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

The Corona Truth Wars: Where Have All the STS’ers Gone When We Need Them Most?

The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complicated by the fact that this quest for truthful knowledge about the virus is entangled with various (geo)political dynamics, government policy pressures, media reporting, platform moderation and public understandings of it all. It is therefore quite unclear what information is reliable, which experts to follow and what (epistemic) authorities to trust. Science and Technology Scholars are perfectly equipped with concepts, theories and methods to help us understand these complex dynamics, and guide us through the fog of uncertainty and manipulation. Yet they seem remarkably absent in public and scientific debates. What is going on

“The Truth Is Out There” : Conspiracy culture in an age of epistemic instability

markdownabstractConspiracy theories are extremely popular: millions of people in the western world no longer trust epistemic authorities (such as science, media and politics) and resort to conspiracy theories to account for what actually happens out there. Conspiracy theories are formulated about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or about collective vaccination, but they also feature in popular culture. Films, books and TV- series like The Matrix, The Da Vinci Code, or The X-Files, all play with logic and rhetoric of hidden games. But although conspiracy theories become more and more mainstream, a good sociological understanding of their popularity remains limited by their consistent pathologization in and outside academia. The stereotypical image of conspiracy theorists as paranoid fanatics is prominent, and the ideas they have about reality are easily put aside as irrational and preposterous. But is the idea of a conspiracy orchestrating world affairs that farfetched when secretive government operations and corporate collusions are a clear reality? Moreover, and this is the argument throughout the book, if we are to understand why so many people engage with conspiracy theories nowadays, then we need to explore the meanings they have for them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch conspiracy milieu and following a cultural sociological approach, Jaron Harambam explores such meanings in this book. He shows what contemporary conspiracy theories are about, which people are involved in the milieu, how they see themselves and what they actually do with these ideas in their everyday lives. Reality turns out to be much more complex than common stereotypes would suggest. As a conclusion, I will sociologically explain why conspiracy theories have such an appeal for so many people nowadays

Contemporary Conspiracy Culture Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability

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The Proliferation of Alternative Media:How Corona Conspiracy Theories in the Netherlands Fostered New Social Movements

Since the start of the pandemic, many different allegations and suspicions about what was really going on surfaced in the Netherlands. The usual suspects quickly shared their conspiratorial ideas on their own websites and social media platforms, but various new publics were lured by the concerns they put forward and the explanations they offered. The diverse collection of competing explanations about the Corona virus and how we are dealing with the pandemic share many commonalities with conspiracy theories in the rest of Western Europe and the United States. Drawing on the author's ongoing ethnographic research in the Dutch conspiracy world and analysis of the mainstream media discourse on the pandemic, the chapter shows how Corona conspiracy theories fostered the emergence of new social movements. More specifically, it explains how the perceived lack of variation in mainstream media reporting contributed to the emergence and consolidation of alternative conspiracy theory media outlets. These popular initiatives, ranging from personal blogs and podcasts to fully fledged media platforms with increasingly professionalized operations, make use of the open and participatory infrastructure of today's digital information landscape but extend to the offline world as well. This chapter highlights how conspiracy theories are not merely ideas formulated in the abstract but are important drivers of cultural change. The (Dutch) media landscape is profoundly more pluralistic than before, although whether that is a positive development is open to debate.</p

Welkom in het spiegelhuis. Uw gids: Willem Schinkel

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