Program areas at The Markup
Editorial & graphics - in 2022, The Markup published investigations and reports that revealed inequities and harm caused by technology. Over The course of The year, we published 105 articles a combination of in-depth, data-backed investigations, tools, and explanatory articles that equipped our audience with practical knowledge.our work had a significant impact. The white house's blueprint for an ai bill of rights, which recognizes The harm algorithms have inflicted on students, workers, tenants, and citizens, used three of The Markup's investigations to help inform its recommendations. Our work on a data privacy breach by online tax filers has become The bedrock of a series of investigations launched by The us senate. And to date, 34 class action lawsuits have been filed against hospitals that violated hipaa by sending patient data to meta.in addition to our reporting work, we continued to develop new digital tools. Some of 2022's most impactful work arose from our pixel hunt series, The first large-scale crowdsourced study of The meta pixel, a snippet of computer code embedded in a website and used for tracking you around The web. It's not just about serving you ads for shoes you might like; even websites processing highly sensitive information can have The pixel installed. Through pixel hunt, we monitor The pervasiveness of The pixel, The kind of information it collects, how it's impacting communities, and what everyone can do to protect their data.
Audience - in 2022, we focused our audience work on growing The Markup's overall brand impact. Our work was republished across other News networks 95 times and localized by other newsrooms 18 times. We continue to reach our readers where it counts: this year alone, 7.7 million people used our blacklight tool and our website experienced a staggering rise in traffic: a 48% year-over-year increase in page views. This year, our most viewed stories were facebook is receiving sensitive medical information from hospital websites and who is collecting data from your car?. We were also recognized by leaders in our industry. We won 22 industry awards, including sabew, sigma, loeb, edward r. murrow, susan crown exchange, online journalism, and deadline club.
Product & technology - in 2022, The Markup's product and tech team primarily focused on building tools and programs that empowered others through data and information. Most notably, we assisted with The building of a meta pixel inspector, which was used for several of our major investigations this year. The meta pixel is a snippet of computer code embedded in a website and through our pixel hunt investigations, we were able to use that tool to monitor The pervasiveness of The pixel, The kind of information it collects, and how it's impacting communities. In addition, we built and released smol links, our link shortener that maintains user privacy. We also conducted a large-scale restructuring of our website to better align with our organization's mission.