Digitalisation for the Common Good

Twentyforty is an experiment that aims to explore new ways of translating scientific knowledge into storytelling. Only in this way can we achieve to put its social implications up for debate and make its findings useful for the construction of tomorrow's world.

In this article Prof. Dr. Riika Koulo discusses the use of algorithmic decision making (ADM) applications to automate legal decision-making processes from the perspective of the European Union (EU) policy on trusted artificial intelligence (AI).

The contributions in this volume bring together programmatic positions that present and discuss central aspects and perspectives of research on digitisation in the social sciences. These include research fields from the fields of participation and party research, governance of digitisation, methodological reflections on computational social science and the analysis of democracy and the public sphere under the conditions of digitisation.

This white paper sets out to explain how and why audits, a specific type of transparency measure, should be mandated by law within the four clear principles of independence, access, publicity, and resources. We go on to unpack the types of transparency, and then contextualize audits in this framework while also describing risks and benefits. The white paper concludes with the explanation of the four principles, as they are derived from the previous sections.

Dominant social media platforms are increasingly using automation and AI to find and remove problematic content. While this helps stop some of the worst content from spreading on the Internet, algorithmic content moderation can delete content that should not be deleted (overblocking) or discriminate against minorities. Crucially, there is very little transparency from platforms about how algorithmic content moderation works, how accurate its technologies are believed to be, and how much content they remove, especially without human review.

This policy brief was developed with the contributions of an interdisciplinary team of experts from the fields of law, political science, sociology, and engineering. It aims to inform legislators and policymakers of the risks posed by the proliferation of algorithmic content moderation and the need for a more proactive regulatory approach by the states towards the governance of content moderation systems that are deployed by online platforms providing digital infrastructure for public discourse. It highlights an information gap that prevents regulators from evaluating the impact of content moderation on freedom of expression and an accountability gap that arises through the absence of effective redress mechanisms by which users are able to challenge violations of freedom of expression.