How to Reach Nirvana: Yandex, News Personalisation, and the Future of Russian Journalistic Media

Technological corporations and the digital services they provide play an increasingly important role in the production and dissemination of news, e.g., through media's growing reliance on algorithmic recommender systems that perform gatekeeping functions. Bringing together three areas of interest - the relationships between large technological corporations and the professional news media, the deployment of recommender systems in non-democracies, and their perceived effects - this article investigates the relationship between Russian media outlets and Yandex. It focuses on personalised content recommendation platform Yandex.Zen and its content prioritisation program Nirvana. Combining a review of available procedural documents with interviews and auditing of the redistribution of journalistic content via Yandex.Zen, we examine how the power relations within the recommender system's multi-stakeholder environment condition journalistic practices. Among other findings, we demonstrate that the platform disincentivizes regional and negative content, which may result in depoliticisation of the news agenda.

Automated summary

Technological corporations and digital services are increasingly influential in news production and dissemination, particularly through the use of algorithmic recommender systems. This article investigates the relationship between Russian media outlets and Yandex, focusing on the personalized content recommendation platform Yandex.Zen and its content prioritization program Nirvana. It explores how power dynamics within the recommender system's multi-stakeholder environment affect journalistic practices.