Understanding the Effects of Personalized Recommender Systems on Political News Perceptions: A Comparison of Content-Based, Collaborative, and Editorial Choice-Based News Recommender System

ABSTRACT With the increasing implementation of algorithms across various news platforms, understanding news consumers’ subjective perceptions of algorithmic-based news recommender systems has become critical. A between-subjects experiment (News Recommender System type: content-based filtering vs. collaborative filtering vs. human editorial choice-based recommender system) with 161 participants revealed that participants tended to trust the collaborative filtering system and perceive news recommended by the system to be more credible and less biased compared to editorial choices-based or content-based recommender systems – due to the triggering of the homophily heuristic – even though the three systems recommended the same set of news. Implications were discussed.