Incident 139: Amazon’s Search and Recommendation Algorithms Found by Auditors to Have Boosted Products That Contained Vaccine Misinformation

Description: Evidence of the "filter-bubble effect" were found by vaccine-misinformation researchers in Amazon's recommendations, where its algorithms presented users who performed actions on misinformative products with more misinfomative products.

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Alleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Amazon Customers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
139
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2021-01-21
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
CSETv1, GMF, MIT

CSETv1 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Incident Number

139

Special Interest Intangible Harm

yes

Date of Incident Year

2021

Date of Incident Month

01

Date of Incident Day

21

Estimated Date

Yes

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

3.2. Pollution of information ecosystem and loss of consensus reality

Risk Domain

  1. Misinformation

Entity

AI

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Unintentional

Auditing E-Commerce Platforms for Algorithmically Curated Vaccine Misinformation
arxiv.org · 2021

Abstract: There is a growing concern that e-commerce platforms are amplifying vaccine-misinformation. To investigate, we conduct two-sets of algorithmic audits for vaccine misinformation on the search and recommendation algorithms of Amazon…

Amazon algorithms boost vaccine misinformation, says study
iol.co.za · 2021

New York - Amid growing concern that e-commerce platforms are amplifying vaccine-misinformation, a new study by researchers at University of Washington has found that Amazon hosts a large number of misinformative products belonging to categ…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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