force internet companies into adopting more responsible data practices. While we remain silent on whether any new laws are called for, in this paper we wish to underline a neglected consequence of people’s ignorance of and apathy for digital privacy: their (...)
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  14. The Ethics of Social Media: Being Better Online.Joe Saunders - 2024 - In Carl Fox & Joe Saunders (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics. Routledge. pp. 307-18.
    Social media is a mess. Philosophers have recently helped catalogue some of the various ills. In this chapter, I relay some of this conceptual work on virtue signalling, piling on, ramping up, echo-chambers, epistemic bubbles, polarization, moral outrage porn, and the gamification of communication. In drawing attention to these things, philosophers hope to steer us towards being better online. One form that this takes is a call for more civility (both online and off). There is a good case to be (...)
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  15. Emerging Technologies & Higher Education.Jake Burley & Alec Stubbs - 2023 - Ieet White Papers.
    Extended Reality (XR) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies have the potential to significantly influence higher education practices and pedagogy in the coming years. As these emerging technologies reshape the educational landscape, it is crucial for educators and higher education professionals to understand their implications and make informed policy decisions for both individual courses and universities as a whole. -/- This paper has two parts. In the first half, we give an overview of XR technologies and their potential future role (...)
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  16. Cancel Culture, Then and Now: A Platonic Approach to the Shaming of People and the Exclusion of Ideas.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Journal of Cyberspace Studies 7 (2):147-166.
    In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their morally reprehensible (...)
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  17. In Defense of (Some) Online Echo Chambers.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3):1-11.
    In this article, I argue that online echo chambers are in some cases and in some respects good. I do not attempt to refute arguments that they are harmful, but I argue that they are sometimes beneficial. In the first section, I argue that it is sometimes good to be insulated from views with which one disagrees. In the second section, I argue that the software-design principles that give rise to online echo chambers have a lot to recommend them. Further, (...)
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  18. Tweet acts and quote-tweetable acts.Chris Cousens - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-28.
    Online communication can often seem different to offline talk. Structural features of social media sites can shape the things we do with words. In this paper, I argue that the practice of ‘quote-tweeting’ can cause a single utterance that originally performed just one speech act to later perform several different speech acts. This describes a new type of illocutionary pluralism—the view that a single utterance can perform multiple illocutionary acts. Not only is this type more plural than others (if one (...)
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  19. The Moral Rights and Wrongs of Online Dating and Hook-Ups.Lily Frank & Michał Klincewicz - 2023 - In Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    In this chapter we identify three potentially morally problematic behaviours that are common among users of dating and hook-up apps (DHAs) and provide arguments as to why they may or may not be considered (a) in a category of their own, distinct from similar behaviours outside of DHAs; (b) caused or facilitated by affordances and business logic of DHAs; (c) as indeed morally wrong. We also consider ways in which morally problematic behaviours can be anticipated, mitigated, or even prevented by (...)
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  20. Data Mining in the Context of Legality, Privacy, and Ethics.Amos Okomayin, Tosin Ige & Abosede Kolade - 2023 - International Journal of Research and Innovation in Applied Science 10 (Vll):10-15.
    Data mining possess a significant threat to ethics, privacy, and legality, especially when we consider the fact that data mining makes it difficult for an individual or consumer (in the case of a company) to control accessibility and usage of his data. Individuals should be able to control how his/ her data in the data warehouse is being access and utilize while at the same time providing enabling environment which enforces legality, privacy and ethicality on data scientists, or data engineer (...)
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  21. The socio-economic argument for the human right to internet access.Merten Reglitz - 2023 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (4): 441-469.
    This paper argues that Internet access should be recognised as a human right because it has become practically indispensable for having adequate opportunities to realise our socio-economic human rights. This argument is significant for a philosophically informed public understanding of the Internet and because it provides the basis for creating new duties. For instance, accepting a human right to Internet access minimally requires guaranteeing access for everyone and protecting Internet access and use from certain objectionable interferences (e.g. surveillance, censorship, online (...)
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  22. The Ethics of Quitting Social Media.Robert Mark Simpson - 2023 - In Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    There are prima facie ethical reasons and prudential reasons for people to avoid or withdraw from social media platforms. But in response to pushes for people to quit social media, a number of authors have argued that there is something ethically questionable about quitting social media: that it involves — typically, if not necessarily — an objectionable expression of privilege on the part of the quitter. In this paper I contextualise privilege-based objections to quitting social media and explain the underlying (...)
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  23. The Democratic Metaverse: Building an Extended Reality Safe for Citizens, Workers and Consumers.Alec Stubbs, James J. Hughes, Nir Eisikovits & Jake Burley - 2023 - Ieet White Papers.
    We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new virtual world cannot consist of walled corporate fiefdoms ruled only by profitmaximization. The interests of workers, consumers and citizens in virtuality require (...)
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  24. The moral source of collective irrationality during COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.Cristina Voinea, Lavinia Marin & Constantin Vică - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology (5):949-968.
    Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the collective irrationality of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as partisanship and ideology, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories or the effectiveness of public messaging. This paper presents a complementary explanation to epistemic accounts of collective irrationality, focusing on the moral reasons underlying people’s decisions regarding vaccination. We argue that the moralization of COVID-19 risk mitigation measures contributed to the polarization of groups along moral values, which ultimately led to the emergence of collective irrational (...)
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  25. Nudging and Social Media: The Choice Architecture of Online Life.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee 2:93-114.
    This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...)
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  26. Counterspeech.Bianca Cepollaro, Maxime Lepoutre & Robert Mark Simpson - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 18 (1):e12890.
    Counterspeech is communication that tries to counteract potential harm brought about by other speech. Theoretical interest in counterspeech partly derives from a libertarian ideal – as captured in the claim that the solution to bad speech is more speech – and partly from a recognition that well-meaning attempts to counteract harm through speech can easily misfire or backfire. Here we survey recent work on the question of what makes counterspeech effective at remedying or preventing harm, in those cases where it (...)
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  27. Reclaiming Care and Privacy in the Age of Social Media.Hugh Desmond - 2022 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92:45-66.
    Social media has invaded our private, professional, and public lives. While corporations continue to portray social media as a celebration of self-expression and freedom, public opinion, by contrast, seems to have decidedly turned against social media. Yet we continue to use it just the same. What is social media, and how should we live with it? Is it the promise of a happier and more interconnected humanity, or a vehicle for toxic self-promotion? In this essay I examine the very structure (...)
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  28. Tracing app technology: an ethical review in the COVID-19 era and directions for post-COVID-19. [REVIEW]Ehsan Hajiramezanali, Shahriar Esmaeili, Kambiz Rasoulkhani, Ali Akbari, Ali Mostafavi, Amir Esmalian & Saleh Afroogh - 2022 - Ethics and Information Technology 24 (3):1-15.
    We conducted a systematic literature review on the ethical considerations of the use of contact tracing app technology, which was extensively implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid and extensive use of this technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, while benefiting the public well-being by providing information about people’s mobility and movements to control the spread of the virus, raised several ethical concerns for the post-COVID-19 era. To investigate these concerns for the post-pandemic situation and provide direction for future events, we (...)
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  29. The Ethics of Matching: Mobile and web-based dating and hook up platforms.Michal Klincewicz, Lily E. Frank & Emma Jane - 2022 - In Brian D. Earp, Clare Chambers & Lori Watson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality. Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy.
    Dating and hookup apps (DHAs) are now widely used and may be transforming our intimate relationships. The apps are beneficial in fostering intimate connections among those who are lonely, who are members of minority or marginalized groups, or who live nomadic lifestyles because of work or recreational travel. However, the wider social and relational changes that DHAs portend are merely beginning to be seriously discussed by academics (Arias et al., 2017). In this chapter, we employ concepts from the philosophy of (...)
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  30. Dewey on Facebook: Who Should Regulate Social Media?Henry Lara-Steidel - 2022 - Philosophy of Education 78 (3):53-65.
    At the time of writing, social media is rife with misinformation and disinformation, having very real effects on our political processes and on the vaccination efforts of the COVID pandemic. As the effort to pass new laws and regulations on social media companies gains momentum, concerns remain about how to balance free speech rights and even who, if anyone, should be the one to regulate social media. Drawing on Dewey’s conception of the public, I argue for the regulation of social (...)
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  31. Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making.Lavinia Marin - 2022 - Topoi 41 (2):425-437.
    This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make (...)
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  32. How to Do Things with Information Online. A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Platforms as Epistemic Environments.Lavinia Marin - 2022 - Philsophy and Technology 35 (77).
    This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify (...)
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  33. Self-trust and critical thinking online: a relational account.Lavinia Marin & Samantha Marie Copeland - 2022 - Social Epistemology.
    An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...)
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  34. Algorithmic Microaggressions.Emma McClure & Benjamin Wald - 2022 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 8 (3).
    We argue that machine learning algorithms can inflict microaggressions on members of marginalized groups and that recognizing these harms as instances of microaggressions is key to effectively addressing the problem. The concept of microaggression is also illuminated by being studied in algorithmic contexts. We contribute to the microaggression literature by expanding the category of environmental microaggressions and highlighting the unique issues of moral responsibility that arise when we focus on this category. We theorize two kinds of algorithmic microaggression, stereotyping and (...)
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  35. Deepfakes, Deep Harms.Regina Rini & Leah Cohen - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (2).
    Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...)
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  36. Promoting Vices: Designing the Web for Manipulation.Lukas Schwengerer - 2022 - In Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation. Routledge. pp. 292-310.
    This chapter discusses a problematic relation between user-friendly design and manipulation. Some specific features of the design of a website can make it a more or less potent tool for manipulation. In particular, features that can be summed up as creating a user-friendly experience are also manipulation-friendly. The ease of using a website also makes it easier to be manipulated via the website. The chapter provides an argument that this can be explained as a less intellectually virtuous engagement with websites (...)
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  37. Data and the Good?Daniel Susser - 2022 - Surveillance and Society 20 (3):297-301.
    Surveillance studies scholars and privacy scholars have each developed sophisticated, important critiques of the existing data-driven order. But too few scholars in either tradition have put forward alternative substantive conceptions of a good digital society. This, I argue, is a crucial omission. Unless we construct new “sociotechnical imaginaries,” new understandings of the goals and aspirations digital technologies should aim to achieve, the most surveillance studies and privacy scholars can hope to accomplish is a less unjust version of the technology industry’s (...)
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  38. Augmented Reality, Augmented Epistemology, and the Real-World Web.Cody Turner - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (1):1-28.
    Augmented reality (AR) technologies function to ‘augment’ normal perception by superimposing virtual objects onto an agent’s visual field. The philosophy of augmented reality is a small but growing subfield within the philosophy of technology. Existing work in this subfield includes research on the phenomenology of augmented experiences, the metaphysics of virtual objects, and different ethical issues associated with AR systems, including (but not limited to) issues of privacy, property rights, ownership, trust, and informed consent. This paper addresses some epistemological issues (...)
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  39. Disoriented and alone in the “experience machine” - On Netflix, shared world deceptions and the consequences of deepening algorithmic personalization.Maria Brincker - 2021 - SATS 22 (1):75-96.
    Most online platforms are becoming increasingly algorithmically personalized. The question is if these practices are simply satisfying users preferences or if something is lost in this process. This article focuses on how to reconcile the personalization with the importance of being able to share cultural objects - including fiction – with others. In analyzing two concrete personalization examples from the streaming giant Netflix, several tendencies are observed. One is to isolate users and sometimes entirely eliminate shared world aspects. Another tendency (...)
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  40. Online Misinformation and “Phantom Patterns”: Epistemic Exploitation in the Era of Big Data.Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (1):57-87.
    In this paper, we examine how the availability of massive quantities of data i.e., the “Big Data” phenomenon, contributes to the creation, spread, and harms of online misinformation. Specifically, we argue that a factor in the problem of online misinformation is the evolved human instinct to recognize patterns. While the pattern-recognition instinct is a crucial evolutionary adaptation, we argue that in the age of Big Data, these capacities have, unfortunately, rendered us vulnerable. Given the ways in which online media outlets (...)
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  41. A Digital Picture to Hold Us Captive? A Flusserian Interpretation of Misinformation Sharing on Social Media.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Philosophy Today 65 (3):485–504.
    In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking, sharing, and posting. Misinformation online is explained as the effect of an informational environment saturated with and shaped by techno-images in which most users act automatically under the (...)
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  42. Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):363-372.
    This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...)
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  43. Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23:79–86.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content (...)
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  44. Retweeting: its linguistic and epistemic value.Neri Marsili - 2021 - Synthese 198:10457–10483.
    This paper analyses the communicative and epistemic value of retweeting (and more generally of reposting content on social media). Against a naïve view, it argues that retweets are not acts of endorsement, motivating this diagnosis with linguistic data. Retweeting is instead modelled as a peculiar form of quotation, in which the reported content is indicated rather than reproduced. A relevance-theoretic account of the communicative import of retweeting is then developed, to spell out the complex mechanisms by which retweets achieve their (...)
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  45. Weaponized skepticism: An analysis of social media deception as applied political epistemology.Regina Rini - 2021 - In Elizabeth Edenberg & Michael Hannon (eds.), Political Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 31-48.
    Since at least 2016, many have worried that social media enables authoritarians to meddle in democratic politics. The concern is that trolls and bots amplify deceptive content. In this chapter I argue that these tactics have a more insidious anti-democratic purpose. Lies implanted in democratic discourse by authoritarians are often intended to be caught. Their primary goal is not to successfully deceive, but rather to undermine the democratic value of testimony. In well-functioning democracies, our mutual reliance on testimony also generates (...)
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  46. Democratic Obligations and Technological Threats to Legitimacy: PredPol, Cambridge Analytica, and Internet Research Agency.Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro & Adam Pham - 2021 - In Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro & Adam Pham (eds.), Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems. Cambridge University Press. pp. 163-183.
    ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Hey, Google, leave those kids alone: Against hypernudging children in the age of big data.James Smith & Tanya de Villiers-Botha - 2021 - AI and Society.
    Children continue to be overlooked as a topic of concern in discussions around the ethical use of people’s data and information. Where children are the subject of such discussions, the focus is often primarily on privacy concerns and consent relating to the use of their data. This paper highlights the unique challenges children face when it comes to online interferences with their decision-making, primarily due to their vulnerability, impressionability, the increased likelihood of disclosing personal information online, and their developmental capacities. (...)
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  48. Surveillance Capitalism: a Marx-inspired account.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2021 - Philosophy 96 (3):359-385..
    Some of the world's most powerful corporations practise what Shoshana Zuboff (2015; 2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The core of their business is harvesting, analysing and selling data about the people who use their products. In Zuboff's view, the first corporation to engage in surveillance capitalism was Google, followed by Facebook; recently, firms such as Microsoft and Amazon have pivoted towards such a model. In this paper, I suggest that Karl Marx's analysis of the relations between industrial capitalists and workers is (...)
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  49. Online Deliberation and #CivicTech: A Symposium.Weiyu Zhang, Todd Davies & Anna Przybylska - 2021 - Journal of Deliberative Democracy 17 (1):76-77.
    Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.
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  50. Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: the case of YouTube’s recommender system.Mark Alfano, Amir Ebrahimi Fard, J. Adam Carter, Peter Clutton & Colin Klein - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1):835-858.
    YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...)
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