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Web search engines are important online information intermediaries that are frequently used and highly trusted by the public despite multiple evidence of their outputs being subjected to inaccuracies and biases. One form of such inaccuracy,…
Conflicts of interest often arise between data sources and their users regarding how the users' information needs should be interpreted by the data source. For example, an online product search might be biased towards presenting certain…
Information availability affects people's behavior and perception of the world. Notably, people rely on search engines to satisfy their need for information. Search engines deliver results relevant to user requests usually without being or…
Abortion is a controversial topic that has long been debated in the US. With the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, access to safe and legal reproductive care is once again in the national spotlight. A key issue central…
In this work, we aim to investigate the impact of location (different countries) on bias in search results. For this, we use the search results of Google and Bing in the UK and US locations. The query set is composed of controversial…
Search engines like Google have become major sources of information for voters during election campaigns. To assess potential biases across candidates' gender and partisan identities in the algorithmic curation of candidate information, we…
Search and recommendation systems are ubiquitous and irreplaceable tools in our daily lives. Despite their critical role in selecting and ranking the most relevant information, they typically do not consider the veracity of information…
Batches of pharmaceutical are sometimes recalled from the market when a safety issue or a defect is detected in specific production runs of a drug. Such problems are usually detected when patients or healthcare providers report…
There is a growing concern that e-commerce platforms are amplifying vaccine-misinformation. To investigate, we conduct two-sets of algorithmic audits for vaccine misinformation on the search and recommendation algorithms of Amazon --…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
When interacting with information retrieval (IR) systems, users, affected by confirmation biases, tend to select search results that confirm their existing beliefs on socially significant contentious issues. To understand the judgments and…
The conspiracy theory that the US 2020 presidential election was fraudulent - the Big Lie - remained a prominent part of the media agenda months after the election. Whether and how search engines prioritized news stories that sought to…
The growing volume of online content prompts the need for adopting algorithmic systems of information curation. These systems range from web search engines to recommender systems and are integral for helping users stay informed about…
International public health policies increasingly favor mandatory immunization. If its short-term effects on vaccine coverage are well documented, there has been little consideration to its effects on public attitudes towards vaccines. In…
The scientific effort devoted to health misinformation mostly focuses on the implications of misleading vaccines and communicable disease claims with respect to public health. However, the proliferation of abortion misinformation following…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
In sponsored search, advertisement (abbreviated ad) slots are usually sold by a search engine to an advertiser through an auction mechanism in which advertisers bid on keywords. In theory, auction mechanisms have many desirable economic…
During the summer of 2018, Facebook, Google, and Twitter created policies and implemented transparent archives that include U.S. political advertisements which ran on their platforms. Through our analysis of over 1.3 million ads with…
Approximately one-third of adults search the internet for health information before visiting an emergency department (ED), with 75% encountering inaccurate content. This study examines how such searches influence patient care. We conducted…