Source code for the online experiment on personalizing news aggregators. The crawler simulates user activity and downloads news articles. The analysis predicts the impact of various personalized profiles on the news diversity of various news websites.
Abstract:
People increasingly use personalizing news aggregators for acquiring news online. Despite benefits such as more relevance, risks such as filter bubbles have been elicited. So far, there is little empirical evidence on how personalization affects the news diversity of news aggregators. Furthermore, it remains unclear how the news diversity of news aggregators compares to edited newspaper websites. This study investigates the effect of personalization on news diversity and reports the results of an online experiment. Based on browser instrumentation, news articles were queried using personalized and non-personalized profiles. Using a fixed-effects model, the news diversity’s change due to personalization was estimated at 8-12%. However, the absolute news diversity of the personalizing news aggregators is comparable to edited newspaper websites with a difference of <5%. Our results contribute empirical insights to the debate on news personalization, finding that filter bubbles stemming from low news diversity are unlikely.
Authors:
- Joschka A. Hüllmann j.huellmann@utwente.nl
- Leonard W. Sensmeier l_sens01@uni-muenster.de
Date: 2022-05-25