Incident 117: TikTok's "Suggested Accounts" Algorithm Allegedly Reinforced Racial Bias through Feedback Loops

Description: TikTok's "Suggested Accounts" recommendations allegedly reinforced racial bias despite not basing recommendations on race or creators' profile photo.

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Alleged: TikTok developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed TikTok users and TikTok content creators.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
117
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2020-02-24
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.