MozFest 2019 Takeaways

Dr. Little directs participants of the “Hidden Values: Embedded Values in Algorithm Design” workshop.

In October, Ethics Lab members Maggie Little, Elizabeth Edenberg, Jonathan Healey and Sydney Luken attended the Mozilla Festival 2019 in London.

MozFest is an ideas festival that draws people from all over the world who are interested in building a healthier internet. This year’s main topic was Responsible AI, and attendees included advocates, academics, and interested laypeople.

The Ethics Lab team hosted a workshop called “Hidden Values: Embedded Values in Algorithm Design,” on Sunday, October 27. 

The purpose of the workshop -- which drew more people than the room could hold -- was to explore how the values embedded in social media algorithms might lead to unintended consequences. 

“Social media sites have taken the place of the public square — in the olden days, literally the park where you stood up on a soapbox to share your views. But there’s a tendency to just cordon off into the people you agree with,” Dr. Little said. 

“The classic question that we ask them to think about is how to avoid hate speech but not impinge on free speech. How would you design an algorithm to respect free speech but tamper down violence-inciting speech? It’s not easy, but we need people to figure it out.

“The Ethics Lab is trying to encourage people to be engineers for solution,” Dr. Little said.

As participant Alan Smith of Consumer Reports attested post-workshop, “One of the things that struck me about the workshop was how [Ethics Lab] brought us along to the same conclusion: that these platforms are programming with a set of ethical inputs... just maybe not the ones that we'd choose."