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Christchurch Call
Background information
What is the Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes?
New Zealand, the USA, Twitter, and Microsoft are working under the Christchurch Call, partnering with OpenMined, to develop new software tools that will help facilitate more independent research on the impacts of user interactions with algorithmic systems.
What will the Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes do?
As the first project under this initiative, the partners will work together to build and test a set of privacy enhancing technologies. Once tested, replicated, and validated, these technologies could form the basis for an infrastructure to support independent study of impacts of algorithms and their interactions with users, including across multiple platforms and types of platforms, and could dramatically lower the barriers to doing this work.
If successful, these technologies will be made available to the Christchurch Call Community and could help support independent research that fulfils our collective Call Commitments, potentially opening up wider applications and new fields of responsible AI research beyond the Call itself.
How does this respond to the Christchurch Call Commitments?
Christchurch Call Supporters have committed to working together and with Civil Society to understand the outcomes of algorithms and other processes that may drive users towards terrorist and violent extremist content, to make changes where this occurs, and to develop effective interventions based on information sharing.
The technologies developed with the help of this initiative should help to overcome some of the barriers identified through our existing work and enable information exchanges among civil society, industry and government, to make it possible to realise those commitments.
Why is it needed?
At the moment it is costly and administratively complex for online service providers to provide access to independent researchers to study impacts on users, while complying with ethical and regulatory obligations. Current secure access programmes often entail significant costs and time from researchers and firms alike. That greatly reduces the possible scale and breadth of external studies of the sort needed to understand the impacts of algorithmic systems. That means independent research typically only studies user impacts on a single platform rather than across a broader demographic (i.e. across multiple platforms).
This new technology is intended to reduce the cost and complexity of access for independent researchers, and allow a multitude of different studies, for instance looking at how social issues manifest online, the impacts of user interactions on artificial intelligence, and the effectiveness of different actions intended to promote a safer online environment. It could also enable studies on a range of other algorithmic and responsible AI topics.
For example, Governments should not require access to private user data from online platforms. However they can benefit from insights obtained by independent researchers that can help inform policy. Civil Society has an interest, among other things, in ensuring privacy is preserved, and that human rights outcomes are effectively assessed and acted upon. These privacy enhancing technologies could help facilitate and scale access to allow important insights without governments or other parties requiring access to the base data.
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https://www.christchurchcall.com/media-and-resources/news-and-updates/christchurch-call-initiative-on-algorithmic-outcomes/