Incident #139·Misinformation

Amazon’s Search and Recommendation Algorithms Found by Auditors to Have Boosted Products That Contained Vaccine Misinformation

January 21, 20212 reportsView on AIID

Description

Evidence of the "filter-bubble effect" were found by vaccine-misinformation researchers in Amazon's recommendations, where its algorithms presented users who performed actions on misinformative products with more misinfomative products.

Actors

Alleged Deployers

amazon

Alleged Developers

amazon

Harmed Parties

amazon-customers

Classification

Risk Domain

Misinformation

Risk Subdomain

3.1. False or misleading information

MIT Risk Profile

AIUnintentionalPost-deployment

Source

Databaseaiid

LicenseCC BY-SA 4.0

View on AIID

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Research Papers on This Topic

Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature

450 citationsOct 2023

Why Language Models Hallucinate

371 citationsSep 2025

CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images

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Degenerate Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems

265 citationsFeb 2019

Source Reports(2 total)

Amazon algorithms boost vaccine misinformation, says study

iol.co.za· Jan 2021

Auditing E-Commerce Platforms for Algorithmically Curated Vaccine Misinformation

arxiv.org· Jan 2021