Diversifying for Democracy: On the Framing of Diversityin the NRS Design and the Normative Consequences forJournalism

The concept and umbrella term news diversity has been introduced in the literature in Social Sciences andComputer Sciences as a way to counter these phenomena and to produce well-functioning newsrecommender systems appropriate for a democratic society. The aim of this article is to critically analysewhat kind of normative assumptions about the role of journalism emerge from the framing of diversity inthe literature on news recommender systems. We do so by conducting a framing analysis of the concept ofdiversity in the literature in the fields of Social Sciences and Computer Science (N=57). We show thatdiversity is framed as an essential component of a well-functioning NRS, as it is framed as the solution tothe filter bubble and potential polarization problem. However, diversity is most often operationalized asdiversity of news topics and political viewpoints on a left/right wing scale across the literature. Further theanalysis shows how the cause of diversity´s importance changed over time in the literature from initiallybeing rooted in the individual users’ lives, connected to their potential boredom and information overload,to the more recent literature framing diversity in NRS as connected to the democratic role of news. Theimplicit role of democracy is linked to liberal models in the operationalization of diversity, while moredeliberate and participatory models of democracy are less prominent.