Predictive Technology in Social Media

CHAPTER 9 Ethical Insights for the Social Media Age

Cristina Fernández-Rovira

Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya, Carrer de la Sagrada Família, 7, 08500 Vic, Barcelona (Spain)

Email: [e-mail]

Introduction

For more than two decades, police departments in countries such as the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland have been using predictive systems based on arrest data to determine crime hotspots in different cities. The main result of this, as pointed out by different studies (O’Neil 2017, Akpinar et al. 2021) is that the mathematical conversion of social activity into statistical data and correlations (Cardon 2018) generates geographical biases about specific places and demographics ...