07

May

By Dennis R. Mortensen
7 comments
News Personalization as a Community Challenge

News Personalization is agreeable a technology challenge, and certainly one that have not yet been solved, but news personalization it also a potential social challenge for the community. When personalizing content, research shows that there are large optimization opportunities in using dimensions such as race, income and education (and similar aggressive demographic dimensions). If this type of personalization is used violently, it is easy to envision a scenario, where the enlightened and well educated population keep getting wiser and the uninformed and likely uneducated population stay just that.

I am by all definitions a capitalist and tend to believe that free markets solve all problems. Still do! But I also believe that it is a fair question to ask, whether we should tolerate that e.g. the New York Times, serve a pool of their likely less educated articles, to sub $30,000 a year in household income visitors ?

Even worse perhaps, we could foresee that publishers who do not have access to such dimensions for their visitors, will use proxies or possible use US-census information data on a ZIP code level. In such a scenario, personalization for a poor neighborhood will affect the information given to everybody in that area. I am sure we all see how this is not optimal or fair.

Let me provide an example, from a recent research paper by a colleague of mine, which provided facts on this type of personalization on a search level. Search represents content selection and presentation very well. When searching for “Wagner”, one segment was thinking of and was presented with Richard Wagner (the brilliant German composer) – the other segment was presented with Wagner, the paint sprayer company!

This example, imbalanced as it is, and by itself, is of course not disturbing and deconstructive to the social fabric as such, but I am sure you can envision a large pool of machine learned choices, activated to the extent where we move beyond just a digital divide, but a much more harmful information divide.

In conclusion, if we are set out to bridge the information divide in our society, aggressive news personalization, with pure revenue optimization for eye, might actually end up extending this gap. Does this mean that news personalization is not suggested, of course not, but it does mean that we have to think about this subject, on a more sophisticated level than which existing personalization and recommendation technology to use.

Think about it.

Please note, that in regards to advertising and it’s use of targeting, such as a demographic profiling and behavioral targeting, I see less of an issue, if any, by applying aggressive tactics.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

  • Jen

    It’s a very interesting consideration. I’ve often wondered if aggressive personalization sets up a situation of self-fulfilling prophecies, but the moral/ethical considerations with news information adds quite a unique layer.

    I think this also can happen with education, and may be relevant research (not that I’m an academic, as you know) There are these swings in education theory around separating students or not, around adjusting curricula to school situations or not, etc. Seems similar at a high level.

    Interesting stuff, as always, Dennis!

    -Jen

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Jen,

    It is indeed an interesting layer and without going all soft on you, a layer that we, the optimization experts, should actively consider, and if nothing else, at least bring to light when this is debated. – This issue is probably even more serious when debating education. I think I leave that response for another day. :-)

    have a great weekend
    d.

  • Carl

    Fascinating post Dennis, in fact I am currently studying a lot of issues related to the ‘Digital Divide’ in an educational context, and this adds considerable further insight.

    Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is that local – as in regional – news services have suffered enormously, at least in the UK, in the last few years. And I would argue that it is these LOCAL sources which, when correctly formatted, pose the real opportunity for inter-demographic news services. It would be great to see new and vital networks for localised news appear – being driven by Yahoo! acting as the display advertiser of choice – of course :-)

  • Carl

    Oh and by the way, Dennis, next time you’re in Budapest, we should talk about your free markets, if you’re available for 10 hours or so… :-P

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Carl,

    Regional news companies, have been perversely profitable for so long, that they sucked up most if not all local or even hyper local news initiatives. Now that they are doing less well to the point of going out of business in certain regions, we (the community) have to figure how till fill this void.

    I however believe, as you Carl, that this is where there is a huge opportunity these days. I actually (on my positive days) believe that we will end up with an even better coverage of our local / hyper local community. The question is then, WHAT local information is shown to readers – so we make sure to bridge that potential information divide.

    AND I’ll prepare for that full-day-seminar on Free Markets in Budapest ;-)

    Cheers
    d.

  • Lev

    Hi Dennis,

    First, I believe here two types of optimality are mixed here; financial and long term social.
    We can talk about social aspect of digital humanity and education what ever but I suggest not to mix it with the other type of optimality.

    The financial optimality may or may not be reached (this is what you start with in your text but slowly slip to the former one, if I am not mistaken) but in general we have no idea how far we are from the point of optimality. This is the achilles of the problem. Furthermore,
    optimality is usually approached by alternating two phases, exploration (sampling the space of possibilities) and exploitation (greedy method in this space). No other possibilities exists.

    Lev

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Lev,

    You are absolutely right, I blend multiple states of optimality, and there is no doubt that I have mixed emotions about the subject. This blog post is, to begin with, just an insurance to myself, that we open up the thought space. But of course, I can always, just go call my friend Lev to open up my way if thinking :-)

    From a social and economics experimentation point of view, most theories imply that it is impossible to make one person better off (or put him in a state of optimality), without making somebody else worse off. Which could be a concern (as indicated above) that we over-optimize so aggressively that the overall good of society suffers.

    However; there is also the idea that improvement towards a better state for any one individual, without making any other person worse off is possible – a strong Pareto optimum. But news media companies wanting to optimize for the better are unlikely to be looking for such an equilibrium.

    Again. great input Lev. Thanks!!

    cheers
    d.