University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Mitigating selective exposure in social media forums

Gao, Mingkun

Content Files
GAO-DISSERTATION-2021.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113856

Description

Title
Mitigating selective exposure in social media forums
Author(s)
Gao, Mingkun
Issue Date
2021-11-29
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Sundaram, Hari
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Sundaram, Hari
Committee Member(s)
  • Kirlik, Alex
  • Karahalios, Karrie
  • Xu, Anbang
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2022-04-29T21:34:30Z
Keyword(s)
  • Interface design
  • Social media
  • Mitigating selective exposure
  • Information filter
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on designing social media interfaces to help people explore diverse social opinions and mitigate selective exposure - a tendency that people actively seek attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-inconsistent information. Diverse information consumption has potential benefits, including but not limited to helping individuals form accurate viewpoints, facilitating better decision-making processes, cultivating people's tolerance and mutual understanding with others, which is essential for a thriving democratic society. Both actively seeking congenial information (i.e., selective exposure) and passively being in a congenial information environment (i.e., de facto selective exposure) can impair people's exposure to diverse social opinions. Meanwhile, people can play a significant role in shaping others' information environments by sharing information on social media. Thus, we break our general research problem down to two sub-problems: 1) designing interfaces to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption, which focuses on the effect of interface design on people's active information-seeking behavior; 2) understanding humans' role as the information filter for others, which is the first step towards a better interface design to tackle potential problems caused by information sharing among people. We first proposed organizing and showing categorized social opinions based on emotional reactions to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption. Our evaluation indicated that such a design could motivate people to explore diverse social opinions. Next, we designed and implemented a system that can provide novel visual hints with new recommendation mechanisms to improve people's awareness of diverse opinions and mitigate selective exposure. Finally, we studied the effect of the stance label and the credibility label on people's information selection and perception on a two-column news feed. We found that the stance label can exacerbate selective exposure and make people agree more on fake news. And the credibility label has a limited effect on mitigating selective exposure and combating fake news. Our work expanded the design toolbox of mitigating selective exposure and gave interface/system designers more choices when using these tools. To better understand people's role as the information filter, we conducted a simulated online experiment to figure out how the attitude distribution of the recipient group affects people's information-sharing behavior in the anonymous scenario. We observed that the attitude distribution of the recipient group has an impact on people’s sharing behavior even though various factors (e.g., topics, people's attitudes, etc.) may be related to such effect. People tend to cater to the majority's attitudes by selectively sharing more information consistent with the majority's attitudes in some specific context, which creates the filter bubble for others. This result indicated the necessity to study interface design to motivate people to share more balanced information to help break the filter bubble for those recipients.
Graduation Semester
2021-12
Type of Resource
Thesis
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113856
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2021 Mingkun Gao

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