We were happy to learn that a part of the national final highschool exams in the Netherlands (the eindexamen maatschappijwetenschappen vwo) featured an excerpt from a blog post we wrote earlier about the findings from our research. Referring to polarization, students were asked questions about the role of the media and of media regulators.
The exam (and the answers) are also available online.
We organize a new RPA Personalised Communication Symposium:
Title: Is there a misinformation crisis?
Date/Time: June 5, 15.00-16.30 hours
Speakers: Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (University of Oxford), member of the High level expert group on Fake News and online disinformation); Tarlach McGonagle (IViR); Amelie Heldt (HBI)
Chair: Natali Helberger
Location: IViR – Institute for Information Law: REC A
Nieuwe Achtergracht 166
1018 WV Amsterdam
We cordially invite everyone who is interested to this Symposium being organised by the RPA Personalised Communication.
The public and academic debate over the scope and consequences of the Misinformation crisis is raging. The term Fake News is widely critiqued and a new vocabulary to describe, analyse, and address the challenges of the new information environment is being developed. The EU High Level Group finished its recommendations and the European Commission is now launching a series of measures to deal with this phenomenon. In this event, we first have Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Oxford University) and Member of the High Level Group report on the work, conclusion, and current follow up of the HLG. He will offer a lecture on this topic. His presentation is followed by a short response and intervention by Amelie Heldt (Hans Bredow Institute) from the perspective of current German interventions and laws. Next, Tarlach McGonagle (University of Amsterdam) will offer his vision on the topic from a Fundamental Rights perspective. The interventions are followed by Q&A and debate, moderated by Professor Natali Helberger.
If you plan to come, please register by sending an e-mail to ascor-secr-fmg@uva.nl
Last week, Sanne Kruikemeier participated in a Tegenlicht Meet Up ‘Verslaafd aan het algoritme’ (‘addicted to the algorithm’) in Pakhuis de Zwijger. You can rewatch the entire meeting in the video below:
The 2018 Amsterdam Symposium On News Personalisation brought together editors, journalists, technologists, and academics to discuss the shared questions news personalisation confronts them with. The members of the Personews project started off the symposium by presenting the ways they have and will continue to further our understanding of news personalisation. Afterwards, participants discussed the various problems they are currently facing, as well as the different solutions they came up with to address them. Following the plenary discussion, participants broke off into groups to discuss specific aspects of news personalisation in more detail. One group, for example, discussed the way news personalisation could promote the editorial values of the media organization which uses it. This poses both broad normative challenges, like the need to revisit these values and identify the ways in which they interact with news personalisation, as well as very concrete problems, like the need to translate these values into code and measure whether they are being promoted. The full account of these discussions is available in the report.
Judith will be speaking at the Struggle for peace event on April 7th in Utrecht. She will be part of the discussion on how to fix the future, and is quite curious herself how the future can be fixed – and whether it needs fixing. If you want to know, be sure to find out at 15:45.
Judith was invited to participate in the International Media Law, Policy & Practice (IMLPP) Conference 2018. It is a conference organized and mainly run by students. It was great to see how the next generation of legal scholars make sense of the complex questions of platform regulation.
Judith was invited to deliver the keynote at the 9th meeting of the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA) in Zagreb, Croatia. She spoke about the link between specific affordances of algorithmic news recommendation and the selective spread of misinformation online.
Gepersonaliseerde communicatie is vaak effectief, maar zorgen omtrent privacy liggen altijd op de loer. De balans tussen relevante communicatie en privacy is een wankel evenwicht. De nieuwe privacy wet- en regelgeving heeft tot doel de controle over persoonsdata terug te geven aan de consumenten. Tot 25 mei 2018 hebben bedrijven de tijd om marketingactiviteiten in overeenstemming te brengen met de nieuwe privacywetgeving: Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming (AVG), of in het Engels GDPR. Veel bedrijven zijn hier dan ook druk mee.
Wat betekent deze wetgeving voor gepersonaliseerde communicatie? En stel dat je je als organisatie aan alle regels houdt, kan je dan toch nog te ver gaan in de ogen van de consument? Accepteren consumenten gepersonaliseerde communicatie van iedere organisatie, of geldt voor sommige sectoren, zoals het bank- en verzekeringswezen, dat mensen hier toch meer moeite mee hebben? En kunnen alle persoonsdata worden gebruikt voor gepersonaliseerde communicatie? Of zijn sommige persoonsgegevens toch privacy gevoeliger dan anderen?
Op 20 maart 2018 organiseert SWOCC in samenwerking met het Research Priority Area ‘Personalised Communication’ een bijeenkomst. Tijdens de bijeenkomst wordt het meest recente wetenschappelijk onderzoek en praktijkkennis over de nieuwe privacy wet en regelgeving en gepersonaliseerde communicatie gedeeld.
Na een korte introductie van het onderwerp, zal vanuit wetenschappelijk en juridisch perspectief worden besproken hoe je invulling kan geven aan de privacy wet en regelgeving en hoe consumenten omgaan met gepersonaliseerde communicatie.
Nadine Bol zal ingaan op de vraag hoeveel informatie consumenten aan een website willen geven (self-disclosure) en of dit anders is voor verschillende contexten: gezondheid, commercie en nieuws. Sophie Boerman zal bespreken wat mensen acceptabel vinden (welk type informatie mag worden gebruikt, is het ok als bedrijven persoonlijke informatie delen met anderen) en wanneer zij vinden dat gepersonaliseerde reclame te ver gaat. Joanna Strycharz bespreekt hoe kennis over privacy en gepersonaliseerde communicatie van invloed zijn op hoe consumenten denken over gepersonaliseerde communicatie.
Daarnaast zal Finbar Hage van Rabobank een praktijkcase presenteren over hoe de bank omgaat met gepersonaliseerde communicatie. Marie Jose Hoefmans van Schluss en Carolin Kaiser van de Privacy Company bespreken vanuit de praktijk hoe je als bedrijf kan inspelen op de nieuwe wetgeving.
Als afsluiting bediscussiëren we met de aanwezigen de uitdagingen voor de toekomst.
GDPR uitgelegd door Fastbyte ICT-Solutions.
dr. Nadine Bol
Universiteit van Amsterdam
dr. Sophie Boerman
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Joanna Strycharz
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Finbar Hage
Rabobank
Marie Jose Hoefmans
Schluss
Carolin Kaiser
Privacy Company
Datum: dinsdag, 20 maart 2018
Tijd: 13.00-17.00 uur
Locatie: CREA, UvA, Nieuwe Achtergracht 170, 1018 WV Amsterdam
Aanmelden is gratis en kan hier.
In the debate about filter bubbles caused by algorithmic news recommendation, the conceptualization of the two core concepts in this debate, diversity and algorithms, has received little attention in social scientific research. This paper examines the effect of multiple recommender systems on different diversity dimensions. To this end, it maps different values that diversity can serve, and a respective set of criteria that characterizes a diverse information offer in this particular conception of diversity. We make use of a data set of simulated article recommendations based on actual content of one of the major Dutch broadsheet newspapers and its users (N=21,973 articles, N=500 users). We find that all of the recommendation logics under study proved to lead to a rather diverse set of recommendations that are on par with human editors and that basing recommendations on user histories can substantially increase topic diversity within a recommendation set.