Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2020
Journal Internet Policy Review
Volume | Issue number 9 | 4
Number of pages 34
Organisations
  • Faculty of Law (FdR) - Institute for Information Law (IViR)
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.

Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1504
Other links https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85093952308
Downloads
policyreview-2020-4-1504 (Final published version)
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