2025/12/01 by Jenni J. Hakkarainen, Laura Savolainen · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Auction Theory and Applications #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/1369118x.2025.2595663
openalex publication_date 2025/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
For a long time, social media recommender systems have been developed in the wild. Recommender systems promote, hide and distribute content and while doing this, shape online experiences and public discourse. Even though recent research has revealed many ethical, social and legal issues caused by their uses, actual interventions have been scarce. Recently, the European Union has shown more interest in legal governance. The Digital Services Act (DSA), requires services using recommender systems to be transparent about their logic, and in certain cases, allow users to affect their logic. User control can be exercised through an interface which enables them to tweak some of the recommender parameters. In this article, we do two things. First, we bridge media studies, legal scholarship and work on user control to analyse the proposed regulation. How does it aim to mitigate problems attached to recommender systems and does it succeed in doing so? Second, we present one alternative way of designing a DSA compliant user interface. Our example, Finnish Somekone (‘Social media machine’) visualises and makes tangible the collective bases and impacts of personalisation. We approach Somekone from the perspective of speculative design to broaden thinking about user control and understanding how many critical implications of recommendation are collective. To probe where law’s ability to enhance user agency through design ceases and the logic of social media takes over, we use the concept of choice architecture, which combines regulatory control, platforms’ infrastructural power and design architecture. While the regulation seems to strengthen the choice architectures of the users, it simultaneously expands the means of control for social media platforms themselves.