The Soap Box as a Black Box: Regulating Transparency in Social Media Recommender Systems
Abstract
Social media recommender systems play a central role in determining what content is seen online, and what remains hidden. As a point of control for media governance, they are subject to intense controversy and, increasingly, regulation by European policymakers. A recurring theme in such efforts is transparency, but this is an ambiguous concept that can be implemented in various ways depending on the types of accountability one envisages. This paper maps and critiques the various efforts at regulating social media recommendation transparency in Europe, and the types of accountability they pursue.
This paper identifies three different categories of disclosure rules in recent policymaking: (1) user-facing disclaimers, (2) government auditing, and (3) data-sharing partnerships with academia and civil society. Despite their limitations and pitfalls, it is argued, each of these approaches has a potential added value for media governance as part of a tiered, varied landscape of transparency rules. However, an important element is missing - public data access. Current trends emphasise exclusive data access regimes directed at particular, trusted regulators or researchers, but this approach has important limitations in terms of scalability, inclusiveness, and independence. This paper articulates the distinct benefits of public data access as a supplement to existing transparency measures, and suggests starting points for its design and regulation.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.