Experiencing algorithms:How Young People Understand, Feel About, and Engage With Algorithmic News Selection on Social Media

The news that young people consume is increasingly subject to algorithmic curation. Yet, while numerous studies explore how algorithms exert power in citizens’ everyday life, little is known about how young people themselves perceive, learn about, and deal with news personalization. Considering the interactions between algorithms and users from an user-centric perspective, this article explores how young people make sense of, feel about, and engage with algorithmic news curation on social media and when such everyday experiences contribute to their algorithmic literacy. Employing in-depth interviews in combination with the walk-through method and think-aloud protocols with a diverse group of 22 young people aged 16–26 years, it addresses three current methodological challenges to studying algorithmic literacy: first, the lack of an established baseline about how algorithms operate; second, the opacity of algorithms within everyday media use; and third, limitations in technological vocabularies that hinder young people in articulating their algorithmic encounters. It finds that users’ sense-making strategies of algorithms are context-specific, triggered by expectancy violations and explicit personalization cues. However, young people’s intuitive and experience-based insights into news personalization do not automatically enable young people to verbalize these, nor does having knowledge about algorithms necessarily stimulate users to intervene in algorithmic decisions

Do novel routines stick after the pandemic?:The formation of news habits during COVID-19

Over half of our news use is comprised of habits: routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life. Conversely, citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines rarely form novel patterns of news use. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being, especially in real-life situations. Previous research suggests that considerable life changes and disruptions in daily routines can give rise to the adaptation or formation of habits. This paper asks how and to what extent citizens created novel patterns of news use or adapted existing news routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecting insights from social psychology to journalism and audience studies, it analyzes which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation. Employing a questionnaire with open-ended questions with 1293 Dutch news users, we identified 5 groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the COVID-19 pandemic: news avoiders, followers turned avoiders, stable news users, frequent news users and news junkies. In-depth follow-up interviews with these users (N = 22) show that differences in users’ everyday context, social cues, levels of stress and anxiety, and affective cues may explain these different behaviors

The Trust Gap:Young People's Tactics for Assessing the Reliability of Political News

In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges such conceptualizations of media trust rooted in rationality and deliberateness. Based on two series of semistructured interviews with fifty-five young people from ten nationalities living in the Netherlands, conducted in 2016 and 2017, we develop a taxonomy of people's tactics when assessing the reliability of news. We explore what this means for how they value news and how such judgments, drawing on explicit and tacit knowledge, impact their news use. Rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news, including affective and intuitive tactics rooted in tacit knowledge. Consequently, we argue that to fully understand how users deal with the complexity of trust in digital environments, we should not start from ideals of informed citizenship, but from people's actual practices and experiences instead

Haven't you heard?:Connecting through news and journalism in everyday life

Van Facebook tot nieuwsapps en uitgesteld kijken: nog nooit had de Nederlandse nieuwsgebruiker de keuze uit zo’n groot nieuwsaanbod. Daardoor ontstaan vele nieuwe routines, van het checkrondje op de smartphone tot het delen van nieuws in WhatsApp-groepen. Zulk veranderend nieuwsgewoonten beïnvloeden niet alleen hoe gebruikers zich informeren, maar hebben ook impact op de sociale functie van nieuws. De maatschappelijke relevantie van de journalistiek is van oudsher verbonden aan het verbinden van de privésfeer van gebruikers met de publieke wereld. Traditionele media hebben echter in toenemende mate te maken met concurrentie van alternatieve nieuwsbronnen. Als gebruikers zich ook via vrienden en familie op Facebook kunnen oriënteren op wat er buiten hun privésfeer gebeurt, waarom zouden ze dan nog het achtuurjournaal kijken? Dit proefschrift onderzoekt wat veranderend nieuwsgebruik betekent voor de verbindende rol van nieuws en journalistiek. Uit de resultaten blijkt dat nieuws, juist in wat gebruikers ervaren als een steeds complexere samenleving, van belang blijft als gemeenschappelijk referentiekader. Welk onderdeel wordt van dat referentiekader en beschouwd wordt als nieuws verandert echter: een Facebookfoto wordt intuïtief gezien als ander “nieuws” dan een item in het Journaal, maar gebruikers missen het vocabulaire om die verschillen onder woorden te brengen. Daarnaast zijn de manieren waarop gebruikers via nieuws een gemeenschappelijk referentiekader construeren diverser, meer continu, en sterker gecentreerd rondom individuen dan voorheen. Tot slot blijken “dark social media” als WhatsApp- en Facebookgroepen van toenemend belang voor het delen van nieuws en faciliteren van publieke connectie, vanwege de beslotenheid en vluchtigheid van deze platforms