In light of recent developments, we will be increasing our presence on Bluesky and can be found there via @aiforensics.bsky.social.

💡 Silver lining: X's transparency exposed what other platforms may hide. We're calling on Instagram, TikTok, and others to match this level of disclosure.

📊 The scale is massive: These ads generated hundreds of millions of impressions across the EU, creating a system where your most personal characteristics determine what information you see. It's algorithmic discrimination at industrial scale.

🌍 DISCRIMINATORY TARGETING: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund excluded users based on: .• Ethnicity (#Blacks, #Niger) .• Sexual orientation (#gay, #lesbian) .• Faith (#Jewish, #Jews).

🏛️ Even worse: EU institutions violated their own rules. The European Commission illegally targeted citizens using political data—confirmed by the European Data Protection Supervisor after a complaint by @NOYBeu.

💊 HEALTH TARGETING: Dell Technologies targeted users with specific medication names like "Sertraline," "Diazepam," and "Gabapentine". McDonald's excluded users based on mental health terms like "suicidal" and "depressed." Your medical data = their marketing advantage.

🗳️ Political Targeting: from TotalEnergies excluding users interested in Green politicians and environmental activists to Netflix or Société Générale that excludes those interested in French far-right party.

Compared to Meta, X is more transparent in the targeting parameters used for advertisings, and such disclosure, mandated by the DSA, reveals how the platform actively enables discriminatory advertisings.

We analyzed X's Ads Repository and discovered that X's allowed widespread targeting of users over "sensitive categories" protected under EU law.

This is part of our latest investigation on X: .

Have you been targeted on X based on your sensitive characteristics? . We built so you can upload your X data and see whether advertisers targeted you based on your sensitive characteristics on X.

RT @slpng_giants_fr: 💥 Des annonceurs sur X ciblent selon l'orientation politique, syndicale, religieuse ou les préférences sexuelles, ce q….

RT @P_Bouchaud: How 𝕏 enables major brands to target your most sensitive personal data - from health conditions to political beliefs - chec….

The statement and its co-signatories can be found in its entirety here:

We also call for a wider range of considerations including: publishing the full list of risks that identified through assessment; publishing the full list of measures taken to address risks; and detail concerning the involvement of internal departments & external stakeholders.

Our shared statement first demands that VLOP’s and VLOSE’s publish detailed methodologies for their risk assessments, outlining precisely how they have been conducted, as well as their scope and the definitions that they adopt in regard to understanding systemic risks.

We recently co-signed the Centre for Democracy and Technology’s civil society statement, which calls for enhanced and meaningful transparency from VLOP and VLOSE risk assessments as a mandatory facet of the Digital Services Act.

For media inquiries, contact press@aiforensics.org.

To hear more about our thoughts on algorithmic pluralism, see our previous piece in @lemondefr, which can be found in English here:

Whilst we will still share our outputs and other important pieces of news here on X, we think it’s important to foster algorithmic pluralism wherever we can and encourage our followers to do the same.