Accountability And Ethical Concerns Of News Recommendation Algorithm

With the development of artificial intelligence technology,algorithm is increasingly applied in the procedure of news collection,production,distribution and feedback.However,news algorithm,as a cross-border integration of computer industry and journalism,is difficult to be held accountable by general public and traditional regulatory authorities with its encapsulation,which makes the public suspicious of its potential ethical problems.Since the Hippocratic oath of ancient Greece,the ethical norms of the professional community have served as a social contract aimed at eliminating public doubts and enhancing social trust.Especially until the rise of professionalism in various industries at the end of the 19th century,ethical norms even served as a sign of the maturity of a professional community.This also made ethical norm a typical avenue investigating professional communities.The human-computer collaboration model of news recommendation algorithm appears in the overlapping field of journalism and computer industry where the context of division of labor misaligns.Theoretically,what normative values should be involved in the ethical norms?Are there any deviations between the actual practitioners’ perceptions of ethical values and their actions?This study extracted the professional community’s consensus on the value norms by analyzing the ethical norms of the journalism and the computer industry in a realistic way.As a comparison,this study also conducted content analysis on 135 patent texts of news recommendation algorithm to interrogate whether there is a discrepancy between the actual behavioral values embedded in the program and the theoretical normative requirements.This study found that the ethic of algorithmic journalism involves six common values:Truth and Accuracy,Objectivity and Non-discrimination,Data Processing and Privacy Protection,Correction and Accountability,Avoidance of Conflicts of Interest,and Respect for Innovation.Among them,the discipline of Data Processing and Privacy Protection is embodied in the usage of personal data and respect for autonomy in moral.The discipline of Truth and Accuracy examines the preciseness of algorithmic decision-making from two dimensions:model and data.The discipline of Objectivity and Non-discrimination involes data bias,presenting bias and machine bias consisting of classification,prioritization,association,and filtering.The significance of this research lied in the investigation of practitioners’ awareness and usage of algorithmic tools by examining the disarepancy between behavior and norms.In addition,this study also attempted to regard the ethical norms of news algorithm as a way to disclose the boundaries of algorithmic transparency,and to explore which factors are expected to improve accountability.