Citizen Browser
In Georgia, Facebook’s Changes Brought Back a Partisan News Feed
Ahead of crucial senate runoffs, Facebook reversed its political ad ban, and the impact was visible on users’ feeds
Surya Mattu
Senior Data Engineer and Investigative Data Journalist
An engineer by training, Surya built tools and gathered data to tell stories about how algorithmic systems perpetuate systemic biases and inequalities in society. He left The Markup in August 2022.
Before The Markup, Surya was the data reporter at Gizmodo’s Special Projects Desk and a contributing researcher at ProPublica. He has also worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, Data & Society, and the MIT Media Lab.
At ProPublica, he was part of the team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for the series “Machine Bias.” At Gizmodo, “The House that Spied on Me” won the National Press Foundation’s Technology in Journalism award and was also made into a TED talk.
Surya’s OpenPGP key fingerprint is 1710 BE3C B4AF 40A8 FA9F 20CE 9B98 0BE8 CCA5 ED64.
The BreakdownBlacklight
I Scanned My Favorite Social Media Site on Blacklight and It Came Up Pretty Clean. What’s Going On?
Ain't no tracking like first-party tracking ’cause first-party tracking don’t stop
Show Your WorkBlacklight
How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector
Blacklight catalogs the many ways any website tracks visitors: from cookies to capturing every user keystroke and mouse movement
Blacklight
The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website
Trackers piggybacking on website tools leave some site operators in the dark about who is watching or what marketers do with the data
Show Your WorkLocked Out
How We Investigated the Tenant Screening Industry
Public records, interviews, and months of searching and reading court records helped us uncover how automated screenings come up short
Locked Out
Access Denied: Faulty Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters
Computer algorithms that scan everything from terror watch lists to eviction records spit out flawed tenant screening reports. And almost nobody is watching
Google the Giant
Swinging the Vote?
Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Examined Gmail's Treatment of Political Emails
We conducted an experiment with a new email address to try to figure out how Gmail's sorting algorithm worked without user input
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