arXiv subjects

Tobias Rohrbach

Publications and source records attributed to Tobias Rohrbach.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Invisible in Search? Auditing Aesthetic Bias in the Visual Representation of Holocaust Victims on Google

Information retrieval systems, such as search engines, increasingly shape the representation of the past and present states of social reality. Despite their importance, these systems face challenges in dealing with the ethical aspects of representation due to various forms of bias, including aesthetic bias that perpetuates hegemonic patterns of representation. While most research on aesthetic bias has examined it in the context of current societal issues, it is also crucial for historical representation, particularly of sensitive subjects such as historical atrocities. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative audit of the visual representation of Holocaust victims on Google. We find that Google tends to propagate a male-dominated representation of Holocaust victims with an emphasis on atrocity context, risking rendering invisible gender-specific suffering and decreasing potential for nurturing empathy. We also observe a variation in representation across geographic locations, suggesting that search algorithms may produce their own aesthetic of victimhood.

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arXiv2025

Campaigning through the lens of Google: A large-scale algorithm audit of Google searches in the run-up to the Swiss Federal Elections 2023

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 conducted a large-scale algorithm audit analyzing Google's selection and ranking of information about candidates for the 2023 Swiss Federal Elections, three and one week before the election day. Results indicate that text searches prioritize media sources in search output but less so for women politicians. Image searches revealed a tendency to reinforce stereotypes about women candidates, marked by a disproportionate focus on stereotypically pleasant emotions for women, particularly among right-leaning candidates. Crucially, we find that patterns of candidates' representation in Google text and image searches are predictive of their electoral performance.

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arXiv2024

A Matter of Mindset? Features and Processes of Newsroom-based Corporate Communication in Times of Artificial Intelligence

Many companies adopt the corporate newsroom model to streamline their corporate communication. This article addresses why and how corporate newsrooms transform corporate communication following the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It draws on original data from 13 semi-structured interviews with executive communication experts in large Swiss companies which use corporate newsrooms. Interviews show that corporate newsrooms serve as an organisational (rather than spatial) coordination body for topic-oriented and agile corporate communication. To enable their functionality, it is crucial to find the right balance between optimising and stabilising communication structures. Newsrooms actively adopt AI both to facilitate routine tasks and enable more innovative applications, such as living data archives and channel translations. Interviews also highlight an urgent need for AI regulation for corporate communication. The article's findings provide important insights into the practical challenges and coping strategies for establishing and managing corporate newsrooms and how newsrooms can be transformed by AI.

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arXiv2024

Finding the white male: The prevalence and consequences of algorithmic gender and race bias in political Google searches

Search engines like Google have become major information gatekeepers that use artificial intelligence (AI) to determine who and what voters find when searching for political information. This article proposes and tests a framework of algorithmic representation of minoritized groups in a series of four studies. First, two algorithm audits of political image searches delineate how search engines reflect and uphold structural inequalities by under- and misrepresenting women and non-white politicians. Second, two online experiments show that these biases in algorithmic representation in turn distort perceptions of the political reality and actively reinforce a white and masculinized view of politics. Together, the results have substantive implications for the scientific understanding of how AI technology amplifies biases in political perceptions and decision-making. The article contributes to ongoing public debates and cross-disciplinary research on algorithmic fairness and injustice.

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