Algorithms in the News
Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, did not call out what he called Mark Zuckerberg’s “Californian code” because of an opposition to algorithms as part of the news dissemination process, but because he disagrees with the ways in which Facebook uses them. In an interview about the newspaper’s role in tackling Facebook on censorship, Hansen described his growing frustration with the platform’s “unprecedented power as an editor,” contrasted with an unwillingness to admit its status as a media company: “I think that one of the core tasks of the independent press . . . is to expose people to diferent views. . . . What we see now is that the press is becoming weaker.” Social media platforms, the interview suggested, have a tendency to trap users in bubbles that prevent them from reading “the other side” of stories. Hansen furthermore claims:
By far, [Facebook] is the most important carrier of news today, and it is editing at least in two ways. Every post you see on your feed is there for a reason; it's not neutral at all, it's an algorithm that decides. (Sullivan, 2016)
Hansen’s worry is that the world’s most powerful editor, the algorithm, and the people controlling it—Mark Zuckerberg and his associates—do not operate according to the same principles and professional ethics as the “independent press.” This worry concerns the power struggle over editorial responsibility, and the question of who should have a right to claim it. On the one side, we have the independent press, whose task it is to inform the public and expose people to diferent views. On the other side, we find the curated filter bubbles created by social media algorithms that relentlessly “trap users in a world of news that only afirms their beliefs” (Sullivan 2016). However, this reduces a complex issue to a false dichotomy of being either for or against the algorithm. Facebook does not connect users and provide them a platform due to an altruistic, benevolent motivation. Nor does Aftenposten and the news industry rally against Facebook because of mere anger over the removal of a photograph. And even though he partly construes such a black-and-white narrative himself, Hansen says in the interview that the problem is not the algorithm per se: “I of course use algorithms myself, and my ambitions are to use them on a much higher level than we do today.”
Programming the News
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