(Re)Design to Mitigate Political Polarization

Abstract

Social Media platforms are increasingly being used for political activities and communication, and research suggests that social media design and use is contributing to the polarization of the public sphere. This study draws on Habermas' ideals concerning deliberative democracy to explore if novel interface designs that diversify information sources through content recommendation, can decrease polarization. Through a designprobe interview approach and insights generated from 19 political and citizen experts in Finland and the United States, we found that our deliberative design can lead to depolarization, while creating additional complexity through which users question content and information. We discuss the need to move beyond naive content recommendation, and user interface level changes, in order to work towards a depolarized public sphere.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Interaction design process and methods; • Applied computing → Law, social and behavioral sciences;

Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media Services

“…The eight design probes were non-functional user interface sketches, which manifested different approaches on how to mitigate online polarisation. Similar probes have been used previously to engage participants to reflect on the social and political impacts of new and emerging technologies [15,78,112]. As we have argued, these design probes are not value-free, but manifest different values [similar to all technologies, e.g., 15,80,111].…”

“…There are many approaches within this broad design approach [14]: some use such tools as a tool for critique [e.g., 86], others use the approach to engage with users in a research through design-settings [2], and some to understand potential futures. In our work, the probes act as a tool for theory-driven understanding of today; similar to value statements used in social sciences, our probes are crafted to express provocative statements which are used in the interview process [78,92,107]. We see the probes as tools used to support the interview process.…”

“…Given the context, we also choose to use concepts emerging from political science to design probes which manifested ideas how political parties relate to citizens, such as the difference between elite and mass parties [50] and differences between freedom and pluralism [110]. The first four probes previously used by [77,78] on studying citizens' perceptions of mitigating polarization, allowing us to build on this baseline work. Beyond these, we deepened our perspective on the political nature of the interfaces and party politics and designed four more probes to examine particularly differences between the participants from different political parties.…”

“…The first design probe (Figure 2a) encapsulates the common design agenda: it provides alternative media sources 4 to supplement the shared opinionated news story and invites readers to examine alternative perspectives [78]. The following three probes (Figures 2b-2d) modify the first design probe to support Habermasian ideals of ideal role taking and well-informed discussion [78].…”

“…The first design probe (Figure 2a) encapsulates the common design agenda: it provides alternative media sources 4 to supplement the shared opinionated news story and invites readers to examine alternative perspectives [78]. The following three probes (Figures 2b-2d) modify the first design probe to support Habermasian ideals of ideal role taking and well-informed discussion [78]. Variations include changing the target from the reader to the distributor of new information, thus supporting more informed initial posting of these perspectives (Figures 2b and 2c), and modifying the delivery mechanism to highlight alternative perspectives from other close friends and family members to highlight the existence of valid opinions (Figures 2c and 2d).…”