Assessing Externalities: Algorithms and Choices
Creators: name: Hroch, Miloš
name: Grassmuck, Volker
name: Moreno, José
name: Kompatsiaris, Panos
name: Poddar, Debashmita
name: Peschke, Lutz
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This deliverable is part of a group of five that each focuses on one of the themes related to the future of European media platforms. In our case, we focus on a theme titled Algorithms and Choices, which we translated into the dynamics between agency and structure, in algorithmically governed platform environments. In order to entangle the complexity of relationships in these processes – connected to the rising impact of algorithms in our everyday decisions, their regulation by European institutions and the platformization of governance – we adopted an approach grounded in structuration theory. Structuration theory (ST), initially developed by Giddens (1984), is the starting point in the theoretical reflection that continues with more contemporary approaches to ST, which has been favored by information systems researchers, but also researchers from platform studies. We prefer broader approaches that allow us to see algorithmic assemblages of entangled relationships between platform users, platform corporations, algorithms, and institutions.
One of the issues that cuts through the deliverable is algorithmic transparency. The problematics and workings of algorithms and platforms are often framed as being opaque structures or "black boxes". While the first section of this deliverable provides a theoretical reflection on structure and agency in platform environments and algorithmic assemblages, the second section looks back to the earlier work of the EUMEPLAT project. Even though the previous research did not particularly zoom in on the workings of algorithms, these processes were manifested in implicit (or more explicit) ways in the deliverables. In this second section, we revisit the research done in four EUMEPLAT work packages from the angle of algorithmic transparency as one of the recurring topics. The reflection on algorithm regulation in EU law in Work Package 1, on recommendation systems on VOD platforms in Work Package 3, and finally, the Twitter algorithm that makes some posts or agents more visible than others in Work Packages 2 and 4 allow us to further enrich our theoretical reflection on the role of algorithms and choices (or their limitations) in algorithmically governed platform environments.
The first two sections stand as theoretical support for the empirical part of this deliverable, which is a qualitative future scenario analysis that uses methods of future studies research. The future studies component of this deliverable is not aiming at forecasting and predicting the future but at capturing the imaginaries about the future. Rather than playing clairvoyant and hypnotizing the crystal ball, the empirical part analyses how the imaginary about the future of European media platforms is constructed by the diversity of experts. These future scenarios, focused on one of the themes, Algorithms and Choices, were produced by 29 Delphi+ participants and the EUMEPLAT researchers. The future scenarios analysis is developed on the axis of structure/agency and tech-centric/human-centric and around four actors, which emerged when the theory was filtered through our data, namely: platform users, platform corporations, algorithms and institutions. Ten scenarios (as clusters) were developed around these actors, and they further provided a perspective on interdependencies between these actors in future imaginaries related to European platform landscapes that involve transhumanistic/neurofuturistic visions of humans enhanced by algorithms, platformization of state or hopes in supranational institutions in securing the algorithm literacy and transparency.