Nudging Towards Exposure Diversity: Examining the Effects of News Recommender Design on Audiences’ News Exposure Behaviours and Perceptions

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly studying how news recommenders can provide audiences with diverse news offers. However, despite their increased interest, little research has been conducted on how news audiences engage with news recommenders. This article assesses how a news recommender’s design affects people’s news exposure behaviours and perceptions. To do so, we conducted an online experiment (n = 337) in a virtual news environment with four different news recommenders, including three news recommenders that aimed to stimulate diverse news exposure. The results show that all diversity-based news recommenders steered users towards more diverse exposure behaviour, with a personalised diversity-based news recommender being the most effective. We also found that people using a diversity-based news recommender did not think they read more diversely, pointing towards a so-called “diversity paradox.” We discuss what this paradox means and how it relates to the secretive nature of news algorithms. We also make a call to policymakers, news organisations and scholars to give transparency and diversity-based news recommenders a more pronounced place in the news environment and in future news recommendation research.

Keywords:

• Diversity paradox
• diversity-based news recommender
• exposure diversity
• news personalisation
• personalised diversity
• public-service algorithms

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank dr. Judith Vermeulen (Ghent University) and prof. dr. Eva Lievens (Ghent University) for their contributions to the data protection and privacy policies used in this research. We also thank the students of Ghent University who helped us to recruit participants. Finally, we would also like to express our appreciation to our project stakeholders for their input and support: VRT, DPG Media, Mediahuis and Apache.

Ethical Statement

This work includes an ethical data plan, which can be found under ID number 60041. As this experiment has a non-interventional nature, no potential conflict of ethical issues was reported by the authors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 To read our pregistration, see: https://osf.io/ytjem/?view_only=4a346c86488c4b82b1b75b240f42f20c.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ghent University under grant BOFGOA2018000601.