Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeepers

Beyond the EULA: Improving Consent for Data Mining

“…Beyond the research context, this case highlights the broader implications of the visibility of media, whether socially-derived or from mainstream media, being algorithmically controlled. Napoli argues that this experiment highlights Facebook's ability to shape public discourse by altering the news feed's algorithm to introduce political bias [37], without any governance to ensure that such new media are acting in the public interest. The majority of Facebook users do not know that such filtering happens at all, and the selective presentation of content from one's social network can cause social repercussions where the perception is that individuals are withholding posts from someone, rather than an algorithmic intervention by Facebook [9].…”

The Political Economy of New Media Revisited

“…It could be argued that instead of platform media the term algorithmic media [7][8][9] might be used. However, although an empirical focus on algorithms is warranted, it is not (or not entirely) the presence of digitized logic that gives these markets their character.…”

Data-Driven Participation: Algorithms, Cities, Citizens, and Corporate Control

“…Recently, researchers have been investigating similar forms of gatekeeping as the pruning and restriction of information access are increasingly done by coded functions in computer software (i.e., algorithms) (Napoli, 2015). In other words, with the increasing reliance on data-driven participation, this sort of control (i.e., be it the production of VGI by citizens, or how or where it is used by city officials) is now being delegated to the coded decisions of algorithms and by the available "solutions" a particular software is capable of performing (Bozdag, 2013;Winter, 2015).…”