My Friends, Editors, Algorithms, and I

Figures & data

TABLE 1 Effects of individual characteristics of news consumers (in 26 countries) on their opinions about the utility of algorithmic and editorial news selection

	Journalistic curation			User tracking			Peer filtering
	Coeff		SE	Coeff		SE	Coeff		SE
Trust in news	0.18	***	0.005	0.14	***	0.005	0.11	***	0.005
Belief in media’s political independence	0.08	***	0.007	0.01		0.007	0.03	***	0.007
Belief in media’s commercial independence	0.11	***	0.007	0.10	***	0.007	0.12	***	0.007
Frequency of social media as news source	0.07	***	0.004	0.11	***	0.004	0.12	***	0.004
Whether mobile is main news medium	0.02	***	0.004	0.04	***	0.005	0.02	***	0.004
Interest in news	0.06	***	0.004	0.05	***	0.005	0.03	***	0.004
Paid for online news in last year	0.07	***	0.004	0.04	***	0.004	0.06	***	0.004
Gender	0.01	**	0.004	–0.00		0.004	–0.01		0.004
Education	–0.03	***	0.004	–0.02	***	0.004	–0.07	***	0.004
Privacy concerns about news personalization	–0.06	***	0.005	–0.09	***	0.005	–0.03	***	0.005
Whether more personalization leads to missing important information	–0.04	***	0.006	–0.03	***	0.006	–0.07	***	0.006
Whether more personalization leads to missing challenging viewpoints	–0.07	***	0.006	–0.09	***	0.006	–0.09	***	0.006
Age	–0.07	***	0.005	–0.10	***	0.005	–0.11	***	0.005
Intercept	–0.00		0.034	–0.00		0.032	0.00		0.033
SD (intercept)	0.178			0.162			0.229
SD (residual)	0.91			0.927			0.908
Log likelihood	–66,172			–67,112			–66,069
AIC	132,378			134,256			132,170
BIC	132,519			134,397			132,311
N	49,895			49,895			49,895
N (countries)	26			26			26

Figure 1 Belief among news consumers in 26 countries that having news stories selected either automatically (on the basis of own past consumption [“user tracking”] or friends’ news consumption [“peer filtering”]) or by editors and journalists (“journalistic curation”) is a good way to get news (N = 53,314)

Figure 2 Effect sizes of the individual characteristics of news consumers (N = 53,314) in 26 countries on their opinions about the utility of algorithmic and editorial news selection