Using value sensitive design to obtain transparency requirements that reduce threats of political microtargeting in the EU
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2023-01-27
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en
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The increased impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in our society comes with societal
risks. These risks appear for instance in elections, where AI is used in the form of
political microtargeting (PMT). PMT allows political campaigns to make use of precise
personalized political messages that are fitted to a targeted audience. Risks related to
a lack of transparency of PMT include manipulation of voters, a lack of autonomy of
targeted individuals and a lack of accountability of social media platforms. This thesis
attempts to reduce transparency risks of political microtargeting in the European Union
(EU) by taking the value of transparency into account in AI system design. This is
done with value sensitive design (VSD), which results in design requirements for political
microtargeting. Eight design requirements are obtained to make political microtargeting
more transparent, including political ad profiles for users of social media platforms, an
increased amount of variables for ad libraries as published by social media platforms and
disclaimers for political advertisements. Unfortunately, these design requirements are far
from all necessary steps to make PMT ethically justified and the absence of a prototype
with these design requirements makes it difficult to justify their usefulness. Nevertheless,
the creation of these eight design requirements can be considered a first step to elucidate
all necessary requirements. To better address ethical problems related to PMT or AI in
general, I emphasize the need of an universal method for reducing ethical issues in the
field of AI.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen