Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded people reinforce each other's opinion, but do not get exposed to the views of the opposing side. In this paper we study algorithmic techniques for bridging these chambers, and thus, reducing controversy. Specifically, we represent the discussion on a controversial issue with an endorsement graph, and cast our problem as an edge-recommendation problem on this graph. The goal of the recommendation is to reduce the controversy score of the graph, which is measured by a recently-developed metric based on random walks. At the same time, we take into account the acceptance probability of the recommended edge, which represents how likely the edge is to materialize in the endorsement graph. We propose a simple model based on a recently-developed user-level controversy score, that is competitive with state-of- the-art link-prediction algorithms. We thus aim at finding the edges that produce the largest reduction in the controversy score, in expectation. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient algorithm, which considers only a fraction of all the combinations of possible edges. Experimental results show that our algorithm is more efficient than a simple greedy heuristic, while producing comparable score reduction. Finally, a comparison with other state-of-the-art edge-addition algorithms shows that this problem is fundamentally different from what has been studied in the literature.
@cite_22 @cite_13 attempt to limit the echo-chamber effect by making users aware of other users' stance on a given issue, the extremity of their position, and their expertise. Their results show that participants who seek to acquire more accurate information about an issue are exposed to a wider range of views, and agree more with users who express moderately-mixed positions on the issue.
@cite_13 @cite_22
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Modern social media have increasingly helped people separate themselves by worldview. We watch television shows and follow blogs that agree with our views, and read Twitter streams of people we like. The result is often called the echo chamber. Scholars cite political echo chambers as partly to blame for the divisive and destructive U.S. political climate. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application called Political Blend designed to combat echo chambers: it brings people with different political beliefs together for a cup of coffee. Based on interviews, we discovered that people are open to this kind of application and feel it may help the broader political environment. The primary contribution of this work is evidence that people are open to meeting those different from them, even those who ideologically oppose them. In an environment dominated by applications matching based on similarities, we see that this is an important finding. In this paper we investigate the effect of the context of interaction on the extent to which a contributor's perspective bias is displayed through their lexical choice. We present a series of experiments on political discussion data. Our experiments indicate that (i) when people quote contributors with an opposing view, they tend to quote the words that are less strongly associated with the opposing view. (ii) Nevertheless, in quoting their opponents, the displayed bias of their word distributions shifts towards that of their opponents. (iii) The personal bias of the speaker is displayed most clearly through the words that are not quoted, (iv) although characteristics of the quoted message do have a measurable effect on the words that are included in the contribution. And, finally, (v) posts are influenced by the displayed bias of previous posts in a thread. The ubiquity of mobile devices has brought forth the concept of participatory sensing, whereby ordinary citizens can now contribute and share information from the urban environment. However, such applications introduce a key research challenge: preserving the privacy of the individuals contributing data. In this paper, we study two different privacy concepts, k-anonymity and l-diversity, and demonstrate how their privacy models can be applied to protect users' spatial and temporal privacy in the context of participatory sensing. The first part of the paper focuses on schemes implementing k-anonymity. We propose the use of microaggregation, a technique used for facilitating disclosure control in databases, as an alternate to tessellation, which is the current state-of-the-art for location privacy in participatory sensing applications. We conduct a comparative study of the two techniques and demonstrate that each has its advantage in certain mutually exclusive situations. We then propose the Hybrid Variable size Maximum Distance to Average Vector (Hybrid-VMDAV) algorithm, which combines the positive aspects of microaggregation and tessellation. The second part of the paper addresses the limitations of the k-anonymity privacy model. We employ the principle of l-diversity and propose an l-diverse version of VMDAV (LD-VMDAV) as an improvement. In particular, LD-VMDAV is robust in situations where an adversary may have gained partial knowledge about certain attributes of the victim. We evaluate the performances of our proposed techniques using real-world traces. Our results show that Hybrid-VMDAV improves the percentage of positive identifications made by an application server by up to 100 and decreases the amount of information loss by about 40 . We empirically show that LD-VMDAV always outperforms its k-anonymity counterpart. In particular, it improves the ability of the applications to accurately interpret the anonymized location and time included in user reports. Our studies also confirm that perturbing the true locations of the users with random Gaussian noise can provide an extra layer of protection, while causing little impact on the application performance. Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias, indeed, plays a pivotal role in viral phenomena. Furthermore, the wide availability of content on the web fosters the aggregation of likeminded people where debates tend to enforce group polarization. Such a configuration might alter the public debate and thus the formation of the public opinion. In this paper we provide a mathematical model to study online social debates and the related polarization dynamics. We assume the basic updating rule of the Bounded Confidence Model (BCM) and we develop two variations a) the Rewire with Bounded Confidence Model (RBCM), in which discordant links are broken until convergence is reached; and b) the Unbounded Confidence Model, under which the interaction among discordant pairs of users is allowed even with a negative feedback, either with the rewiring step (RUCM) or without it (UCM). From numerical simulations we find that the new models (UCM and RUCM), unlike the BCM, are able to explain the coexistence of two stable final opinions, often observed in reality. Lastly, we present a mean field approximation of the newly introduced models.