Dorothee Baer, Germany’s incoming minister with responsibility for digital policy says she will push social media giants to make users’ information feeds more diverse and timely to avoid creating “echo chambers” for the like-minded.
Companies such as Facebook have come under pressure from regulators around the world as evidence has emerged of how the recirculation of a particular selection of news and views on their platforms can narrow perceptions of the world and voters behaviour.
The minister said she would open talks with Facebook and Google on the way that posts on social media platforms were sequenced.
“At the moment, the algorithms sort according to relevance or popularity. That pushes to the top old posts that often have little to do with the truth.
“I want to see real-time timelines again that confront people not with what they want to know, but what they need to know, what is happening at this moment,” she told the newspaper Die Welt in an interview.