The BiasChecker: How biased are social media searches?

Can Yang, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Jônatas Castro Dos Santos, Sean Wolfgand Matsui Siqueira, Xinyuan Xu

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Social media searches are frequently employed by users to keep them up to date about ongoing events and learn broadly about public opinion on topics that are unfamiliar to them. Nevertheless, there are rising concerns about the results returned that can reinforce users' existing biases - the inclination to one opinion over another. This paper introduces a tool, called BiasChecker, that contributes to the check for bias in search results on a social media platform. BiasChecker follows a distributed and extendable architecture that allows us to simulate users following and unfollowing accounts, search for different polarised topics in a concurrent manner and measure bias. It may be applied to multiple social media platforms. The proposed tool takes into account several factors that can interfere with the detection of bias, e.g., the cross-over effect, geolocation, IP address, and language.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2021
    EditorsMichele Coscia, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Kai Shu
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
    Pages305-308
    Number of pages4
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450391283
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 8 Nov 2021
    Event13th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2021 - Virtual, Online, Netherlands
    Duration: 8 Nov 2021 → …

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2021

    Conference

    Conference13th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2021
    Country/TerritoryNetherlands
    CityVirtual, Online
    Period8/11/21 → …

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