Work

Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: News outlets worldwide increasingly adopt user-and system-driven personalisation to individualise their news delivery.Yet, the technical implementation of news personalisation systems, in particular the one relying on algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) and tailoring individual news suggestions with the help of user data, often remains opaque.In our article, we examine how news personalisation is used by quality and popular media in three countries with different media accountability infrastructures -Brazil, the Netherlands, and Russia -and investigate how information about personalisation usage is communicated to the news readers via privacy policies.Our findings point out that news personalisation systems are predominantly treated as black boxes that indicate a significant gap between practice and theory of algorithmic transparency, in particular in the non-EU context.

Source: Internet Policy Review

DOI: 10.14763/2020.4.1504

Authors: Mariella Bastian, Mykola Makhortykh, Jaron Harambam, Max van Drunen

Institutions: University of Bern, University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven

Language: English

Topic: Ethics and Social Impacts of AI

Subfield: Safety Research

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, H2020 European Research Council