4,786 research outputs found
The Philosophy of Online Manipulation
Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online?
This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user friendly design, microtargeting, default settings, gamification, and real time profiling. The authors in this volume address four broad and interconnected themes:
What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined?
Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life and if so, how?
What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation?
What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation?
This volume brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. The Philosophy of Online Manipulation will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation
Exploring personality-targeted UI design in online social participation systems
We present a theoretical foundation and empirical findings demonstrating the effectiveness of personality-targeted design. Much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on his specific genetic profile, we argue that theory-driven, personality-targeted UI design can be more effective than design applied to the entire population. The empirical exploration focused on two settings, two populations and two personality traits: Study 1 shows that users' extroversion level moderates the relationship between the UI cue of audience size and users' contribution. Study 2 demonstrates that the effectiveness of social anchors in encouraging online contributions depends on users' level of emotional stability. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the potential and robustness of the interactionist approach to UI design. The findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of social systems, by providing guidelines to targeted design that can increase online participation. Copyright © 2013 ACM
Recommender systems and their ethical challenges
This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system
Encouraging password manager adoption by meeting adopter self-determination needs
Password managers are a potential solution to the password conundrum, but adoption is paltry. We investigated the impact of a recommender application that harnessed the tenets of self-determination theory to encourage adoption of password managers. This theory argues that meeting a person's autonomy, relatedness and competence needs will make them more likely to act. To test the power of meeting these needs, we conducted a factorial experiment, in the wild. We satisfied each of the three self determination factors, and all individual combinations thereof, and observed short-term adoption of password managers. The Android recommender application was used by 470 participants, who were randomly assigned to one of the experimental or control conditions. Our analysis revealed that when all self-determination factors were satisfied, adoption was highest, while meeting only the autonomy or relatedness needs individually significantly improved the likelihood of adoption
Improving information filtering via network manipulation
Recommender system is a very promising way to address the problem of
overabundant information for online users. Though the information filtering for
the online commercial systems received much attention recently, almost all of
the previous works are dedicated to design new algorithms and consider the
user-item bipartite networks as given and constant information. However, many
problems for recommender systems such as the cold-start problem (i.e. low
recommendation accuracy for the small degree items) are actually due to the
limitation of the underlying user-item bipartite networks. In this letter, we
propose a strategy to enhance the performance of the already existing
recommendation algorithms by directly manipulating the user-item bipartite
networks, namely adding some virtual connections to the networks. Numerical
analyses on two benchmark data sets, MovieLens and Netflix, show that our
method can remarkably improve the recommendation performance. Specifically, it
not only improve the recommendations accuracy (especially for the small degree
items), but also help the recommender systems generate more diverse and novel
recommendations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
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