Platforms, algorithms and AI: Issues and hypotheses in the mediatization perspective

Conceptualizing commodification bias in algorithmic modern news exchange 45 field has been exclusively reserved to social psychologists, anthropologists and ethnomethodologists who studied the circu- lation of messages in interpersonal realms. So, it constantly has been separated by researchers from mass communication as an institutionalized field. Even the issue of using interpersonal me- diatized interaction, such as telephone and email to spread the professional news never has been a serious object of research in the field of mass communication while such platforms rep- resented a part of the new extremely powerful sector in mod- ern communication industries – telecommunication services – while telecommunication giants cumulating capital on the basis of such services became important players in the field of media and entertainment industries. The concept of bias appears in mass communication theories relates with media effects and refers to the so-called “confirmation bias”: the stronger ability of mass media messages to confirm pre-existing opinions of people rather than contradict existing opinions (Klapper, 1960). But the notion of bias became then much larger than just a bias at the level of the audience consumption of information. Later the concept of bias has been largely employed to mean ideological orientation of re- ports of mass media (Groseclose, Milyo, 2005) or to designate an information slant which depends on a complex set of factors (Gentzkow, Shapiro, 2006). Neoliberal vision on how to solve the bias problem unsurprisingly proposed classic market-oriented solutions – essentially oriented toward supporting pluralism on media market and take anti-trust measures in order to increase the number of voices. Gentzkow and Shapiro showed that “when consumers have access to a source that can provide ex post veri- fication of the true state of the world, firms’ incentives to distort information are weakened” (Gentzkow, Shapiro, 2006). As a result, neoliberal vision welcomed Internet to increase the num- ber of voices, as a result making pluralism higher: “marketplace of ideas […] may be flawed, but it is […] getting better, not worse” (Compaine, 2005). The critic of such a vision has been done from the side of critical political economy of media. Then it has been formulated as commercial bias: a distortion of content due to the commercial principle of media financing. Habermas (Haber-

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