Safeguarding the Journalistic DNA: Attitudes towards the Role of Professional Values in Algorithmic News Recommender Designs

In contrast to the extensive debate on the influence of algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) on individual news diets, the interaction between such systems and journalistic norms and missions remain under-studied. The change in the relationship between journalists and the audience caused by the transition to personalized news delivery has profound consequences for the understanding of what journalism should be. To investigate how media practitioners perceive the impact of ANRs on their professional norms and media organizations’ missions, and how these norms and missions can be integrated into ANR design, this article looks at two quality newspapers from the Netherlands and Switzerland. Using an interview-based approach conducted with practitioners in different departments (e.g. journalists, data scientists, and product managers), it explores how ANRs interact with organization-centred and audience-centred journalistic values. The paper’s findings indicate a varying degree of prominence for specific values between individual practitioners in the context of their perception of ANRs. At the same time, the paper also reveals that some organization-centred (e.g. transparency) and most audience-centred (e.g. usability) values are viewed as prerequisites for successful ANR design by practitioners with different professional backgrounds

Talking with and about Politicians on Twitter: An Analysis of Tweets Containing @-mentions of Candidates in the Brazilian Presidential Elections

While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion.While Twitter has become an increasingly important platform for public opinion formation, little is known about its use in recent Latin American election campaigns. We therefore investigate the case of the presidential elections in Brazil in October 2014, in order to analyze communication structures in actual and para-social interactions with presidential candidates. In particular, while Twitter makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their opinion online, it is maybe even more important that they can also address and communicate with persons who would otherwise not be reachable at all. Politicians are probably the most important group in this regard. Based on N = 1,891,657 tweets containing an @mention of a candidate in the Brazilian elections of 2014, we investigate which actual or para-social interactions with the candidates take place. Furthermore, because framing literature suggests that all actors involved in a discussion on social media will try to highlight specific aspects and interpretations of issues and events, we used techniques of co-word analysis to investigate the ways in which the main candidates were framed by the Twitter users. The results give insight into the deliberative potential of Twitter: they show how the candidates are presented to the social media community and thus how this presentation may be reflected in public opinion

Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types

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

Beyond Optimizing for Clicks: Incorporating Editorial Values in News Recommendation

With the uptake of algorithmic personalization in the news domain, news organizations increasingly trust automated systems with previously considered editorial responsibilities, e.g., prioritizing news to readers. In this paper we study an automated news recommender system in the context of a news organization's editorial values. We conduct and present two online studies with a news recommender system, which span one and a half months and involve over 1,200 users. In our first study we explore how our news recommender steers reading behavior in the context of editorial values such as serendipity, dynamism, diversity, and coverage. Next, we present an intervention study where we extend our news recommender to steer our readers to more dynamic reading behavior. We find that (i) our recommender system yields more diverse reading behavior and yields a higher coverage of articles compared to non-personalized editorial rankings, and (ii) we can successfully incorporate dynamism in our recommender system as a re-ranking method, effectively steering our readers to more dynamic articles without hurting our recommender system's accuracy.Comment: To appear in UMAP 202

Perspektivwechsel: Migrationsberichterstattung in ausgewählten afrikanischen Ländern und Deutschland aus Migrant*innensicht

Spätestens seit dem Jahr 2015 sind Migration und Zuwanderung fester Gegenstand politischer Debatten in Deutschland. Verschiedene kommunikationswissenschaftliche Studien widmen sich daher der medialen Berichterstattung zu diesen Themen und untersuchen, wie diese auf die Wahrnehmung von Migranten innerhalb der deutschen Bevölkerung wirkt (z.B. Arlt & Wolling, 2017). In Abgrenzung dazu widmet sich die hier vorliegende Studie der Frage, wie Migranten selbst die Migrationsberichterstattung rezipieren, wie sie diese wahrnehmen und wie diese persönliche Migrations- und Integrationshandlungen prägt. Dazu wurden zwei Fokusgruppendiskussionen mit Migranten aus Subsahara-Afrika geführt. Diskutiert wurden sowohl die Rezeption und Bewertung der Migrationsberichterstattung im Herkunftsland als auch in Deutschland. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das Thema Migration kaum Gegenstand der in den Herkunftsländern rezipierten Berichterstattung war, weshalb persönliche Migrationsentscheidungen vor allem durch interpersonale Kommunikation beeinflusst wurden. Die Migrationsberichterstattung in Deutschland nahmen die afrikanischen Teilnehmer als zu einseitig und zu reduziert auf die Subthemen Armut und Krieg wahr.Since 2015, migration and immigration have been relevant topics of political debate in Germany. Therefore, various communication studies researched the media reporting on these issues and examined how it affects the perception of migrants within the German population (e.g. Arlt & Wolling, 2017). In distinction to this, the present study addresses the question of how migrants themselves receive migration reporting, how they perceive it, and how it shapes their personal migration and integration actions. We conducted two focus group discussions with migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. The participants discussed both the reception and evaluation of migration reporting in their country of origin and in Germany. The results show that the topic of migration was hardly reported in the countries of origin, which is why personal migration decisions were more influenced by interpersonal communication. In Germany, the African participants perceive media reports about migration issues as too one-sided and as reduced to the sub-themes of poverty and war

Overcoming polarization with chatbot news? Investigating the impact of news content containing opposing views on agreement and credibility

Chatbots are a burgeoning opportunity for news media outlets to disseminate their content in a conversational way, and create an engaging experience around it. Since chatbots are social and interactive technologies, they might be effective tools to lower the threshold of engaging with news content containing opposing views. In an experiment, we test this idea by investigating whether people are more likely to accept a news article containing conflicting views when it is delivered by a chatbot, as compared with the same article on a news website. The results indicated that people agreed more to a counter-attitudinal news article when it was delivered by a news chatbot (compared with the website article). In addition, users also perceived this chatbot article as more credible. The underlying process for this effect was that people attributed human-like characteristics to the chatbot on an implicit level (i.e., perceived mindless anthropomorphism). These results are discussed in the light of their potential contribution to an informed public discourse and a decrease in polarization in our society

Personalizing the war: Perspectives for the adoption of news recommendation algorithms in the media coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine

The use of algorithmically tailored individual news feeds is increasingly viewed as an important strategy for accommodating consumers’ information needs by legacy media. However, growing personalization of news distribution also raises normative concerns about the societal function of legacy media, in particular when dealing with personalization of traumatic and polarizing content. To extend the discussion of these concerns beyond the current focus on the role of news personalization in Western democracies, this article offers a conceptual assessment of perspectives for adopting personalization for conflict coverage in Ukraine and Russia, where media systems enjoy a lesser degree of press freedom. Using the coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine as a case study, the article offers a conceptual framework for assessing the impact of personalization on the distribution of conflict-related news in a non-Western context

The neutral point of view and the black hole of Auschwitz: Crowdsourcing the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia

In this paper, we discuss challenges and opportunities arising from the use of online platforms for collaborative history-writing about the Holocaust. The increasing use of digital media for remediating the past has attracted significant scholarly attention in the recent years (see, for instance, Garde-Hansen, Hosking and Reading (2009) and Hoskins (2016)); yet, the long-term consequences of digitalization of historical events, in particular the ones of highly traumatic nature, remain unclear. By enabling dynamic interactions in the transnational online environment, digital platforms can encourage the dialogue leading to the formation of more inclusive views on the past (Jones and Gibson 2012); however, the same platforms often facilitate the distribution of historical hoaxes and conspiracy theories increasing societal polarization and supporting populist claims (Harambam 2017). An illustrative example of these complex interactions between collective remembrance of past traumas and digital technologies is Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. Built upon the neutral point of view (NPOV) principle, which encourages fair and unbiased representation of the encyclopedia’s subjects, Wikipedia offers a unique transnational space for collective history-writing (Dounaevsky 2013). Yet, the platform’s idealistic aspiration towards representing the troubled past in a neutral way is often undermined by disagreements between its authors. Consequently, instead of serving as a cross-cultural forum for negotiating the past traumas, Wikipedia often turns into a memory battlefield used by individual actors for promoting their preferred historical narratives (Rogers and Sendijarevic 2012). So far, only a few studies (Pfanzelter 2015; Makhortykh 2018) discuss the role of Wikipedia in the context of the Holocaust memorialization; yet, all of them focus on the platform's use for representing separate episodes of the Holocaust. In our talk, we focus on the broader consequences of the audience turn for the Holocaust studies and ask if crowdsourcing of the Holocaust history on Wikipedia can encourage the transnational dialogue about the traumatic past or, instead, create additional obstacles for it by promoting hoaxes. Specifically, we analyze how the history-writing about the Holocaust on Wikipedia is influenced by the amalgamation of cultural practices, individual agendas and platform policies and to what degree the differences in historical paradigms between Eastern and Western Europe are projected on Wikipedia. We implement our analysis in two stages: first, we extract data about semantic relations between articles about the Holocaust and use network analysis to compare how these relations vary between Eastern (i.e. Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Belorussian) and Western European (i.e. English, German, and Dutch) Wikipedia versions. Specifically, we examine how specific aspects of the Holocaust are integrated into the larger WWII narrative and which of these aspects are more visible or marginalized. Based on this examination, we identify a set of cases to explore through qualitative content analysis how Wikipedia authors employ discursive strategies to collaboratively construct the Holocaust history; additionally, we discuss how Wikipedia practices and policies interact with authors’ individual views on the past

Algorithms as a peacekeeping force? Automated systems of news distribution and peace journalism

In our talk we discuss how the increasing use of AI-driven systems of content distribution impacts the ways readers are exposed to news about wars and conflicts. To do so, we examine the place of algorithmic personalization – i.e. the tailoring of individualized news feeds based on users’ information preferences – in the framework of peace journalism (PJ), a journalistic paradigm calling for more diversified and creative war reporting. Using a conceptual approach, we scrutinize how the deployment of news personalization can mediate – or worsen – pitfalls of PJ paradigm, and present a theoretical framework for analyzing how algorithmic system designs can facilitate constructive conflict coverage

Algorithmic Personalization, Human Rights and Individual/Collective Digital Memory Legislation

The emergence of the unprecedented volume of digital data and the deployment of AI-driven systems for their processing has significant implications for individual and collective remembrance. By enabling new ways of producing and storing mnemonic traces, these technological changes lead to the formation of "post-scarcity" (Hoskins 2014) culture characterized by pervasiveness and abundance of memory-related content. This shift revolutionizes the ways individuals and societies deal with the past, but also raises numerous concerns related to the need for dealing with “memory overload” and controlling the distribution of private/unwanted memories. Many of these concerns are located at the intersection of human rights and memory. An illustrative example is the right to be forgotten, which recognizes the need for control over individual memory traces, in particular considering their relationship with the right to identity. However, the digital turn has implications not only for the protection of individual memory rights, but also for the regulation of collective remembrance. An example is the application of memory laws such as Russian Law against the rehabilitation of Nazism to the reinforcement of hegemonic memory narratives in digital environments. In our paper, we examine one particular aspect of digital memory turn, namely the increasing personalization of memory-related content distribution via algorithmic systems (e.g. search engines). Algorithmic personalization takes into consideration individual preferences and contextual cues to automatically retrieve content viewed the most relevant for the user. Despite its importance for dealing with information overload, personalization raises multiple questions about user agency and the transparency of automated decision-making. To conceptualize its possible effects on human rights in the context of remembrance, we critically review legal acts dealing with (digital) individual/collective memory (e.g. GDPR or memory laws in post-socialist countries) and ask to what degree they account for the role of algorithmic content distribution