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Political blend: an application designed to bring people together based on political differences

Published: 29 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Modern social media have increasingly helped people separate themselves by worldview. We watch television shows and follow blogs that agree with our views, and read Twitter streams of people we like. The result is often called the echo chamber. Scholars cite political echo chambers as partly to blame for the divisive and destructive U.S. political climate. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application called Political Blend designed to combat echo chambers: it brings people with different political beliefs together for a cup of coffee. Based on interviews, we discovered that people are open to this kind of application and feel it may help the broader political environment. The primary contribution of this work is evidence that people are open to meeting those different from them, even those who ideologically oppose them. In an environment dominated by applications matching based on similarities, we see that this is an important finding.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      C&T '13: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
      June 2013
      165 pages
      ISBN:9781450321044
      DOI:10.1145/2482991
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      • ITIS: ITIS e.V.
      • EUSSET: European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 29 June 2013

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      Author Tags

      1. echo chamber
      2. matching
      3. mobile
      4. politics
      5. social

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      C&T '13
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      • EUSSET

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      C&T '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 58 submissions, 29%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

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      Cited By

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      • (2021)A systematic review on fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption: Research efforts, challenges, and future directionsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.026008016:12(e0260080)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2021
      • (2020)Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media ServicesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34151754:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2020
      • (2020)"Learning for the Rise of China": Exploring Uses and Gratifications of State-Owned Online PlatformProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928354:CSCW1(1-25)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
      • (2020)A Survey on Computational PoliticsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30349838(197379-197406)Online publication date: 2020
      • (2019)Audience and Expert Perspectives on Second Screen Engagement with Political DebatesProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video10.1145/3317697.3323352(70-82)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
      • (2019)Quantifying Biases in Online Information ExposureJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2412170:3(218-229)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2019
      • (2018)Complex Mediation in the Formation of Political OpinionsProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3174210(1-15)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
      • (2018)Quantifying Controversy on Social MediaACM Transactions on Social Computing10.1145/31405651:1(1-27)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2018
      • (2018)Speaking their MindComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-018-9316-227:3-6(293-326)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
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