News diversity and recommendation systems : setting the interdisciplinary scene

Concerns about selective exposure and filter bubbles in the digital news environment trigger questions regarding how news recommender systems can become more citizen-oriented and facilitate – rather than limit – normative aims of journalism. Accordingly, this chapter presents building blocks for the construction of such a news algorithm as they are being developed by the Ghent University interdisciplinary research project #NewsDNA, of which the primary aim is to actually build, evaluate and test a diversity-enhancing news recommender. As such, the deployment of artificial intelligence could support the media in providing people with information and stimulating public debate, rather than undermine their role in that respect. To do so, it combines insights from computer sciences (news recommender systems), law (right to receive information), communication sciences (conceptualisations of news diversity), and computational linguistics (automated content extraction from text). To gather feedback from scholars of different backgrounds, this research has been presented and discussed during the 2019 IFIP summer school workshop on ‘co-designing a personalised news diversity algorithmic model based on news consumers’ agency and fine-grained content modelling’. This contribution also reflects the results of that dialogue

The Consent Paradox: Accounting for the Prominent Role of Consent in Data Protection

The concept of consent is a central pillar of data protection. It features prominently in research, regulation, and public debates on the subject, in spite of the wide-ranging criticisms that have been levelled against it. In this paper, I refer to this as the consent paradox. I argue that consent continues to play a central role not despite but because the criticisms of it. I analyze the debate on consent in the scholarly literature in general, and among German data protection professionals in particular, showing that it is a focus on the informed individual that keeps the concept of consent in place. Critiques of consent based on the notion of “informedness” reinforce the centrality of consent rather than calling it into question. They allude to a market view that foregrounds individual choice. Yet, the idea of a data market obscures more fundamental objections to consent, namely the individual’s dependency on data controllers’ services that renders the assumption of free choice a fiction