In the media pluralism policies of liberal nation states, access to diverse news sources is widely regarded as key to the maintenance of an informed citizenry and healthy democracy. This assumption, and its relation to the risks of concentrated media power, underpins media diversity and media pluralism – or anti-concentration – laws and policy across the world.

Yet the evolving mix of curated (human or machine edited) and algorithmic (computer generated) news is stretching our understanding of media pluralism, and in this project, we are seeking to understand these changes.

In our view the implications of these shifts are having a profound impact on our news diets.

A combination of factors including network infrastructure, recommendation algorithms and personalisation, strong and weak ties in social networks (and related ideas of ‘filter bubbles and echo chambers’) all may have an impact on how people discover or access news, how deeply they engage with it, and then how it shapes knowledge.