Chris Liebold
It is with great pleasure that the Department of CCS under the direction of Prof. Domahidi can report that the bachelor thesis of Franziska Burgschat will be awarded with the Lazarsfeld Scholarship 2022 of the DGPUK Methods Group. During the annual conference of the Methods Group, which will take place from October 5 to 7 in Munich, Ms. Burgschat will receive the scholarship for outstanding students or graduates of journalism and communication studies for particularly challenging or innovative theses and dissertations in the field of methods and will be able to present her work in this context.
The thesis, supervised by Prof. Domahidi and Aliya Andrich, is entitled "Yandex's News Algorithm on Trial: A Systematic Replication Study" and deals with algorithmic biases in news aggregators (such as search engines) and the resulting possible limitations of news diversity.In doing so, this work systematically replicates the study "Search as News Curator: The Role of Google in Shaping Attention to News Information" by Trielli and Diakopoulos (2019). In Russia, where news diversity is is per se limited by state control, the search engine Yandex has a significant role to play as a news news aggregator has a significant role to play. By means of web scraping, Yandex was subjected to an Yandex was subjected to an algorithm audit and the top stories box was examined, in which Yandex highlights news on the search results page. Also in light of the current geopolitical situation, this work provides socially important insights into how algorithms work.
Congratulations for this outstanding achievement!