The talk given by Talia Stroud, inspired me to design a tool that will facilitate a longitudinal study. The tool briefly is a political news aggregator website (I will explain it later in more details). The study aims to measure and monitor the reading habits of the site’s users, and try to measure techniques that try to expose users to news articles that opposes their political preferences and if those techniques could affect their reading habits and political preference. This tools could help in mitigating the level of polarization between the community of online news readers.
The site will allow users to build their profiles and personalize their news feed. That is by providing details about their social identity, political preferences, and their opinions/preferences regarding a set of the most common controversial topics that being actively discussed and would affect their political/voting preferences (such as, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, Animal Testing, Gun Control … etc).
The site would also give each user a profile color that ranges from red and blue (we could add another colors if the community is represented my multi-polar parties instead of being a bipolar community), which will represent the two main poles of the current political environment (For example, liberals and conservatives, those set of poles could change from community to other and from time to time). The same badge or color would be given to each article. There will also be profiles for news sources (newspapers, blogs, TV shows … etc) that will indicate their political leaning. This coloring metric will be used to filter news feed according to the user profile/color). They will also be displayed beside each news article and news source.
The experiment will start with few phases (left to be crafted by the experiment designer) and after each phase a survey will be provided to users in order to measure how each phase affected their perspective of the opposite pole and their own pole. Each phase will build a news feed filter based on different tactics (will be left to the experiment designer to define the level of exposure, the content being displayed, the number of phases … etc). Gradually the filters will be modified to pass more news that promotes or expose the other pole opinions.
The first phase’s filter will filter out news that are most likely to be controversial to the user, and will pass mainly mainstream news and news that match their preferences.
The second phase filter will be changed to include some news from the other pole but are not controversial or triggering the user to accept or reject to read the article. Suppose that the most competing poles are poles A and B, and the user politically belong to pole A. The aggregator filter will pass those news that will contain humanitarian works done by group B public figures, That would emotionally (the Like dimension) affect the people in group A, I would expose them to more commons between those groups than expose them to the most controversial topics. After some period of exposure we would do how that affected their perception of the other pole(s).
In the next few phases we would expose (increase the amount displayed in their news feed) users to more news that discusses the other pole opinions. Then perform the similar surveys to measure their movement from one pole to another.
