Machine Learning Coffee seminar: "Computational Challenges in Analyzing And Moderating Online Social Discussions", Aristides Gionis, Aalto

Weekly seminars held jointly by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.

Helsinki region machine learning researchers will start our week by an exciting machine learning talk. The aim is to gather people from different fields of science with interest in machine learning. Porridge and coffee is served at 9:00 and the talk will begin at 9:15. The venue for this talk is seminar room T5, CS building.

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Computational Challenges in Analyzing And Moderating Online Social Discussions

Aristides Gionis
Professor of Computer Science, Aalto University

Abstract:

Online social media are a major venue of public discourse today, hosting the opinions of hundreds of millions of individuals. Social media are often credited for providing a technological means to break information barriers and promote diversity and democracy. In practice, however, the opposite effect is often observed: users tend to favor content that agrees with their existing world-view, get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints, and eventually create "echo chambers" and increased polarization. Arguably, without any kind of moderation, current social-media platforms gravitate towards a state in which net-citizens are constantly reinforcing their existing opinions. In this talk we present a ongoing line of work on analyzing and moderating online social discussions. We first consider the questions of detecting controversy using network structure and content, tracking the evolution of polarized discussions, and understanding their properties over time. We then address the problem of designing algorithms to break filter bubbles and reduce polarization. We discuss a number of different strategies such as user and content recommendation, as well as viral approaches.

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See the next talks at the seminar webpage.

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