Dr. Talia Stroud spoke at length about partisanship in the media. I’ve jotted down the following things that occurred to me as I watched the lecture:
- To keep a check on the degree of partisanship, I would want to study if the degree has increased after the 2016 elections. The public in the America have been more divided than ever after 2016. If we study the degree of incivility in discussion forums before and after the 2016 elections, we may be able to tell conclusively that the political temperature can learn to more divide in public opinion. For a fixed active users, we can check to see if they have flipped their stance (in public atleast) since before and after the elections on any major issues – gay marriage, abortion, etc.
- One could imagine that there would be a lot of trolls in the mix just to cause the confusion and have more people engage in the (sometimes) pointless conversations. If we are able to efficiently identify trolls and sockpuppets in the comments (automatically) we may be able to, to a degree, control the off topic conversations in the forums. Does this reduce the amount of polarization on the forums? If it does, this may imply that many people want to put their points forth civilly but are incited into wars in the comments section. We must note that not all news houses have the resources to have 13 people weed out unwanted comments.
- While this may not be possible with larger news organizations, small organizations with left-right leaning partisan following can feature stories from the opposition news organization of similar scale. We can have the partisans visit their preferred websites and check to see if this has improved tolerance in the two parties. I would like to mention a study undertaken by the Duke University Polarization Lab (https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/07/bursting-peoples-political-bubbles-could-make-them-even-more-partisan/) that suggests that the attempt to burst people’s political bubbles could make them even more partisan. This means that pushing people to acknowledge that they’re living in a bubble could be counter-productive.
- There was something that Dr. Stroud mentions that caught my attention- that we might have to feed information to the general populace without them being aware of this. The Emmy nominated sitcom ‘Blackish’ currently streams on Hulu deals with an African American family and their take on America’s social and political fabric. While this show received a lot of flak for their presentation of their issues, this is a way to inject information into the public without this being explicitly called ‘news’. After I binge-watched the series, I realised that they tried their best to give the most balanced information they could and it was quite effective.
- Design-wise we can have a ‘The Balancer’ style widget that can help us display the bias in the comment section as users post. By gently asking the user if he wants to post a heavily polarizing comment, we may be able to guilt some users into not posting their comment.
