Do News Consumers Want Explanations for Personalized News Rankings?

Como, Italy

To gain more insight in the question whether personalized news recommender systems should be responsible for their recommendations and transparent about their decisions, we study whether news consumers want explanations of why these news articles are recommended to them and what they find the best way to explain this. We survey users of Blendle’s news recommendation system, and from 120 respondents we learn that news consumers do want explanations, yet do not have a very strong preference for how explanations should be shown to them. Moreover, we perform an A/B test that shows that the open rate per user does not change if users are provided with reasons for the articles recommended for them. Most likely this is because users did not pay attention to the reasons.