The report “Beyond the filter bubble: concepts, myths, evidence and issues for future debates” we wrote earlier this year for the Commissariaat voor de Media was shared with the Dutch parliament as part of the Kamerbrief over onderzoek naar de toekomst van onafhankelijke journalistiek in Nederland.

A blog about insights from the 2018 Amsterdam Symposium on News Personalisation was featured on the LSE Media Policy Project Blog.

News organisations all across Europe are facing the same challenge: how to make use of artificial intelligence in a way that saves costs and increases users’ experience, without compromising on quality or the provision of diverse and relevant news. In order to share knowledge about the optimal use of data and algorithmic news recommendations, M.Z. van Drunen (University of Amsterdam), N. Helberger (University of Amsterdam), B. Bodó (University of Amsterdam), J.K. Sørensen (Aalborg University), J.E. Möller (University of Amsterdam), M.B. Bastian (University of Amsterdam), together initiated the 2018 Amsterdam Symposium on News Personalisation, which brought together journalists, editors, technologists and academics to discuss the issue. Here, the authors report back from the symposium. 

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.

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.