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Rebalancing Social Feed to Minimize Polarization and Disagreement

Published: 21 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Examination of Polarization in Social Media in Aggressor-Oriented and Victim-Oriented Discourse Following VigilantismInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-024-10578-8Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Optimally improving cooperative learning in a social settingProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning10.5555/3692070.3692752(17148-17188)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Modeling the Impact of Timeline Algorithms on Opinion Dynamics Using Low-rank UpdatesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645714(2694-2702)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '23: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
October 2023
5508 pages
ISBN:9798400701245
DOI:10.1145/3583780
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 21 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. gradient descent
  2. opinion dynamics
  3. polarization
  4. social feed

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View all
  • (2025)Examination of Polarization in Social Media in Aggressor-Oriented and Victim-Oriented Discourse Following VigilantismInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-024-10578-8Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Optimally improving cooperative learning in a social settingProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning10.5555/3692070.3692752(17148-17188)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Modeling the Impact of Timeline Algorithms on Opinion Dynamics Using Low-rank UpdatesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645714(2694-2702)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Sublinear-Time Opinion Estimation in the Friedkin--Johnsen ModelProceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645572(2563-2571)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Friedkin-Johnsen Model for Opinion Dynamics on Signed GraphsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.342497436:12(8313-8327)Online publication date: Dec-2024
  • (2024)Optimizing Diverse Information Exposure in Social Graphs2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825032(519-528)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024

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