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James Meese
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PALGRAVE GLOBAL MEDIA POLICY
AND BUSINESS
The Algorithmic
Distribution of News
Policy Responses
Edited by
James Meese · Sara Bannerman
Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business
Series Editors
Petros Iosifidis, Department of Sociology, City University, London, UK
Jeanette Steemers, Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College
London, London, UK
Gerald Sussman, Urban Studies & Planning, Portland State University,
Portland, OR, USA
Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
The Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business Series has published over 22 books
since its launch in 2012. Concentrating on the social, cultural, political, political-
economic, institutional, and technological changes arising from the globalization
and digitization of media and communications industries, the series considers
the impact of these changes on business practice, regulation and policy, and
social outcomes. The policy side encompasses the challenge of conceiving policy-
making as a reiterative process that recurrently addresses such key challenges
as inclusiveness, participation, industrial-labor relations, universal access, digital
discrimination, and the growing implications of AI in an increasingly global-
ized world, as well as local challenges to global media business and culture.
The business side encompasses a political economy approach that looks at the
power of transnational corporations in specific contexts — and the controversies
associated with these global conglomerates. The business side considers as well
the emergence of small and medium media enterprises, and the role played by
nation-states in promoting particular firms and industries.
Based on a multi-disciplinary approach, the series tackles four key questions:
• To what extent do new developments in platforms, and approaches to

personal data require radical change in regulatory philosophy and objectives
towards the media?
• To what extent do technologies, datafication and transforming media
consumption require fundamental changes in business practices and models?
• To what extent do privatisation, datification, globalisation, and commercial-
isation alter the creative freedom, cultural and political diversity, values and
public accountability of media enterprises?
• To what extent does the structure of global communications contribute to
(in)equality within the Global South?
Series Editors
Professor Petros Iosifidis, City, University of London, UK, p.iosifidis@city.ac.uk
Professor Jeanette Steemers, King’s College London, UK, jeanette.steemers@kcl.
ac.uk
Professor Gerald Sussman, Portland State University, USA, sussmag@pdx.edu
Professor Terry Flew, The University of Sydney, Australia, terry.flew@sydney.edu.
au
Book proposals should be submitted to p.iosifidis@city.ac.uk
James Meese · Sara Bannerman
Editors
The Algorithmic
Distribution of News
Policy Responses
Editors
James Meese Sara Bannerman
RMIT University Department of Communication
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Studies and Multimedia
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
ISSN 2634-6192 ISSN 2634-6206 (electronic)

Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business
ISBN 978-3-030-87085-0 ISBN 978-3-030-87086-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87086-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Edward Hurcombe who provided valuable admin-

istrative assistance throughout the compilation of this edited collection.
We would also like to acknowledge our contributors for committing to a
project that began at the same time a global pandemic was announced.
Their perseverance, patience, and insight are truly appreciated. The
volume is an outcome of James Meese’s Australian Research Council
funded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellowship project
“Understanding algorithmic distribution in the Australian media indus-
try” (DE190100458). Sara Bannerman would like to thank McMaster
University, the Canada Research Chairs program, and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council for general support of her research.
James Meese would like to thank colleagues at the Technology, Commu-
nication, and Policy Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Auto-
mated Decision-Making and Society. We also thank Redhu Ruthroyoni,
Lauriane Piette, Mala Sanghera-Warren, Emily Wood, and Karthika
Purushothaman at Palgrave for their support of this volume.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic

Distribution of the News 1
James Meese and Sara Bannerman
Part I In the Newsroom: Algorithms, Bots, Business

Models, and Privacy
2 Governing the Algorithmic Distribution of News
in China: The Case of Jinri Toutiao 27
Jian Xu and Terry Flew
3 Algorithms, Platforms, and Policy: The Changing
Face of Canadian News Distribution 49
Nicole Blanchett, Fenwick McKelvey, and Colette Brin
4 ‘Good Morning, here’s today’s News’: Delivering
News via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s
Facebook Messenger Chatbot 71
Catherine Young
5 Algorithms and the News Media in Kenya: Emerging
Issues in Data Policy and Accountability 91
George Ogola and David Cheruiyot
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Advertising, Algorithms and Audiences: The

Unchanging Economics of Online Journalism 107
James Meese
Part II Current Approaches: Copyright or Competition

7 Australian and EU Policy Responses to Algorithmic
News Distribution: A Comparative Analysis 127
David Lindsay
8 Private Property vs. Public Policy Vision in Ancillary
Copyright Law Reform 151
Christian Herzog, Christopher Buschow,
and Alessandro Immanuel Beil
9 Big Tech and News: A Critical Approach to Digital
Platforms, Journalism, and Competition Law 171
Tai Neilson and Baskaran Balasingham
Part III Regulatory Challenges

10 New Zealand: Curbing Hate Speech, But Leaving
Platforms to Self-Regulate 193
Merja Myllylahti
11 Diversity, Fake News and Hate Speech: The German
Response to Algorithmic Regulation 209
Kerstin Liesem
12 Switzerland, Algorithms and the News: A Small
Country Looking for Global Solutions 233
Colin Porlezza
Part IV Future Horizons: Algorithms and Media Policy

13 Toward Platform Democracy: Imagining
an Open-Source Public Service Social Media Platform 253
Derek Hrynyshyn
14 Access Diversity Through Online News Media
and Public Service Algorithms: An Analysis of News
Recommendation in Light of Article 10 ECHR 269
Judith Vermeulen
CONTENTS ix
15 The Shortcomings of the Diversity Diet: Public

Service Media, Algorithms and the Multiple
Dimensions of Diversity 289
Jannick Kirk Sørensen
Index 309
Notes on Contributors
Balasingham Baskaran is an assistant professor at the Utrecht Univer-

sity School of Law. His area of expertise includes competition law,
international trade law and EU law. His current research focuses on regu-
lating Big Tech companies using competition law. Before joining Utrecht
University Baskaran worked as a lecturer at Macquarie University, Deakin
University and Maastricht University. He completed his Ph.D. in Law at
King’s College London.
Bannerman Sara is Associate Professor at McMaster University, Canada,
and Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance.
Beil Alessandro Immanuel is a postgraduate student in Management &
Marketing at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Previously, he studied busi-
ness engineering at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University
and worked in international sales. His research interests include digital
transformation, including agility and resilience, entrepreneurial strategies
and international business development.
Blanchett Nicole is an associate professor in the School of Journalism
at X University (also known as Ryerson University) in Toronto, Canada.
She is the principal investigator of the Canadian branch of the Journal-
istic Role Performance project, and a member of the research teams for
the Worlds of Journalism Study and Local Journalism Data Hub. Her
published works primarily focus on the impact of the use of metrics and
analytics on journalistic practice and the influence of the audience on
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
content creation. She previously worked as a news writer and producer

in a large, local television newsroom.
Brin Colette is a professor at Université Laval’s Département d’informa-
tion et de communication and the director of the Centre d’études sur les
médias. Her research and teaching focus on recent and ongoing changes
in journalistic practice, through policy and organizational initiatives, as
well as journalists’ professional discourse. She coordinates the Canadian
study for the Digital News Report (Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism). She is a member of the Groupe de recherche sur la commu-
nication politique (GRCP) and of the Centre for the Study of Democratic
Citizenship (CSDC).
Buschow Christopher is an assistant professor of “Organization and
Network Media” in the Media Management Department at Bauhaus-
Universität Weimar, Germany. His research and teaching focus on inno-
vation and entrepreneurship in the media business, with a particular focus
on the news industry. His work has been honoured with the Lower
Saxony Science Award and the Körber Foundation’s German Thesis
Award.
Cheruiyot David is an assistant professor at the Centre for Media
and Journalism Studies of the University of Groningen in The Nether-
lands. His main research interests revolve around the participation of
non-journalistic actors in news production/practice and media account-
ability. He has published works in relation to current debates in digital
journalism, mainly about peripheral actors in data journalism and fact-
checking, as well as digital media criticism and its implications to
traditional journalism.
Flew Terry is a professor of Digital Communication and Culture at the
University of Sydney. He is the author of 14 books (four edited), 65
book chapters, 101 refereed journal articles, and 17 reports and research
monographs. He was President of the International Communications
Association (ICA) from 2019 to 2020 and an Executive Board member
of the ICA since 2017. He was elected an ICA Fellow in 2019. He is a
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), elected in
2019. He has held visiting professor roles at City University, London and
George Washington University, and is a distinguished professor with the
State Key Laboratory for Media Convergence and Communication, the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Communications University of China, and an honorary professor at the

University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
Herzog Christian is a lecturer in the Graduate School at Leuphana
University Lüneburg. Previously, he was a lecturer in the Department
of Media & Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His
research is concerned with media policy and qualitative methods. It
has been published in European Journal of Communication, Human-
ities & Social Sciences Communications and International Journal of
Cultural Policy. He has edited and authored the books Transparency and
Funding of Public Service Media (Springer VS) and Towards a Market in
Broadcasting: Communications Policy in the UK and Germany (Palgrave).
Hrynyshyn Derek teaches in the Department of Communications and
Media Studies at York University in Toronto Canada. He is author of
Limits of the Digital Revolution: How Mass Media Culture Persists in a
Social Media World (Praeger, 2017).
Liesem Kerstin is a professor of Constitutional Law at Univer-
sity for Police and Public Administration North Rhine-Westphalia at
Mühlheim/Ruhr in Germany. Before she joined University, she served
as a Senior Researcher at Mainz Media Institute, Germany, an academic
institution with a focus on the development of the media legislative from
an interdisciplinary perspective. She holds a Ph.D. in legal studies and a
master’s degree in journalism. Her current research and teaching inter-
ests are related to media policy and Internet governance. They centre on
changing governance structures, algorithms on the Internet and Internet
platforms. Together with Prof. Dr. Matthias Cornils she delivered an
expert opinion on the first draft of the German “Interstate Media Treaty”.
Lindsay David is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University
of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he teaches copyright and a tech-
nology law capstone subject. He is co-author (with Graham Greenleaf) of
Public Rights: Copyright’s Pubic Domains (Central University of Punjab,
2018) and is widely published in the areas of copyright, privacy and tech-
nology law. He is a general editor of the Australian Intellectual Property
Journal and, at UTS, convenes the Technology & Intellectual Property
research group. His current research focuses on the regulation of Internet
of Things (IoT) devices and governance of artificial intelligence systems.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
McKelvey Fenwick is an associate professor in the Department of

Communication Studies at Concordia University. He studies digital poli-
tics and policy, appearing frequently as an expert commentator in the
media and intervening in media regulatory hearings. He is the author
of Internet Daemons (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), winner of
the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award.
Meese James is Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Australia, and Asso-
ciate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated
Decision Making and Society.
Myllylahti Merja is a senior lecturer in critical media studies at the Auck-
land University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand, and co-director of
Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) research centre. Her research
concerns digital news revenue models, platforms, attention economy,
media ownership, and trust in news. Her work has been published in
international academic journals such as Journalism Studies, Digital Jour-
nalism and Journal of Media Business Studies; and books such as The
Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, Routledge Hand-
book of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies, and Encyclopaedia of
Journalism Studies. She is an editorial board member of the Media and
Communication Journal.
Neilson Tai is the author of Journalism and Digital Labor: Experiences
of Online News Production. His areas of expertise include journalism,
the political economy of communication and critical cultural theory.
His current research investigates journalists’ work practices, professional
ideologies and the power relations that shape media work. This includes
critical approaches to digital platforms, data collection and new modes of
capital accumulation. He has published work on news and digital media
in Digital Journalism, Journalism, Triple-C, and Fast Capitalism. He is
a lecturer in media studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he
teaches classes on digital media, technology and journalism.
Ogola George is a reader/associate professor in Journalism in the School
of Arts and Media at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK.
His current research focuses on the impact of emerging digital technolo-
gies on media and political practices in Africa and lie at the intersection of
journalism studies, popular culture, development studies and politics. He
is the author of Popular Media in Kenyan History: Fiction and Newspapers
as Political Actors (2017), and The Future of Quality News Journalism:
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
A Cross-Continental Study (2016), co-edited with Peter Anderson and

Michael Williams.
Porlezza Colin is a senior assistant professor of Digital Journalism at the
Institute of Media and Journalism with the Università della Svizzera ital-
iana in Lugano, Switzerland. He is also honorary senior research fellow
with the Department of Journalism at City, University of London, and
Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Jour-
nalism at Columbia University. His research focuses on the impact of
AI on journalism, the datafication of digital journalism, as well as media
accountability and transparency. Currently, he is a co-investigator of a
Swiss National Science Foundation supported project on journalism inno-
vation in democratic societies, as well as PI of a Knight News Innovation
funded project on the design of AI-driven tools. He recently concluded
a Google DNI funded project called DMINR, of which he was the prin-
cipal investigator, about the impact of AI on journalism that included
also the development of an AI-driven tool for information gathering and
verification.
Sørensen Jannick Kirk (born 1967, Ph.D. 2011 from University of
Southern Denmark: “The Paradox of Personalisation”) is an associate
professor at Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University,
Denmark. Situated among computer engineering colleagues he examines
how technologies, policies and ideals interact in the going transformation
process of public service broadcasting and—media towards a position in
the new algorithmic media landscape. With a background as radio jour-
nalist (Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 1993–2000) approaches the
transformation problem not only as a technical challenge or a new policy
framing but also as a matter of keeping the ethos of public service also
in an algorithmic age. He teaches computer ethics and user experience
design to Computer Science students at Aalborg University.
Vermeulen Judith is a Ph.D. researcher at the Faculty of Law & Crim-
inology of Ghent University, Belgium. There, she is a member of the
Law & Technology research group, the Human Rights Centre as well as
the knowledge and research platform Privacy, Information Exchange, Law
Enforcement and Surveillance (PIXLES). She obtained a master’s degree
in law at Ghent University in 2017 and a master’s degree in European
law at the College of Europe in Bruges in 2018. Her research interests
include data protection law, human rights, European law, media law and
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
the (assessment of the need for) regulation of new technologies. With

her doctoral research, she explores the advantages and disadvantages of
online news recommendation, in particular with a view to formulating
policy recommendations to safeguard and promote news diversity.
Xu Jian is a senior lecturer in Communication and co-convenor of the
Asian Media and Cultural Studies Network, Deakin University, Australia.
He researches Chinese media and communication with a particular focus
on China’s internet politics and governance, propaganda in the digital
era, digital youth cultures and celebrity studies.
Young Catherine is a journalism researcher exploring editorial routines,
emerging forms of computational journalism, and audience analysis. More
specifically, her work centres upon the integration of technological inno-
vations into journalistic practice and the changing nature of news work in
the modern media environment. She received her Ph.D. from the Univer-
sity of Queensland, which focused on the use of audience measurement
and analysis techniques across a range of emerging digital news platforms.
Catherine works in Graduate Research Education and Development at
Queensland University of Technology and as a Sessional Academic at the
University of Queensland. Catherine earned her Bachelor of Communi-
cation and Bachelor of Journalism (Honours), for which she was awarded
a University medal, from the University of Queensland.
List of Figures
Fig. 8.1 Google’s portrayal of ancillary copyright reform 158

Fig. 8.2 German news publishers’ portrayal of ancillary copyright
reform 160
xvii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Toutiao’s meetings (yuetan) with Chinese administrative

authorities 35
Table 14.1 The diversity chain in the digital environment (online
written news) 275
Table 15.1 List of interviewees 292
xix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic

Distribution of the News
James Meese and Sara Bannerman
On 17 February 2021, Facebook stopped its Australian users from sharing

local or international news. In addition, Australian news organizations
that operated Facebook Pages were not only unable to share content on
their pages but also had their Pages wiped of historical content. Facebook
had been arguing with the Australian Government over a controversial
new law that would force platforms to pay for news content and had regu-
larly threatened to withdraw services from the country as the policy was
being developed. However, it was still something of a surprise when the
ban happened. Overnight, Facebook stopped serving news to an entire
country and no-one could stop them. They only reinstated news after the
Australian Government made last-minute concessions (Meade, Taylor and
Hurst 2021).
J. Meese (B)
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: james.meese@rmit.edu.au
S. Bannerman
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
e-mail: banners@mcmaster.ca
© The Author(s) 2022 1

J. Meese and S. Bannerman (eds.), The Algorithmic Distribution of News,
Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87086-7_1
2 J. MEESE AND S. BANNERMAN
Facebook has a history of making unilateral decisions around how news

is distributed on their platform. In January 2018, the company decided
to prioritize content from family and friends over content from Facebook
Pages across its entire platform (Wong 2018). However, news compa-
nies across the world used Facebook Pages to distribute stories to their
audiences. The change had a significant impact on outlets that focused
heavily on social distribution, forcing them to diversify their distribu-
tion strategies (Meese and Hurcombe 2020). The change may also
have had political impacts. Some have reported that Facebook tweaked
its algorithm to favour right-wing content after finding at the testing
stage that a significant amount of right-wing news content would be
removed under the new rules. Mother Jones reported that some left-wing
outlets (including their own) were targeted to ensure that more right-
wing content circulated after the algorithm change (Bauerlein and Jeffery
2020).
Google makes decisions in a similarly autonomous manner. The
company distributes algorithmically curated news through Google News
and delivers news content occasionally through Google Search. In some
countries, a “Top Stories” carousel appears at the top of relevant searches.
The company has been careful to build partnerships with publishers
and at one stage both sectors were working on the Accelerated Mobile
Pages (AMP) project, which would see news content delivered quickly
and seamlessly to people’s smartphones. However, the news sector soon
accused Google of focusing on their own interests and prioritizing
publishers who used AMP over competitors when selecting stories to
appear at the stop of search results (Scott 2018). Google admitted to
preferential treatment in late-2020 and announced they would no longer
focus on the use of AMP as the sole decision point when working out
which stories would appear in the coveted carousel positions (Jeffries
2020).
These three examples give us some insight into the problems that
start to appear when platforms engage in news distribution. They use
inscrutable algorithms to make significant decisions around the visibility
of news on their service, which can affect people who want to access news
and news outlets who want audiences to reach their websites. As a result,
these technology companies are not merely intermediaries or conduits but
have become critical gatekeepers (Blanchette 2021; Jeffries 2020; Napoli
2015; Russell 2019; Wallace 2018). When they make decisions, there is
1 INTRODUCTION: GOVERNING THE ALGORITHMIC DISTRIBUTION … 3
often little that the media industry can do about it. Thankfully, platform
regulation has started to become a critical policy issue.
Media activists and certain scholars have been concerned about the
rising power of digital platforms since the early 2010s (Daly 2016;
Fuchs 2013; Lovink 2011). However, the international policy commu-
nity only began paying serious attention to the problems associated with
the dominance of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (otherwise
known as GAFA) from the mid-2010s onwards (Galloway 2017). Poli-
cymakers and legislators started to focus on market concentration (Kahn
2016; Moore and Tambini 2018) and related issues like tax avoidance
(British Broadcasting Corporation 2020), privacy (Solove 2004; Cohen
2013), misinformation (or fake news) (Farkas and Schou 2019; Tandoc
Jr., Lim and Ling 2018) and, critically for this volume, the algorithmic
distribution of news.
Wider regulatory interest in the governance of the algorithmic distribu-
tion of news arose as platforms and news outlets developed an increasingly
strained relationship across the 2010s (Bell and Owen 2017). At the
beginning of the decade, many news outlets these new intermediaries
as a potential solution to their economic problems. While print adver-
tising revenue had dried up, news media companies figured that they
could build larger audiences through social media and direct these new
people to their online websites (Bossio 2017; Usher 2014). They could
then generate income by charging advertisers more money to advertise
on their increasingly popular websites. While some outlets were more
cynical of these new intermediaries, Google and Facebook were keen
to partner with news organizations and offered funded partnerships to
various outlets. Initially, the relationship was working out. Platforms got
a steady stream of professionally produced content and news outlets saw
a significant increase in traffic to their websites (Tandoc Jr 2014; Nielsen
and Ganter 2018; Zamith 2018).
However, a breakup was on the horizon. Platforms started to capture
an increasing amount of digital advertising revenue, which meant that
there were not many dollars left for news companies (Australian Compe-
tition and Consumer Commission 2019). Opaque and unpredictable
algorithms also caused major problems for news organizations (Christin
2020; Meese and Hurcombe 2020). Editors and journalists struggled
to gain visibility on these platforms. They made significant investments
at the behest of platforms, increasing their production of video content
after Facebook signalled that they would prioritize video (Tandoc Jr and
Maitra 2018). However, platforms would then change their mind and
leave media outlets in the lurch. The relationship became increasingly
tense and news outlets in various countries (most notably Australia),
started demanding regulatory intervention (Meese 2020). The media
sector suggested that the public interest outcomes associated with the
distribution of news were being harmed by this increasingly unworkable
relationship. They also argued that platforms were essentially stealing their
content and called for news organizations to be paid for the snippets of
content that appeared on search results or on Facebook News Feeds (Flew
and Wilding, 2020; Meese, 2020).
Further impetus for reform came from policymakers, legislators and
scholars who were concerned about what the convergence of news, plat-
forms and algorithms meant for democracy. Initial worries were about the
prospect of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” appearing. These terms
were coined by Eli Pariser (2011) and Cass Sunstein (2018), respectively,
in response to the growing personalization of online content. Pariser
worried that algorithms might only deliver a limited selection of news
to people, reinforcing existing beliefs, and Sunstein was concerned about
the homogenization of political discourse across social networks. Even-
tually, Axel Bruns (2019, 8) showed that people had much more diverse
media diets than these concepts suggested, which themselves were based
on “hypothetical thought experiments or personal anecdotes”. Neverthe-
less, the potential of platforms to unilaterally decide how and when people
would access news and other content was still of concern. As a result, poli-
cymakers started to focus on algorithmic transparency and the operation
of recommender systems from the mid-2010s onwards.
The emergence of these two related policy trajectories has seen coun-
tries across the world propose or implement major reforms, which
specifically address the algorithmic distribution of news. The collection
grapples with this moment of reform, focusing on countries outside
of the United States. This geographic distinction is important for two
reasons. Firstly, much of the regulatory concern and activity is occur-
ring in countries who have to respond to the rapid growth of US-based
platforms (Meese 2020). The United States, on the other hand, has
generally taken a relaxed approach to platform regulation until the late-
2010s, whereas other jurisdictions have been actively considering reform
for a longer period of time. Secondly, algorithmic distribution is not just

an issue for democratic countries. For example, Chinese platforms also
distribute news in this way, but their political system ends up producing
somewhat different regulatory interventions. This international approach
allows us to provide a comprehensive discussion around the different
ways that countries have responded to algorithmic distribution as a social
phenomenon and a policy problem.
The chapters in this volume cover the policy responses of a diverse set
of countries to the algorithmic distribution of news—a transformation
in news business models led, in a large part, by American multina-
tional platforms. We examine policy responses to these changes from
around the world—in Europe (Chapter 7 by David Lindsay, Chapter 8
by Christian Herzog, Christopher Buschow, and Alessandro Immanuel
Beil, Chapter 15 by Jannick Kirk Sørensen, and Chapter 14 by Judith
Vermulen), including Switzerland (Chapter 12 by Colin Porlezza) and
Germany (Chapter 11 by Kerstin Liesem; Chapter 8 by Christian Herzog,
Christopher Buschow, and Alessandro Immanuel Beil); in the Asia
Pacific region, including New Zealand (Chapter 10 by Merja Myllylahti),
Australia (Chapter 7 by David Lindsay; Chapter 9 by Tai Neilson and
Baskaran Balasingham; Chapter 6 by James Meese; and Chapter 4 by
Catherine Young), and China (Chapter 2 by Jian Xu and Terry Flew;
in North America, including Canada (Chapter 3 by Nicole Blanchett,
Fenwick McKelvey and Colette Brin); and in Sub-Saharan Africa in Kenya
(Chapter 5 by George Ogola and David Cheruiyot). We find common-
alities across many of these regions—particularly the tendency in some
countries to follow the regulatory lead of more powerful countries—as
well as differences, including differences in the policy tools chosen to
approach the algorithmic distribution of news.
The rest of our introduction proceeds as follows. We canvass these
regulatory trends and outline some of the more popular conceptual
responses. We go on to discuss historical institutionalism, the theoretical
and methodological approach that informs the collection as a whole. After
this summarize the major themes from this collection, before introducing
each chapter and ending with a reflection on future research directions
for journalism and media policy scholars.
Algorithmic Governance:
Transparency, Diversity or Departure
As part of this wider regulatory pushback, regional groupings and indi-
vidual countries are actively working regulate recommender systems and
other forms of algorithmic distribution. One approach involves intro-
ducing specific regulations to provide transparency about how these
systems work. The European Union and its member states are deciding
whether or not to adopt a proposed Digital Services Act (DSA), a
wide-ranging reform that aims to regulate large online intermediaries
across a variety of domains, from content takedowns to online advertising
(Helberger 2021). Alongside these areas, the proposed reform also aims
to give individuals transparency around recommender systems through
Article 29. The Act would require specified platforms to make public what
“the main parameters of their recommender system are and the options
for users to modify or influence those parameters” (Helberger 2021).
However, as Natali Helberger (2021) and colleagues explain, transparency
does not necessarily mean control. Platforms may not be required to
provide these options and moreover, even if they do so, individuals may be
forced to choose between two or three subpar options, none of which may
be aligned with “broader public and societal values” (Helberger 2021).
This turn towards transparency is evident in other jurisdictions as well,
most notably Australia. In this jurisdiction, the major outcome of this
recent international reform moment has been an inquiry around digital
platforms, which Chapters 6, 7 and 9 in this volume discuss in more
detail. The first major proposal to emerge from the inquiry was the
News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), which forced platforms to form
commercial agreements with news outlets around the use of their content
(Flew, Gillett, Martin and Sunman 2021). However, somewhat hidden in
the Act that featured this headline reform were a number of additional
standards that designated platforms would be required to follow.1 One
such standard required platforms to give news outlets advance notifica-
tion of algorithm changes if it affected referral traffic to news content.
In contrast to the DSA, this form of transparency is situated within the
broader corporatist arrangement of the NMBC and as a result, specifi-
cally focuses on how algorithms impact on one industry. This corporatist
1 The minister responsible—the Treasurer—has to designate a platform before these

laws can apply. At time of writing, no platforms are designated.
arrangement is also evident by the fact that platforms and publishers can
agree to “contract out” of any or all minimum standards (i.e. agree that
they will not apply). The UK and Canada have watched the Australian
reform process closely and are considering introducing similar or related
reforms (Meese, 2020).
Other interventions address algorithmic distribution from the perspec-
tive of media diversity. The Australian reform process includes a non-
discrimination provision that requires designated platforms to not choose
between news outlets based on the outcome of commercial negotia-
tions or other external factors (Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission 2019). Germany’s Interstate Media Treaty (discussed in this
volume) has a similar reform that prohibits large platforms from unfairly
discriminating between news outlets (Nelson and Jaursch 2020). These
are important reforms that start to treat platforms as public infrastruc-
tures. Their content becomes subject to state regulation, which aims to
ensure that people get a diverse selection of news delivered to them.
Leaving aside the larger debates around the ongoing focus on content
published across organizations (external diversity), at the expense of diver-
sifying content published within organizations (internal diversity), these
reforms do not actively attempt to impose diversity requirements on plat-
forms (Karppinen 2013; Loecherbach, Moeller, Trilling and van Atteveldt
2020). The aim is to ensure that no outlet is unfairly excluded on these
platforms, rather than genuinely understand what a diverse media selec-
tion on social media could look like. Chapters 14 and 15 weigh up the
value of more interventionist approaches to the diversity problem.
Other approaches are either more idealistic or ideological. In the ideal-
istic category, we could consider the growing interest building publicly
funded services to replace their commercial equivalents. For example,
instead of forcing Google to follow certain publicly oriented outcomes,
could a country (or perhaps, the world) just publicly fund a search engine?
Related outcomes associated with the public interest (Napoli, 2019), like
securing media diversity, might be achieved with less friction through this
approach. Existing work on the topic suggests that “public service models
for search engines – and especially social networking – would likely func-
tion poorly if made available only on a national basis” (Andrejevic 2013,
131) but suggests that international co-operation could be a possibility.
Scholars have even argued that “nonmarket provision” has become even
more critical in the current climate because existing policymaking efforts
are failing to genuinely grapple with the fact that platforms are fundamen-
tally opposed to democratic outcomes (Cammaerts and Mansell 2020,
147). Chapter 13 engages with these questions and considers whether an
open-sourced social media platform, supported by public service media
could break through the current state of platform dominance.
Conversely, in the ideological category, we have a diversity of policy
responses that are more politically inflected. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
two standout nations in this regard are the United States and China.
The United States has been hesitant to regulate platforms in any domain,
let alone in reference to the algorithmic distribution of news. This is
partially due to the fact that the leading transnational platforms are based
in this jurisdiction, and the nation has had a vested interest in ensuring
their success (Popiel 2018). The country’s strong commitment to free
speech through the First Amendment has also influenced its approach
to online platform regulation. The Department of Justice (2020) has
launched an antitrust suit against Google and Congress is considering
an algorithmic accountability act, which would provide more oversight
around automated decision-making systems (Algorithmic Accountability
Act of 2019). However, there has been no sign that the Congress will
regulate how algorithmic systems shape the circulation of news. China
has taken the opposite approach and as one of our chapters will show, has
taken an active role in this area. The relevant regulatory bodies orga-
nize regular meetings with the leading news aggregation service Jinri
Toutiao (Today’s Headlines), while the Chinese state media has organized
a competing product called Renminhao (Good People).
Through this brief survey of regulatory trends, we see that a number
of countries are regulating platforms in an attempt to manage the algo-
rithmic distribution of news. We have identified a number of different
approaches, which as we will see throughout the collection, are often
influenced by local political contexts and broader regional developments.
This focus on nations and regions furthers another goal of this collec-
tion, which is to explore the geopolitics of media regulation. China is
working to transform its nation into a platform and export this digital
infrastructure across the world, while maintaining a high level of internal
control (Choudary 2020). In contrast, the United States is touting its
transnational platform companies as national success stories and tracking
China’s growing tendency to exhibit its global strength through tech-
nological means (Weber 2018). Many of the countries in our collection
are stuck in the middle of this tech-influenced geopolitical manoeuvring
and are attempting to establish some independence from the United

States, without subsequently becoming dependent on China. Our collec-
tion features a number of small (Switzerland, New Zealand) and middle
powers (Canada, Australia) attempting to negotiate this difficult situation.
Major Concepts in News,

Algorithms and the Public Interest
The scholarly debate around the algorithmic distribution of news has
begun to mature as regulatory reforms have occurred. The vague fears
and catchy phrases of Sunstein (2018) (“echo chambers”) and Pariser
(“filter bubbles”) (2011) have given way to rigorous research projects
and considered conceptual development. Journalism scholars have offered
important insights. There has been significant research on the gradual
introduction of algorithmic logics into newsrooms. Scholars have tracked
the increasing use of analytics to make editorial decisions (Christin and
Petre 2020; Tandoc Jr 2014; Petre 2015; Zamith 2018), the growing
focus on distribution through digital platforms (Diakopolous 2019;
Bossio 2017) and the importance of news aggregation systems and
services (Coddington 2019). The field has also noted that these new
intermediaries are gatekeepers who have as much capacity to select and
feature news as traditional gatekeepers (like the editor of a newspaper)
(Shoemaker and Vos 2009; Wallace 2018). Julian Wallace has gone so far
as to propose a new theoretical model of gatekeeping to better address
the complex distributional networks now in operation (Wallace 2018).
Alongside this work is a growing body of media policy scholarship,
which this collection contributes to. Natali Helberger has established
a comprehensive research agenda around news recommender systems
that has made significant empirical and theoretical contributions. Along-
side her colleagues, she found that in certain circumstances algorithmic
recommendations can mimic the sort of news diversity found in recom-
mendations made by human editors (Möller, Trilling, Helberger and van
Es 2018). Her other work has offered an important critical perspective on
algorithmic recommendations, explaining that these technical advances
could have positive and negative implications, depending on how one
understands democracy. She suggests recommenders that emphasize facil-
itating individuals’ management of their information diets, and recom-
menders that focus on presenting information readers “ought to read” to
“alert, inform or even educate readers and push them out of their intellec-
tual comfort zones” can both be compatible with democracy (Helberger
2019, 1010).
Philip Napoli (2019) has also made an important foundational contri-
bution in this area. He (along with Robyn Caplan) argues that social
media platforms need to be treated as publishers (essentially compa-
rable to other media outlets) and actively regulated in the public interest
(Napoli and Caplan 2017). It is clear from this our introduction and
contributions throughout this volume that governments have followed
this directive only in the most general sense. They have approached
platforms and their algorithms as regulatable objects but have not estab-
lished a complete equivalence between platforms and publishers. Many
of these reform agendas also appear to align with the goals of the
commercial media industry or interest groups across the cultural policy
sector. This speaks to a wider historical problem across media policy-
making, which sees powerful actors prioritized over civil society and
the wider public (Flew, Gillett, Martin, and Sunman 2021; Freedman
2008).
Indeed, many of our featured jurisdictions appear to have engaged in
relatively light-touch regulation when viewed against publicly oriented
reforms proposed by scholars (Helberger 2019) or proposals of non-
market alternatives (Andrejevic 2013; Cammaerts and Mansell 2020).
Other researchers question whether the dominant regulatory approaches
we have identified above are even taking the right conceptual approach;
Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford (2018) ask if growing demands for
algorithmic transparency are adequate to ensure algorithmic account-
ability. They argue that regulators and policymakers need to adopt a
systemic approach of looking at the operational logic of algorithmic
systems and identifying who is involved as an actor, who has the power
to intervene and whether the system is legible enough to be deployed,
amongst other things. These alternative approaches present useful insights
for those countries in our collection that are still considering reform
and underline the fact that all interested parties have not converged
around one ideal model to regulate algorithms, platforms and the public
sphere.
Historical Institutionalism: Path

Dependency, Change and Critical Junctures
The above discussion of power, gatekeeping and the public interest leads
us to historical institutionalism, the conceptual framework that sits at the
heart of our collection. Historical institutionalism sits within a broader set
of “new institutionalist” approaches (March and Olsen 1983) that aim to
account for the role of institutions across society. As one of us has previ-
ously noted, communication scholarship has engaged with institutional
theory in an ad-hoc manner and “tend[s] to speak of new institution-
alism without explicitly distinguishing one institutionalism from another”
(Bannerman and Haggart 2015, 2). If more specificity is provided,
scholars tend to focus on sociological institutionalism, an approach
that focuses on cultural practices within organizations (DiMaggio and
Powell 1983). Existing journalism scholarship has used this framework
to understand how changing newsroom practices affect the institution
of journalism (Anderson, 2012; Benson, 1999; Benson, 2004; 2006). It
has also been used to explore how Facebook’s algorithmic logics have
intersected with journalism (Caplan and boyd 2018).
In contrast, historical institutionalism focuses on the history of each
institution as playing a defining role in its subsequent development. The
role of history is accounted for through the concept of path dependency,
the idea that “past decisions tend to constrain future institutional change”
(Bannerman and Haggart 2015, 5). The approach rejects the claim that
the future is radically unknowable and instead argues that previous institu-
tional decisions inform and shape future outcomes. Another core concept
is the idea of the critical juncture. While institutions are generally viewed
as path dependent and stable, at important points there is a moment of
disruption where institutional arrangements are uncertain, and change is
seriously considered (Capoccia 2015). The collection views the growing
importance of platform regulation and the growth of algorithmic distri-
bution as critical junctures. There is tension between acknowledging the
path dependencies of history and examining change (which is also rooted
in past fissures and tensions). Critical junctures can provide moments of
possible agency, even as actors are never fully free from existing path
dependencies. Instead, these moments either reinforce institutions (and
associated path dependencies) or weaken them (Bannerman and Haggart
2015). Across our chapters, we can see how different countries and jour-
nalism more broadly have responded to these moments and assess the
extent to which different actors can actually make radical departures.
Importantly for this collection, historical institutionalism also allows
scholars to focus on the structural relationships between different institu-
tions. This is because it accounts for power relations as part of its overall
approach and places a greater focus on political contests (Bannerman
and Haggart 2015). This makes it arguably suited to studies of policy
reform, opposing interests and difficult moments of institutional change.
The collection features contributors from a variety of disciplinary back-
grounds; not all of our contributors specifically adopt historical institu-
tionalism. However, each chapter is attuned to the wider concerns of
this approach, recognizing the importance of historical developments and
accounting for moments of continuity and change.
Change and Path Dependency:

The Findings of This Volume
The chapters that follow reveal both significant change and significant
path dependency in news production and related policies. Markets and
business structures have undergone change and disruption, as Meese,
Porlezza, and Young note in this volume. The emergence of players
like Facebook and Google News has significantly changed and disrupted
advertising markets and the business models of journalism organizations
and news publishers. This emergence has also brought structural changes
to news consumption practices, production processes, and to newsrooms’
infrastructures, interactions with readers (Young) and distribution prac-
tices (Porlezza; Young). More broadly, these changes are tied to changes
across media systems and to a shift, as Hrynyshyn notes, from mass media
to a more individualized media system.
A raft of significant legal and policy changes, from the privatization
of telecommunications (Ogola and Cheruiyot) to the advent of artifi-
cial intelligence policies (Porlezza, Myllylahti), lie behind and respond
to the rise of algorithmic news distributors. Chapters in this volume
address the variety of policy realms that are being adapted in response
to the algorithmic distribution of news, from copyright (Lindsay; Herzog,
Buschow, and Beil; Liesem; Meese), competition policy (Lindsay; Neilson
and Balasingham, Meese), hate speech (Liesem; Myllylahti), media diver-
sity (Sørensen, Vermullen), infrastructure policy (Hrynyshyn), and media
licensing and censorship practices (Xu and Terry Flew). Insofar as the
policy changes at hand regulate the gatekeeping functions (Blanchette,
McKelvey and Brin), production and distribution of news, they arguably
regulate structures that are of “systemic importance” for democracies
(Gersemann 2019 quoted in Herzog, Buschow, and Beil) and author-
itarian countries alike. Chapters in this volume stretch from covering
the recent histories of policies that are currently in place, to spec-
ulative analyses of policy changes of the potential future—those that
might govern the localization of platform infrastructures (Hrynyshyn) and
media diversity (Vermulen, Sørensen).
Algorithms themselves also undergo change, as when Facebook altered
its news feed algorithm following the Cambridge Analytica scandal,
as Merja Myllylahti and James Meese discuss in this volume. Such
changes can have dramatic effects on some news companies (Myllylahti,
Meese) and, potentially, on the relative promotion of political perspectives
(Meese). Future potential recommender and news distribution technolo-
gies could bring cause further changes to the algorithmic distribution of
news (Vermulen, Sørensen).
While change may be a constant fact of life, the authors in this
volume identify several changes as critical junctures. Some critical junc-
tures are brought by events external to policy; the Christchurch mosque
terrorist attacks in March 2019 (Myllylahti), the COVID-19 pandemic
(Meese), and the Capitol riots of January 2021 (Hrynyshyn) were—each
in different ways—moments of important rethinking about the role and
effects of social media platforms in distributing news along with hate,
terrorist communications and misinformation. Others are internal to the
course of law and policymaking itself—new approaches introduced as past
approaches break down, are undermined, or become “no longer viable”
(Herzog, Buschow, and Beil). These include the introduction of a new
ancillary copyright, which then drove “copyright reform across the EU
and elsewhere” (Herzog, Buschow, and Beil); the German Interstate
Media Treaty and NetzDG, which departed from previous regulatory
approaches (Leisem); and the Australian News Media Bargaining Code
(Neilson and Balasingham), now influential as a possible model for other
countries, to name a few.
Despite a number of approaches that bring significant or founda-
tional change, there are also significant path dependencies not only in
law and policymaking, but also in media industries, journalistic practices,
and business models. Established and powerful actors—including plat-

forms themselves—sometimes seek to maintain the status quo if existing
frameworks serve their interests (Herzog, Buschow, and Beil). Existing
institutional arrangements and business models can hold back policy
change (Meese). Because existing laws and policies serve powerful polit-
ical and business interests, these can prove difficult to shift, particularly if
political priorities remain aligned with existing laws and regulations (Xu
and Flew; Myllylahti). Business models (like the news media’s reliance on
advertising) can also become entrenched, along with attendant regulatory
systems. These, along with barriers to entry for new players (Herzog,
Buschow, and Beil) and the dependencies of longstanding players on
existing business ecosystems (Meese), can prove to withstand—for better
or for worse—significant technological and economic change (Ogola and
Cheruiyot; Meese). Journalistic practices also, in many cases, prove at least
partially resilient to the changes brought by new technologies and distri-
bution practices (Young; Ogola and Cheruiyot; Blanchette, McKelvey,
and Brin).
Chapter Overview
In section one, “In the newsroom: algorithms, bots, business models, and
privacy”, Jian Xu and Terry Flew give a detailed review of the Chinese
Government’s response to the algorithmic distribution of news and the
incorporation of algorithms into its existing policies of Internet censor-
ship and regulation. Nicole Blanchette, Fenwick McKelvey and Colette
Brin discuss the ways that algorithms and social media have changed
news production and distribution across Canadian newsrooms and outline
subsequent policy responses. Catherine Young discusses the use of a
chatbot by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and George Ogola
and David Cheruiyot review the limited use of algorithms and metrics by
Kenyan news media. These Canadian, Australian and Kenyan case studies
emphasize the national policy contexts in which the algorithmic distribu-
tion of news is situated, underlining the need for government policy to
be revised in light of these practices—particularly in relation to the collec-
tion of personal information by newsrooms in the course of conducting
chatbot or analytic operations. James Meese, focusing on Australia, sheds
light on the difficulties news organizations have had in responding to
the algorithmic distribution of news with new business models, and the
potential inadequacies of government responses under the New Media

Bargaining Code that has recently been established.
In section two, we review the two leading policy approaches that have
emerged to the algorithmic distribution of news: copyright reform and
competition law reform. David Lyndsay compares the two approaches,
arguing that the competition law approach is better suited to the policy
problem at hand, focused on market power. Herzog, Buschow and Beil
argue, in a review of the major statements of stakeholders, that a private
property vision of copyright reigns in the establishment of ancillary copy-
right—or a right of publishers to receive copyright payments for the use
of news snippets by news aggregators like Google News. Tai Neilson and
Baskaran Balasingham give a helpful review of the centrality of compe-
tition law in Australia’s recently implemented reforms, and ask whether
competition law could be extended to other areas of media policy, most
notably media pluralism.
In section three, chapters focus on some of the challenges entailed in
mounting regulations to respond to the algorithmic distribution of news.
Merja Myllylahti reviews the challenges faced in New Zealand, which
has not extended its active policy response following the Christchurch
mosque terrorist attacks around hate speech and radicalization to other
areas of platform regulation; Kerstin Liesem reviews the German approach
to platform regulation, and Colin Porlezza discusses the challenges that
Switzerland faces in studying and ultimately responding to platform regu-
lation in light of the significant moves made by powerful neighbours
like Germany. Common themes seen here are the need for less powerful
countries to follow the regulatory trends of their more powerful trading
partners, particularly in light of an overall reluctance to regulate social
media in light of historically liberal media policies.
In the final section, we discuss some possible future regulatory areas.
Derek Hrynyshyn proposes a radical break with social media infrastruc-
tures and current regulatory policies intended to address the fundamental
public policy problems posed when asking—or allowing—profit-seeking
platforms based on complex algorithms to govern speech. In the next two
chapters, Judith Vermulen and Jannick Kirk Sørensen review the promises,
possibilities and perils of designing or regulating news recommenders to
encompass the policy objectives of exposing users to a diversity of views
and content.
Future Directions: The Geopolitics

of Communication Policy
The chapters in this volume reveal the growing importance of nation
states and regional groupings in policy reform. Communications policy
researchers have challenged the excessively utopian narratives of globaliza-
tion and have acknowledged that the state continues to play a critical role
in policy reform and implementation (Flew, Iosifidis and Steemers 2016;
Flew and Waisbord 2015). An adjacent strand of research has pointed to
the emergence of a potential Splinternet (Malcomson 2016; Hoffman,
Lazanski and Taylor 2020). With Europe, China and the United States
regulating the Internet in vastly different ways, some suggest that these
underlying legal frameworks could see the online world separate into
“the authoritarian Internet, the bourgeois European Internet [and] the
commercial American Internet” (Nabben, Poblet and Gardner-Stephen
2020, 747; O’Hara and Hall 2020). Throughout our collection, we see
smaller and middle powers respond in a variety of ways. For example,
Switzerland are policy followers and wait to see what larger states in
their region do, whereas Australia has worked to establish themselves as
international policy leaders. Powerful nation states (China) and regional
groupings (the European Union) are very much able to act independently
and take a more interventionist approach.
In response to this growing regional divergence amongst stronger
actors, we are seeing a growth in international connections and collabora-
tion. Examples include the launch of the International Grand Committee,
an ad-hoc group of parliamentary representatives from around the world
who meet to discuss technology policy, and the Christchurch Call, a
New Zealand led initiative to prohibit the circulation of terrorist content
online. We also see more informal and gradual efforts at policy transla-
tion, with the Canadian government closely watching the progress of an
Australian reform that forced platforms to pay for news, a policy idea that
was first tested in Europe (Meese 2020). These trends have given some
people hope that there may be potential for genuine multilateral responses
to algorithmic power.
However, multilateralism is difficult to achieve in practice, even
amongst smaller nations who are less inclined (and less able) to establish
and prosecute their own independent regulatory agenda. In this volume,
contributors discuss how algorithmic distribution intersects with media
policy and adjacent areas like competition law and privacy. We see how
each nation’s legal, social and cultural contexts produce vastly different
regulatory approaches. Some countries do not provide public funding
to the media (Pickard 2019) whereas others offer generous press subsi-
dies (Ots 2009). Governments may view media pluralism in completely
different ways and have contrasting feelings about the value of national
content or whether regulators should be involved in mandating algo-
rithmic diversity. This does not mean that effective multilateralism and
cross-border collaboration are impossible. Instead, it is a genuine chal-
lenge, one that will need to be carefully addressed as future reform
agendas are canvassed.
Our collection suggests several additional areas for future research.
Most critically, this collection treats distribution seriously (Braun, 2019;
Lobato, 2012) and places it at the centre of conversations around
journalism and media policy. Journalism scholarship tends to focus on
the production and output of news and so “much of the literature
on media distribution comes from scholars focused on other areas of
communication” (Braun 2019, 3). The growing importance of algo-
rithmic distribution means that this often-unloved intermediate space,
sitting between production and consumption, must be given greater
attention. While exceptional work on recommender systems has already
been conducted (Coddington 2019; Helberger 2019), more research is
needed, particularly in light of these recent reforms. One research trajec-
tory, worthy of further exploration is the question of whether people
want more control and choice when using news recommender systems
(Harambam, Bountouridis, Makhortykh and Van Hoboken 2019). Would
they be interested in tweaking their algorithms, and would their changes
even affect the wider sociotechnical systems of which they are a part
(Ananny and Crawford 2018)?
The collection sets the stage for more targeted comparative research
across a number of topics. We have offered a necessarily limited survey of
recent developments and are writing this introduction at a critical junc-
ture. As this volume came together, governments were introducing or
actively considering regulations around the algorithmic distribution of
the news. In a few years, long-term outcomes can be fully assessed and
more substantive comparisons between countries can be drawn. Scholar-
ship in this area can also provide more granular accounts of these reforms
and attend to differences between specific countries. Similar compara-
tive work will need to be conducted around other relevant media policy
issues. Media diversity has come to the fore in this volume and as many
before us have noted, the concept is still ill-defined (Karppinen 2013;

Loecherbach, Moeller, Trilling and van Atteveldt 2020). It is unclear
how specific countries will operationalize the term in an algorithmic
context and divergence between nations is likely here. Finally, the survival
of many journalism organizations is an ongoing issue. Countries and
regions will take different approaches to public funding, commercializa-
tion and press freedom. Comparative work can help us understand the
path dependencies that inform policy choices in different jurisdictions and
the effectiveness of specific interventions.
In closing, it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge that this edited
collection was written during a global pandemic, with the contract signed
just weeks before the world was thrown into chaos. Our international
group of collaborators had to face significant personal and professional
challenges as this volume came together and we thank them for their
commitment during this difficult time. Misinformation also circulated
across social media platforms as people struggled to come to terms with
the reality of the situation. Governments and international bodies were
forced to react in real-time. They introduced education campaigns and
encouraged platforms to surface authorized information about the virus.
These developments point to the ongoing problems that surround algo-
rithmic distribution more generally and suggest that it will be an active
policy issue for some time to come.
We hope you enjoy the volume.
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PART I
In the Newsroom: Algorithms, Bots,

Business Models, and Privacy
CHAPTER 2
Governing the Algorithmic Distribution

of News in China: The Case of Jinri Toutiao
Jian Xu and Terry Flew
Governance and the Institutional

Politics of Algorithmic Systems
The concept of governance has become increasingly important in media
and communications studies in general, and around digital and social
media in particular (Flew 2015; Ginosar 2013; Linke and Zerfass 2013;
Parathasarathi 2010; Puppis 2010). This is in line with a broader ‘turn to
governance’ in studies of policy and regulation, associated with new insti-
tutionalism, where the analytical focus shifted from the state as a coherent
entity that sat outside of, and regulated, an equally reified ‘society’ (March
J. Xu (B)
Deakin University, Burwood, Australia
e-mail: j.xu@deakin.edu.au
T. Flew
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: terry.flew@sydney.edu.au
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Meese and S. Bannerman (eds.), The Algorithmic Distribution of News,
Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87086-7_2
28 J. XU AND T. FLEW
and Olsen 1984). Instead, new institutionalism pointed to the impor-

tance of analysing both state and non-state actors as shaping particular
regulatory fields, and observing how internal processes of decision-
making within and between institutions and organisations shaped societal
outcomes (Bannerman and Haggart 2015; Ostrom 2010; Williamson
2000).
New institutionalism has been linked in some accounts to the idea of
‘governance-beyond-the-state’ (Swyngedouw 2005). This focus on ‘post-
state’ governance and a ‘post-regulatory’ order (Black 2001) has decen-
tred the state in policy analysis in favour of policy networks consisting
of multiple institutional actors. Here, the state becomes ‘just a node
(however important) of a particular network’ (Castells 2009, 19). Such
approaches align with talk of a ‘governance revolution’ among govern-
ment policy-makers, as behavioural techniques such as ‘nudging’ and the
engagement of non-government actors increasingly shape government
regulation (Bevir 2011; Freiberg 2010; Halpern 2015; Thaler 2015). As
a consequence, traditional regulatory tools and techniques, or ‘command-
and-control’ regulation, is increasingly seen as only one of many options
available to policy-makers to shape the conduct of regulated entities
(Baldwin et al. 2012).
Governance is a particularly important concept with regard to digital
platforms and the role played by algorithms in gathering, sorting and
distributing social data. Gillespie (2018a, 2018b) has made the point
that activities such as content moderation are not a strategic choice made
by digital platforms—to moderate or not to moderate—but are in fact
intrinsic to platforms themselves, which require the optimisation of data
distribution in order to best align multiple stakeholders that interact on
the platform, meaning that ‘everything on a platform is designed and
orchestrated’ (Gillespie (2018a, 2018b). Governance practices are, there-
fore, intrinsic to platform businesses, as they align the value propositions
of different parties that interact on the platforms (content publishers,
advertisers and site users, for example, or people seeking transport and
those providing it), and enable platform businesses to manage the many
and varied conflicts likely to arise in brokering such relationships. Gover-
nance is thus as constitutive of what platforms are as data, algorithms and
interfaces (Flew 2021).
At the same time, as Ginosar has observed, governance has to go
beyond being a mere ‘buzzword’ in media and communication stud-
ies’ and ‘the institutional arrangement of such mixtures of actors and in
2 GOVERNING THE ALGORITHMIC DISTRIBUTION OF NEWS IN CHINA … 29
particular societal and industrial actors’ (Ginosar 2013, 363) needs to be

clarified. At the very least, we need to differentiate between what Gillespie
termed ‘governance of platforms’, or the legal, regulatory and institu-
tional frameworks that impact upon platform businesses from the outside,
and ‘governance by platforms’ and the role played by both human and
non-human actors within platform businesses to make the platforms oper-
ational and to maximise value in an environment characterised by multiple
participants and stakeholders (Gillespie 2018a, b). There is much debate
about algorithmic governance, or the ways in which algorithms can func-
tion as institutions as they apply ‘norms and rules that affect behavior
on the supply and demand side, as a set of rules and routines that both
limit activities and create new room for maneuver’ (Just and Latzer 2017,
244). But algorithms are not simply ‘black boxes’, immune from human
intervention or institutional regulation (Massanari 2017; Pasquale 2016).
Decisions made about the algorithmic distribution of content are shaped
by multiple factors, which in turn can in many cases be traced back to the
organisations governing platforms themselves, or to external entities such
as regulators setting priorities around the conduct of such organisations.
Algorithms and algorithmic systems have been increasingly applied in
the public and private sectors to support a variety of decision-making
mechanisms, from AI government and intelligent transportation systems
to e-commerce and marketing campaigns. Algorithms are the rules and
processes established for activities including calculation, data processing
and automated reasoning, and algorithmic systems refer to ‘the process
that assigns (contextualized) relevance to information elements of a data
set by an automated, statistical assessment of decentrally generated data
signals’ (Just and Latzer 2017, 241) or ‘the combination of algorithms,
data and the interface process that together determine the outcomes that
affect end users’ (Koene et al. 2019). Algorithmic systems are increasingly
prominent in the global news industry, as news is increasingly accessed
online or through digital and mobile devices, and as decisions around
news production, distribution, consumption and advertising are increas-
ingly driven by data and by automated processes for applying data to
decision-making (Wilding et al. 2018).
The rise of algorithmic systems in the news process has posed a
series of ethical challenges on contemporary news industry, such as algo-
rithmic bias, accountability and transparency, as well as its ‘echo chamber’
or ‘filter bubble’ effect upon users (Bruns 2019; Diakopoulos 2015;
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The Algorithmic Distribution of News

• To what extent do new developments in platforms, and approaches to

ISSN 2634-6192 ISSN 2634-6206 (electronic)

Cover credit: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com

We would like to thank Edward Hurcombe who provided valuable admin-

1 Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic

Part I In the Newsroom: Algorithms, Bots, Business

6 Advertising, Algorithms and Audiences: The

Part II Current Approaches: Copyright or Competition

Part III Regulatory Challenges

Part IV Future Horizons: Algorithms and Media Policy

15 The Shortcomings of the Diversity Diet: Public

Balasingham Baskaran is an assistant professor at the Utrecht Univer-

content creation. She previously worked as a news writer and producer

Communications University of China, and an honorary professor at the

McKelvey Fenwick is an associate professor in the Department of

A Cross-Continental Study (2016), co-edited with Peter Anderson and

the (assessment of the need for) regulation of new technologies. With

Fig. 8.1 Google’s portrayal of ancillary copyright reform 158

Table 2.1 Toutiao’s meetings (yuetan) with Chinese administrative

Introduction: Governing the Algorithmic

James Meese and Sara Bannerman

On 17 February 2021, Facebook stopped its Australian users from sharing

© The Author(s) 2022 1

Facebook has a history of making unilateral decisions around how news

for a longer period of time. Secondly, algorithmic distribution is not just

1 The minister responsible—the Treasurer—has to designate a platform before these

and are attempting to establish some independence from the United

Major Concepts in News,

Historical Institutionalism: Path

Change and Path Dependency:

and business models. Established and powerful actors—including plat-

potential inadequacies of government responses under the New Media

Future Directions: The Geopolitics

before us have noted, the concept is still ill-defined (Karppinen 2013;

Shoemaker, Pamela and Timothy Vos. Gatekeeping theory. London: Routledge,

In the Newsroom: Algorithms, Bots,

Governing the Algorithmic Distribution

Jian Xu and Terry Flew

Governance and the Institutional

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

and Olsen 1984). Instead, new institutionalism pointed to the impor-

particular societal and industrial actors’ (Ginosar 2013, 363) needs to be

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

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