Rebalancing Social Feed to Minimize Polarization and Disagreement
2023 (English)In: CIKM 2023 - Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2023, p. 369-378Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that mitigate these effects. In this paper, we propose a novel problem formulation aimed at slightly nudging users' social feeds in order to strike a balance between relevance and diversity, thus mitigating the emergence of polarization, without lowering the quality of the feed. Our approach is based on re-weighting the relative importance of the accounts that a user follows, so as to calibrate the frequency with which the content produced by various accounts is shown to the user. We analyze the convexity properties of the problem, demonstrating the non-matrix convexity of the objective function and the convexity of the feasible set. To efficiently address the problem, we develop a scalable algorithm based on projected gradient descent. We also prove that our problem statement is a proper generalization of the undirected-case problem so that our method can also be adopted for undirected social networks. As a baseline for comparison in the undirected case, we develop a semidefinite programming approach, which provides the optimal solution. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms non-trivial baselines, underscoring its ability to foster healthier and more cohesive online communities.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2023. p. 369-378
Keywords [en]
gradient descent, opinion dynamics, polarization, social feed
National Category
Other Computer and Information Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-341472DOI: 10.1145/3583780.3615025ISI: 001161549500039Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85178115910OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-341472DiVA, id: diva2:1825208
Conference
32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2023, Birmingham, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Oct 21 2023 - Oct 25 2023
Note
QC 20240109
Part of ISBN 9798400701245
2024-01-092024-01-092025-01-27Bibliographically approved