Presenting diverse political opinions

Abstract

Is a polarized society inevitable, where people choose to be exposed to only political news and commentary that reinforces their existing viewpoints? We examine the relationship between the numbers of supporting and challenging items in a collection of political opinion items and readers' satisfaction, and then evaluate whether simple presentation techniques such as highlighting agreeable items or showing them first can increase satisfaction when fewer agreeable items are present. We find individual differences: some people are diversity-seeking while others are challenge-averse. For challenge-averse readers, highlighting appears to make satisfaction with sets of mostly agreeable items more extreme, but does not increase satisfaction overall, and sorting agreeable content first appears to decrease satisfaction rather than increasing it. These findings have important implications for builders of websites that aggregate content reflecting different positions.

Computing political preference among twitter followers

“…Tweets (or information provided on other social media sites) can be highlighted, filtered out, or sorted based on the similarity of their audiences' political preferences to those of the user. Alternatively, our method could be used as input to systems that recommend content read by audiences with diverse political opinions [10]. Finally, marketers and social media analysts can use our method to get a sense of their Twitter reach within different political markets, helping them know if they are reaching their intended audience.…”

Supporting reflective public thought with considerit

“…Communitarianism [15,46] emphasizes group identification with like-minded people in order to better organize against groups with whom they disagree. Evidence from studies of ideological fragmentation and selective exposure have demonstrated that communitarian behavior is exceedingly common both online and off, with most people choosing to engage material that aligns with their prior beliefs [18,27,28,35]. And while some people do not go out of their way to avoid challenging material, they still must encounter it first, an activity that platforms like Facebook and Google Reader do not encourage.…”

“…It is challenging for people to listen to perspectives that contradict their own; most people, at least in America, are averse to even engaging with those with whom they suspect of harboring different views [36]. The use of communication media reflect these tendencies, with people highly attracted to content that aligns with their prior beliefs, even those who do not actively avoid challenging content [18,27,28,35]. The problem is reinforced by a lack of effective socialization in the skills and values associated with productive exchanges of ideas, particularly in public schools [38].…”

Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics

“…It is well known that a majority of users are challengeaverse [46], so it could be expected that politically-engaged users exposed to our conditions would have had a negative (e. g., less engaging) experience. This was not the caseusers who were exposed to our proposed conditions and are politically-involved present a comparable (and even slightly more positive) experience when using the site.…”

“…This direct approach has not been effective as users often do not value diversity or do not feel satisfied with it [46]. Motivated by this scenario, our work aims at understanding how to encourage exposure to diverse people from an ideological point of view on microblogging platforms.…”