Case study

STS-UY 2144 – Ethics & Technology

Essay #1: Take An Ethical Perspective

Due October 21st, 2022 (5PM ET)

CASE: AI Social Media Content Moderation (Green 2018)

A social media company is having trouble with political actors manipulating the flow of information on its platform. Specifically, certain right wing political organizations are producing tens or hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to promote discriminatory propaganda by swamping user’s social media feeds to bury any news containing ideas that does not align with the government’s perspective.

The social media company is attempting to address these problems by using machine learning to determine which accounts are fake, based on their activity patterns, but the right-wing political organizations are responding with their own machine learning to better hide those patterns & impersonate “real users”. For every batch of fake accounts deactivated, just as many seem to pop up again.

Furthermore, the machine learning algorithms are imperfect, & balancing false-positives with false-negatives can lead to deactivating real people’s accounts, leading to anger, frustration, & bad publicity for the social media company. On the other hand, scaling back to avoid false positives leads to more fake accounts slipping through.

ESSAY QUESTIONS:

(A) Identify three ethical issues that any designers/developers involved in this project need to address. Explain your reasoning as to how each identified issue is of ethical concern using at least one of the five ethical perspectives we’ve learned in class.

(B) Given the ethical issues that you have identified, which one would you prioritize, & why? (C) How might this company’s efforts be evaluated by the ethical theories/perspectives

(utilitarian, duty, virtue, justice, & care) we’ve learned in class?

FORMATTING: Overall, your essay answers should be no more than 4-5 pages double spaced (~1,000- 1,250 words) total (excluding the citations/references page(s)). The font should be Times New Roman (12-point) & with normal margins (1”). Cite your sources & follow the STS-UY 2144 citation style guide.

TIPS & HINTS: Ethics, or moral philosophy, is about thinking through issues of right & wrong. Deciphering what is right from what is wrong is not a simple matter addressed by facts alone nor is it a science. Instead, science & facts can be utilized to assist us in understanding the morally right course of action given the situation. Facts alone do not make a sound ethical argument & values vary depending on the circumstances (e.g., histories, cultures, when, where & etc.). The aim is to assess the situation, present your answer(s) & analytically demonstrate your answer(s) utilizing what you’ve learned.