Know your algorithm: what media organizations need to explain to their users about news personalization

Abstract

If the right to an explanation is expected to effectively safeguard users’ rights, it must be interpreted in a manner that takes the contextual risks algorithms pose to those rights into account. This article provides a framework of transparency instruments in the context of the news personalization algorithms employed by both traditional media organizations and social media companies. Explaining the impact on a user’s news diet and the role of editorial values in the algorithm is especially important in this context. Conversely, explanations of individual decisions and counterfactual explanations face specific practical and normative barriers that limit their utility. Citizens’ online lives are shaped by algorithms that tailor their search results, rate their credit, or sort their news. Their knowledge of how, why, or even if they are affected by the algorithms that judge them is typically limited and sometimes mistaken, however.1 Moreover, they have traditionally lacked easy access to the information needed to remedy this situation. This is problematic. A lack of algorithmic transparency can hide discrimination, enable manipulation, or cause individuals to blindly (dis)trust algorithmic decision-making. However, making algorithms transparent can be costly, and organizations have few incentives to show users how their algorithms engage in manipulation or discrimination.2 This incentive-structure has fuelled increasing calls for regulation.3 In particular, an individual transparency mechanism in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that entitles users to information about these automated processes, commonly referred to as the right to an explanation, has recently been seized on to combat the lack of algorithmic transparency.4 However, which (if any) kind of individual transparency is a suitable policy tool to regulate algorithms remains a contested issue. Many critiques take an instrumental approach to transparency, arguing that transparency (especially with regard to private parties) is primarily valued because of the goals it advances. Making more information available does not automatically advance these goals, as users often lack the ability or motivation to process complex technical information.5 Not only the form, but also the content of the information that is to be communicated can be unsuitable to reach the desired goal. Disclosures may not be relevant to the particular context in which individuals try to exercise their rights, may be shown not to enhance trust, or may be unable to produce accountability where individuals are unable to exert pressure on the party that should be held accountable.6 Disregarding the connection between a disclosure and the goal it pursues risks creating a transparency fallacy, in which transparency functions as an ineffective solution that wards off stronger regulation.7 This article will argue that the goals of the right to an explanation and the information that is suitable to further them cannot be assessed in isolation. Instead, like other general open transparency norms in EU law, the right to an explanation of automated decision-making must be interpreted in the context of the decision-making that is to be explained.8 This context shapes the goals the right to an explanation to algorithm that on for rights an algorithm that news an individual is to If the right to an explanation is expected to be a suitable safeguard risks to rights and contextual risks must be into account. on the of these risks and the suitable on these provides a normative for the information by the right to an explanation, and between and the values that are specific to the in which the this article on news personalization a of that to tailor the or of news to an or algorithms are by the media and are the of the social media where individuals of their This the right to an explanation to with regard to algorithms that a role in lives and that have the to their rights, in particular their right to the the of the the right to an 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