Social networks should also tackle how their recommendation algorithm might be influencing the "information bubble" of citizens (or at least be gamed in order t

Social networks should also tackle how their recommendation algorithm might be influencing the "information bubble" of citizens (or at least be gamed in order to do so). For example in France, during an election campaign, official media must strive to share equally the "speaking time" between candidates. And while social networks, with subsidiaries in France, have a more and more prominent role in the information bubble of citizens, they currently ignore this regulation in their automated recommendations. I experienced it myself some days ago, while looking for some videos about French candidates on youtube, I was persistently recommended some videos for a specific candidate by youtube's recommendation algorithm. I was apparently not the only one to notice that, as some people even conducted automated tests [1] : "Mélenchon, Le Pen and Asselineau make up nearly 60 percent of the candidates that are mentioned in the titles of the most recommended videos. It is particularly surprising for Asselineau to be recommended so much because he received less than 1 percent of voter preferences in the latest polls. Perhaps predictably, each of these three candidates is the top recommended candidate when searching for their name. However, we have found that starting from a search of any other candidate, these three candidates are still the most recommended" Theses 3 candidates are highly active on social networks, but also pro-frexit and often categorized as populist. [1] http://algotransparency.org/en/presse.html http://algotransparency.org/en/presse.html