Regulating news recommender systems in light of the rule of law

Many online services – search, e-commerce, movie streaming, social media, and news – use recommender systems. Recommender systems are software programs that select items out of a bigger pool of items and then recommend these to users of online services. In this contribution, I focus on personalised recommender systems, which recommend different items to different individuals based on information about the individual.

I argue that it is largely unnecessary and, in any case, contrary to the rule of law to regulate how news media deploy recommender systems to select and rank the news for individual users. Instead, I consider an alternative for state regulation of news recommenders, should empirical research show that certain news recommender systems have harmful effects on individual rights and societies.