Burst your bubble! An intelligent system for improving awareness of diverse social opinions

Mingkun Gao, Hyo Jin Do, Wai Tat Fu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Social media users are overloaded with diverse opinions by people with opposing stances. Previous research shows that people often look for opinions that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs and stances, which may lead to social polarization. Traditional social media present opinions in a linear list format, which not only lacks structures for people to explore diverse viewpoints but also aggravates their selective exposure to agreeable opinions. To address this problem, we designed an intelligent system that improves awareness of diverse social opinions by providing visual hints and recommendations of opinions (e.g. news articles and comments) on different sides with different indicators. We evaluated our system with news articles about Obamacare repeal issue and their corresponding user comments from Facebook. Results demonstrate that our system could increase people's awareness of their stances and opinion selection preferences, which mitigates selective exposure and thereby leads to a more balanced perception of social opinions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIUI 2018 - Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages371-383
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349451
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 5 2018
Event23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2018 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: Mar 7 2018Mar 11 2018

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Other

Other23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2018
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period3/7/183/11/18

Keywords

  • Intelligent system
  • Selective exposure
  • Social opinion

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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