Cliqz News covers the “news cycle” consisting of “the media reporting on some event, followed by the media reporting on public and other reactions to the earlier reports” mentioned in the Wikipedia page you base your comment on, by the nature of the product. As you might want to read what you "need to know" are most relevant news events at any time of day. We look 24hours back to get the all news articles from hand-picked, trusted news domains in a country and follow event developments. the process is started every hour. There are no social signals involved in the development of this product.
Below the product statement again for further clarification “The product translates into a limited, per-country list of news articles, aiming to keep Cliqz users informed about current events. All articles originate from hand-picked, well-respected and trusted news outlets in a particular country. In order to determine the most relevant news, we first collect and process all articles that were published by those outlets during a defined timeframe, which we then compare among each other to form clusters around current events. The impact of these events, their prevalence on news sources, their presence on homepages and their times of publication all help to curate a list of Top News—updated hourly or every time a major story breaks.”
it's impossible to keep the promise of delivering quality content, when their sourcing for the "What you need to know / Top News" feature submits itself to the rules of a 24 hour news cycle[1]:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_as...
... and ...
> footnote: The first version of Cliqz News recommended articles to users in the form of a web application by harnessing the power of the crowd. Topics were represented by large groups of Twitter users with influence in a particular topic. The content circulated within these groups was then classified and ranked, allowing us to make predictions about stories you might want to read based on detected similarities with other users’ interests
They realized they could predict what will become newsworthy by looking at twitter echo chambers. Twitter is awesome because we get to watch how (especially Western) news break, and how larger established outlets cover the same story, and (with some manual digging) follow discussions/reactions in different echo chambers and how these continue to affect the coverage. Twitter feels (or in the past felt) like grassroots journalism. The problems of the 24hr-News-Cycle aren't created by Twitter and already existed with tabloids. But Twitter amplifies the problems mentioned on Wikipedia tremendously, while even creating some new ones. Cliqz doesn't look like it is going to solve any of this, instead they assume nothing is wrong with how things work currently. Cliqz inability to think about this problem, while at the same time building / peddling services on top of it, is a red flag imo.
EDIT: the wikipedia page has a brilliant book[0][1] linked at the bottom ("Skyful of Lies & Black Swans") which I highly recommend:
[0] summary: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/skyf... [1] pdf https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/fil...