Embedding Societal Values into Social Media Algorithms

Michael S. Bernstein, Jeffrey Hancock, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Chenyan Jia, Michelle S. Lam, Nicole Meister, Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Jeanne Tsai, Johan Ugander

Abstract: Social media influences what we see and hear, what we believe, and how we act—but artificial intelligence (AI) influences social media. By changing our social environments, AIs change our social behavior: as per Winston Churchill, “We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us.” Across billions of people on platforms from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube to TikTok, AI decides what is at the top of our feeds (Backstrom 2016; Fischer 2020), who we might connect with (Guy, Ronen, and Wilcox 2009), and what should be moderated, labeled with a warning, or outright removed (Gillespie 2018). These AI models change the social environment around us by amplifying or removing misinformation and radicalizing content (Hassan et al. 2015), by highlighting or suppressing antisocial behavior such as harassment (Lees et al. 2022), and by upranking or downranking content that might harm well-being (Burke, Cheng, and Gant 2020). How do we understand and engineer this sociotechnical ouroboros (Mansoury et al. 2020)?