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TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook Want to Appear Trustworthy but Don't Be Fooled


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Will the quest for transparency always be a game of cat and mouse between major tech platforms and under-resourced, independent researchers?

Major tech platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok have good reasons to withhold more complete forms of transparency. More and more, they rely on AI systems to recommend and curate content, and it's clear that these systems can have negative consequences, such as misinforming voters, radicalizing the vulnerable, and polarizing large portions of the country.

As Big Technology companies exert ever more influence over our individual and collective lives, visibility into what they are doing and how they operate is more important than ever. We can't afford to let transparency become a meaningless tagline—it's one of the few levers for change in the public interest that we have left.

From The New York Times
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