Related papers: Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views

In social networks, users often engage with like-minded peers. This selective exposure to opinions might result in echo chambers, i.e., political fragmentation and social polarization of user interactions. When echo chambers form, opinions…

Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore…

Detecting controversy in general web pages is a daunting task, but increasingly essential to efficiently moderate discussions and effectively filter problematic content. Unfortunately, controversies occur across many topics and domains,…

In recommendation literature, explainability and fairness are becoming two prominent perspectives to consider. However, prior works have mostly addressed them separately, for instance by explaining to consumers why a certain item was…

To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized…

Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…

Online social networks have become primary means of communication. As they often exhibit undesirable effects such as hostility, polarisation or echo chambers, it is crucial to develop analytical tools that help us better understand them. In…

Recommender systems increasingly suffer from echo chambers and user homogenization, systemic distortions arising from the dynamic interplay between algorithmic recommendations and human behavior. While prior work has studied these phenomena…

An important aspect of AI design and ethics is to create systems that reflect aggregate preferences of the society. To this end, the techniques of social choice theory are often utilized. We propose a new social choice function motivated by…

Social media platforms facilitate echo chambers through feedback loops between user preferences and recommendation algorithms. While algorithmic homogeneity is well-documented, the distinct evolutionary pathways driven by content-based…

Over the past decade, social media platforms have been key in spreading rumors, leading to significant negative impacts. To counter this, the community has developed various Rumor Detection (RD) algorithms to automatically identify them…

Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…

The proliferation of social media platforms, recommender systems, and their joint societal impacts have prompted significant interest in opinion formation and evolution within social networks. We study how local edge dynamics can drive…

Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack…

In the wake of increasing political extremism, online platforms have been criticized for contributing to polarization. One line of criticism has focused on echo chambers and the recommended content served to users by these platforms. In…

The field of algorithmic fairness has highlighted ethical questions which may not have purely technical answers. For example, different algorithmic fairness constraints are often impossible to satisfy simultaneously, and choosing between…

The emergence of politically driven divisions in online discussion networks has attracted a wealth of literature, but also one which has thus far been largely limited to single country studies. Hence whilst there is good evidence that these…

Among the topics discussed on social media, some spark more heated debate than others. For example, experience suggests that major political events, such as a vote for healthcare law in the US, would spark more debate between opposing sides…

The landscape of information has experienced significant transformations with the rapid expansion of the internet and the emergence of online social networks. Initially, there was optimism that these platforms would encourage a culture of…

Due to the difficulty of acquiring large-scale explicit user feedback, implicit feedback (e.g., clicks or other interactions) is widely applied as an alternative source of data, where user-item interactions can be modeled as a bipartite…