Algorithms, Platforms, and Policy: The Changing Face of Canadian News Distribution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada’s English/French hybrid media system, algorithms are changing traditional gatekeeping practices, with newsworkers using data from third-party platforms to help determine what types of stories should be covered and how they will be promoted. Algorithmic distribution has become a proxy issue in a showdown between legacy news industries, news journalism startups, governments, and large social media platforms. The Canadian government is now joining forces with other countries to explore regulations that support the continued creation and distribution of diverse news content. Our chapter provides an overview of algorithms’ impact on journalistic integrity in Canadian newsrooms and an analysis of the policies that might influence this largely self-regulated industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".