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Posted by Miranda Marcus on

The ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ has a huge wealth of content for its audiences. One of the technology challenges we face is how to help them to find the right content for them. Recommendation systems (also referred to as β€˜recommendation engines’) are critical tools for enabling this, but they can also pose a number of significant ethical challenges such as privacy, user profiling, transparency and polarisation.

So, to ensure we enable audiences to find and enjoy the right content for them and do so in a trustworthy way, ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ research teams are collaborating with the to explore the development and use of recommendation systems in public service media.

Particular ethical issues that will be considered include:

  • Personal autonomy: There are concerns about recommendation systems nudging users of services towards a particular outcome, which may be commercially beneficial to the service but potentially harmful to the user's welfare.
  • User profiling: Predictions for suggested content may stem from assumptions about the user’s demographic information, which may, in turn, entrench societal biases and inequalities.
  • Privacy: Systems often require the collection, storage and use of large amounts of personal data.
  • Transparency and explainability: Recommendation systems, particularly those based on modern machine learning techniques, often produce decisions that are difficult to explain to lay audiences.
  • Polarisation: There are concerns about the polarising effects within societies of recommendation systems that deliver a personalised perspective of news, media and current events.

These issues will be considered specifically from the perspective of the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ and other public service media organisations. Unlike private sector firms, whose business model is motivated by shareholder interests and profit, public service organisations are beholden to the public interest.

The project aims to develop clear guidance for how the wider public sector should consider designing and implementing such systems. By undertaking a literature review and qualitative interviews with ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ experts alongside other national public broadcasters, academics and developers, we hope to:

  • Set out how public service media organisations translate their values into practical implementations of recommendations systems.
  • Develop potential governance and mitigation strategies that could minimise ethical risks while maximising social benefit.
  • Highlight future research questions and practical governance experiments to be explored in this area. The project is supported by the .

Ada's relationship with the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ is governed by a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which is available .

This post is part of the Internet Research and Future Services section

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