Bio: Ari Ezra Waldman is CITP’s 2019-20 Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information Technology Policy. Ari is a professor of law and the founding director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at New York Law School. He is also an affiliate fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Ari researches how law and technology mediate social life, with particular focus on privacy, technology design, online speech, and the experiences of marginalized populations. He has won numerous…

Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the potential to influence product consumption, individuals’ perceptions of the world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations; this creates a pernicious feedback loop. We demonstrate how using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing utility.

The talk will focus on how Facebook develops, implements, and enforces its policies on what content and behavior is not allowed on the platform and how research informs these processes. This will include details on the internal policy development processes, how product and operations teams work to build the machine and human review processes, as well as details on the different ways in which both theoretic and empirical social science research inform these efforts. The talk will conclude with Facebook’s approach to collaboration with external researchers.