The ‘Fairness Doctrine’ lives on? Theorizing about the Algorithmic News Curation of Google’s Top Stories
The ‘Fairness Doctrine’ lives on? Theorizing about the Algorithmic News Curation of Google’s Top Stories
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“公平主义”继续存在吗？
DOI：
10.1145/3372923.3404794
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Mustafaraj, Eni
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kawakami, Anna;Umarova, Khonzoda;Huang, Dongchen;Mustafaraj, Eni
当人们在谷歌上搜索政治候选人时，由最近的新闻报道组成的面板（称为热门新闻）通常会显示在搜索结果页面的顶部。这些故事是通过算法从数千家新闻出版商发表的数十万篇文章中选出的。在我们之前的工作中，我们确定了 56 个新闻来源，这些新闻来源为参加 2020 年美国总统选举初选的 30 名政治候选人贡献了所有热门新闻的 2/3。在本文中，我们对美国选民进行了调查，以了解他们对这 56 家新闻媒体的熟悉程度和信任度。我们发现，一些最常见的媒体并非为所有选民所熟悉（例如《The HillorPolitico》），或者特别受到任何政治派系选民的信任（例如《华盛顿观察家报》或《每日野兽报》）。那么，为什么此类来源如此频繁地出现在头条新闻中呢？我们推测，谷歌正在从具有不同政治倾向的来源中抽取新闻文章，以提供平衡的报道。这让人想起美国所谓的“公平主义”（1949-1987）政策，要求广播机构（广播电台或电视台）对有争议的问题发表相反的观点。由于右倾出版物比中倾或左倾出版物少，为了维持这种“公平”平衡，低信任度的超党派极右新闻来源比一些公众更熟悉和信任的新闻来源获得更多的关注度。
When one searches for political candidates on Google, a panel composed of recent news stories, known as Top stories, is commonly shown at the top of the search results page. These stories are selected by an algorithm that chooses from hundreds of thousands of articles published by thousands of news publishers. In our previous work, we identified 56 news sources that contributed 2/3 of all Top stories for 30 political candidates running in the primaries of 2020 US Presidential Election. In this paper, we survey US voters to elicit their familiarity and trust with these 56 news outlets. We find that some of the most frequent outlets are not familiar to all voters (e.g.The HillorPolitico), or particularly trusted by voters of any political stripes (e.g.Washington ExaminerorThe Daily Beast). Why then, are such sources shown so frequently in Top stories? We theorize that Google is sampling news articles from sources with different political leanings to offer a balanced coverage. This is reminiscent of the so-called "fairness doctrine'' (1949-1987) policy in the United States that required broadcasters (radio or TV stations) to air contrasting views about controversial matters. Because there are fewer right-leaning publications than center or left-leaning ones, in order to maintain this "fair'' balance, hyper-partisan far-right news sources of low trust receive more visibility than some news sources that are more familiar to and trusted by the public.