This study is the third study of my PhD project ‘Understanding XAI as digital competence’, which aims to investigate how explainable AI (XAI) can promote adequate levels of user digital competence so users can cope with AI-driven communication. The current study examines the role of users’ level of AI competence in the impact of the presence of explanations in the news recommender systems on users’ understanding and evaluation of news recommender systems through a survey experiment.