Recommenders you can rely on: A legal and empirical perspective on the transparency and control individuals require to trust news personalisation

Abstract

This article explores the role law can play to support trust in the context of news personalisation. The need to ensure trust in the face of technological changes in information dissemination is an important aspect of both recent horizontal legislation such as the Digital Services Act, as well as context-specific specific efforts surrounding for example disinformation. In these legal discussions, however, what trust is, why law should promote it, and what concrete measures are suitable to do so often remain ambiguous. This raises suspicions over whether trust is simply a selling point of traditional legal measures, and if not, what concrete role law can and should play to promote trust. This article focuses on the role control and transparency measures can play to safeguard trust in organisations that use news personalisation. It first analyses how trust should be understood in the context of news personalisation, how media regulation has traditionally supported trust, and how it should continue to do so in the context of news personalisation. It then draws on a conceptual framework of transparency measures in the context of news personalisation to survey how important different transparency and control measures are to the individuals who place trust in organisations that use personalisation. Law’s current focus on informing individuals about and empowering them to stop personalisation does not account for the importance of enabling individuals to control how news is personalised.