In early 2015, Nicholas Diakopoulos’s paper “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes” sparked a debate in a small but international community of journalists, focusing on the question how journalists can contribute to the growing field of investigating automated decision making (ADM) systems and holding them accountable to democratic control. This started the process of a group of four people, consisting of a journalist, a data journalist, a data scientist and a philosopher, thinking about what kind of means were needed to increase public attention for this issue in Europe. It led to the creation of AlgorithmWatch, a watchdog and advocacy initiative based in Berlin.

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