Can I read Online Platforms and the Fair Exposure Problem Under Homophily on EtoBox?

Online Platforms and the Fair Exposure Problem Under Homophily by Schoeffer, Jakob; Ritchie, Alexander; Naggita, Keziah; Monachou, Faidra; Finocchiaro, Jessie; Juarez, Marc is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Online Platforms and the Fair Exposure Problem Under Homophily about?

In the wake of increasing political extremism, online platforms have been criticized for contributing to polarization. One line of criticism has focused on echo chambers and the recommended content served to users by these platforms. In this work, we introduce the fair exposure problem: given limited intervention power of the platform, the goal is to enforce balance in the spread of content (e.g., news articles) among two groups of users through constraints similar to those imposed by the Fairness Doctrine in the United States in the past. Groups are characterized by different affiliations (e.g., political views) and have different preferences for content. We develop a stylized framework that models intra- and intergroup content propagation under homophily, and we formulate the platform's decision as an optimization problem that aims at maximizing user engagement, potentially under fairness constraints. Our main notion of fairness requires that each group see a mixture of their preferred and non-preferred content, encouraging information diversity. Promoting such information diversity is often viewed as desirable and a potential means for breaking out of harmful echo chambers. We s

Author

Schoeffer, Jakob; Ritchie, Alexander; Naggita, Keziah; Monachou, Faidra; Finocchiaro, Jessie; Juarez, Marc

Published

2022

Language

EN