The Markup

Illustration of a Black woman driving a car whose headlights are eyes, situated in the middle of the road surrounded by houses; there is a “Welcome to Detroit, Michigan” sign to the left of the car

Show Your WorkPremium Penalty

How We Investigated Car Insurance Loopholes in Michigan

We found that Michigan’s reforms allowed auto insurers to charge higher rates in Black neighborhoods

July 18, 2024 06:15 ET

Illustration of cascading website browsers for sites like Wikipedia, Google, Nasa, It Gets Better and The Trevor Project; the browser windows have an inverted halftone filter that obscures the site's content

Show Your WorkDigital Book Banning

How We Investigated Web Censorship in Schools

We requested records from 26 districts in 11 states. Ten turned us down on cybersecurity grounds.

April 13, 2024 06:00 ET

Monochromatic illustration of the side profiles of four people: a bearded person wearing glasses, a person with curly hair, a person wearing a hijab, and a person with short hair; the person wearing a hijab is drawn with a white dotted outline and is transparent, unlike the other three people.

Show Your WorkAutomated Censorship

How We Investigated Shadowbanning on Instagram

We found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, suppressed hashtags, and limited users’ ability to appeal moderation decisions

February 25, 2024 08:00 ET

Portrait photograph of Lee Yaiva, an Indigenous man wearing a blue suit and sporting a braided ponytail; his hands are clasped together

Show Your WorkOrgan Failure

How We Investigated Racial Disparities in Liver Transplants

We found Native Americans were listed for a transplant significantly less often than other racial groups compared with their number of deaths from liver disease

February 8, 2024 06:00 ET

Digital illustration of three people peeking behind blinds, with suspicion and fear in their eyes.

Show Your WorkNeighborhood Watch

How We Investigated Ring's Crime Alert System for Police Departments

In Los Angeles, residents in Whiter and wealthier areas post more often on Neighbors, but do not report a higher crime rate

October 11, 2023 08:00 ET

Digital illustration of a grid overlaid on top of a closeup grainy photograph of two police officers holding their hands behind their back. One police officer’s gun is visible in the photo.

Show Your WorkPrediction: Bias

How We Assessed the Accuracy of Predictive Policing Software

We found that Geolitica’s crime prediction algorithm had a success rate of less than 1% in Plainfield, New Jersey

October 2, 2023 10:00 ET

Illustration of a person hunched over a hospital bed with their back facing towards the viewer. There is a clock and X-ray of a liver in the background.

Show Your WorkOrgan Failure

How We Investigated UNOS’s Liver Allocation Policy

We found that new requirements led to plummeting transplants in some poorer states while New York and California saw big gains

March 21, 2023 14:00 ET

Photo illustration of a hand reaching out for help. The left half of it has a darker skin tone, while the right half has a whiter skin tone. In the background are torn photos of homeless encampments and tents, as well as numbers and abstract shapes.

Show Your Work

How We Investigated L.A.’s Homelessness Scoring System

Year after year, White people have been rated highly “vulnerable” more often than Black people

February 28, 2023 08:00 ET

An illustration of two houses, one receiving many dashed lines and the other receiving a single line, against an abstract street grid.

Show Your WorkStill Loading

How We Uncovered Disparities in Internet Deals

AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered the worst deals to lower-income areas and communities of color across the country—while charging the same for faster speeds in higher-income and Whiter areas

October 19, 2022 06:51 ET

Show Your WorkPixel Hunt

How We Built a Meta Pixel Inspector

The first large-scale, crowdsourced study that monitors how Meta tracks people across the internet

April 28, 2022 08:00 ET