Designing Diverse Features to Reduce the Filter Bubble Effect on Social Media

Sammanfattning: The filter bubble effect has been an active area of research that has been explored in various contexts within social media. Research on recommender system designs within filter bubbles has received a lot of attention, mainly due to its impact on the phenomena. They have contributed to filter bubbles by personalizing content on social media based on users’ behaviours and preferences. This personalization has led to diminished user control over content consumption and a lack of exposure to diverse content and perspectives. This has thus had a significant impact on user agency and polarization across social media. Current research hasn’t shown signs of integrating diverse recommender system designs on social media platforms, which is important to understand their effectiveness. Although recommender systems have contributed to filter bubbles largely, the proposition of incorporating them to counteract these bubbles presents a unique opportunity to understand how they function and how they could be optimized for diversity on social media, in a way that improves user autonomy. This project was done with COSE, a social network startup whose focus was on creating and sharing science and technology based content. The project aims to integrate recommender system designs on social media platforms to guide diverse exposure to content and perspectives within the context of science and technology based topics, and thus help in reducing the filter bubble effect. Using a Research through Design (RtD) approach, three design features, Discovery+, Views, and Consumption History were designed and prototyped to allow exposure to diverse content, perspectives and empower users to take control of their content consumption on social media. The evaluation for the three features indicated the possibility of promoting diverse exposure to content and perspectives. Users were exposed to a diverse range of content through the features, which increased their desire to explore new information, promoted transparency in content consumption habits, and provided access to multiple viewpoints within a single post. This urged users to actively seek and engage with a variety of content. A need for intuitive design of the Views feature was highlighted considering its presentation during testing and the intent of the feature itself. Nevertheless, the feature proved to be encouraging of finding diverse perspectives and invoked curiosity. Potential for further research on how the key design principles could be effectively integrated with diverse recommender system designs was also highlighted. The diverse features highlight the importance of fostering ethical social media experiences that support social sustainability, where users have access to empowering information, promote dialogue, help people make informed decisions, and strengthen social cohesion, while also addressing social media perils like polarization, echo chambers, dialogue hindrance, and restrictions on encouraging a global perspective on various topics.