The Seattle Times wrote about a recently posted preprint paper from UW iSchool PhD student Prerna Juneja and CIP faculty member and iSchool assistant professor Tanu Mitra that found that “Amazon’s search algorithm boosts books promoting false claims about vaccines over those that debunk health misinformation.” The paper, which has been peer reviewed and is scheduled to be presented at the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May, was also recently featured by VentureBeat.
Juneja and Mitra wrote in their paper:
“Several medically unverified products for coronavirus treatment, like prayer healing, herbal treatments and antiviral vitamin supplements proliferated Amazon, so much so that the company had to remove 1 million fake products after several instances of such treatments were reported by the media. The scale of the problematic content suggests that Amazon could be a great enabler of misinformation, especially health misinformation. It not only hosts problematic health-related content but its recommendation algorithms drive engagement by pushing potentially dubious health products to users of the system.”
Read the preprint paper, “Auditing E-Commerce Platforms for Algorithmically Curated Vaccine Misinformation,” available on arXiv (.pdf).
Photo above: The Amazon Spheres in downtown Seattle
