Abstract
In offering personalized content geared toward users’ individual interests, recommender systems are assumed to reduce news diversity and thus lead to partial information blindness (i.e., filter bubbles). We conducted two exploratory studies to test the effect of both implicit and explicit personalization on the content and source diversity of Google News. Except for small effects of implicit personalization on content diversity, we found no support for the filter-bubble hypothesis. We did, however, find a general bias in that Google News over-represents certain news outlets and under-represents other, highly frequented, news outlets. The results add to a growing body of evidence, which suggests that concerns about algorithmic filter bubbles in the context of online news might be exaggerated.
Item Type: | Journal article |
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Keywords: | diversity; experiment; filter bubble; online news; personalization |
Faculties: | Social Sciences > Communication |
Subjects: | 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology 300 Social sciences > 380 Commerce, communications and transportation |
ISSN: | 2167-0811 |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 42846 |
Date Deposited: | 31. Mar 2018, 19:57 |
Last Modified: | 15. Dec 2020, 09:31 |