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Fairness in Online Social Network Timelines: Measurements, Models and Mechanism Design

Published: 25 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithm lacks transparency, motivating measurements, modeling and analysis in order to understand and improve its properties. In this paper, we propose a reproducible methodology encompassing measurements, an analytical model and a fairness-based News Feed design. The model leverages the versatility and analytical tractability of time-to-live (TTL) counters to capture the visibility and occupancy of publishers over a News Feed. Measurements are used to parameterize and to validate the expressive power of the proposed model. Then, we conduct a what-if analysis to assess the visibility and occupancy bias incurred by users against a baseline derived from the model. Our results indicate that a significant bias exists and it is more prominent at the top position of the News Feed. In addition, we find that the bias is non-negligible even for users that are deliberately set as neutral with respect to their political views, motivating the proposal of a novel and more transparent fairness-based News Feed design.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Maximizing fair content spread via edge suggestion in social networksProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3551793.355182415:11(2692-2705)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Fairness in generative modelingProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion10.1145/3520304.3528992(320-323)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Achieving efficiency via fairness in online resource allocationProceedings of the Twenty-Third International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3492866.3549724(101-110)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2022
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 46, Issue 3
December 2018
174 pages
ISSN:0163-5999
DOI:10.1145/3308897
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 January 2019
Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 46, Issue 3

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Maximizing fair content spread via edge suggestion in social networksProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3551793.355182415:11(2692-2705)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Fairness in generative modelingProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion10.1145/3520304.3528992(320-323)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Achieving efficiency via fairness in online resource allocationProceedings of the Twenty-Third International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3492866.3549724(101-110)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Advantage and Misuse of Vision Augmentation – Exploring User Perceptions and Attitudes using a Zoom PrototypeProceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 202110.1145/3458709.3458984(77-85)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Caches and Timelines Operate Under Heavy TrafficACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3439602.343961248:2(24-26)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2020
  • (2020)Facebook news feed personalization filterProceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381301(615-618)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2020
  • (2019)FairwalkProceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3367471.3367498(3289-3295)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2019
  • (2019)Quantifying the Impact of User Attentionon Fair Group Representation in Ranked ListsCompanion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308560.3317595(553-562)Online publication date: 13-May-2019

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