The Information Futures Lab convened policymakers, journalists, and academic researchers to propose a comprehensive standard for defining social media transparency, in collaboration with partners at the Algorithmic Transparency Institute.
There is widespread and growing demand for greater transparency from the online platforms and social media companies that host and mediate so much of our civic discourse. Regulations to address platform transparency have either been passed or are in development in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. However these efforts are limited by the absence of both a broadly accepted definition of “transparency,” and a comprehensive understanding of the current state of transparency across platforms of interest, which themselves measure it in different and often opaque ways.
To develop the detailed and standardized definition of platform transparency necessary to formulate policies that effectively hold platforms accountable and protect the public from harm, participants identified key datastreams and evaluated critical questions about risks and use cases. Based on this work a transparency standard could be used to gather and publish data about each platform and track changes over time.
This workshop, which took place from September 22-23, was the inaugural event of IFL’s Sandbox Series — sprint projects that bring together experts to design practical, cross-disciplinary solutions to information problems.