Ethics & Technology Indices (beta graphs)

The USC Neely Center Ethics and Technology Indices were born out of the observation that the benefits and harms that users experience on technology platforms are often subjective in nature. While it is certainly useful to know whether a person has seen content that violates a platform's policy, it is also useful to know whether a user has experienced content that they themselves experienced negatively or positively. Not everything that users experience negatively or positively is the fault of technology platforms, but it is useful to at least consider why some platforms consistently have more or fewer positive and negative experiences than other platforms, whether it be differences in users, norms, use cases or platform design. We also track outcomes related to well-being and social cohesion that are often tied to technology usage in societal discourse. In partnership with USC's Understanding America Study, we sample 1500-3000 representative US Households on a quarterly basis to understand their experiences with AI, Mixed Reality, and Online Communications Platforms, including Social Media. While we publish our main results on our substack, we also wanted to experiment with daily graphs that allow us to track the responses of the trailing 14 days' participants. We invite 46-47 people each day and get a response rate of approximately 65% which yields a sample of slightly over 400 people for each data point. Results are weighted according to our invited participants, while our final results are weighted based on responding participants, so you may see some changes from these results to our published data. As well, some sample sizes will be relatively small, given that experience results are based on the percentage of users who use a given platform, so please keep that in mind in looking at this data. Some changes may be random variation within smaller samples, rather than actual differences. Click the below links to see graphs for: Mixed Reality - Social Cohesion - Social Media