This paper presents an unexpected story about the outcomes of a civic project. CSCW and HCI scholarships have argued for a long-term perspective to assess civic projects and to understand how local communities appropriate – or maybe disregard – the material outcomes of such interventions. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to interpret the outcomes of such projects, and how to make sense of their social impact on the wider contexts they are bound to. This article draws on the notion of “political ecologies of participation“ to illustrate: \textit{i)} how outcomes of socially-engaged projects circulate through communities and can be appropriated independently of the research inquiries they stem from; \textit{ii)} how, through such process, impact is reconfigured as issues are added to shared concerns. The paper sets out by analyzing the entanglement of actors, meanings (e.g. values, narratives, opinions) and forms of participation that were configured throughout the transformation observed. Attention is then drawn to their political qualities, including their inherent openness and their capacity to produce change locally. The paper introduces four analytical sensitives illustrating how thinking with political ecologies of participation can help CSCW research to focus on the longer processes whereby impact can be configured.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449286
Air pollution is a global challenge for cities across the globe. Understanding the public perception of air pollution can help policymakers engage better with the public and appropriately introduce policies. Accurate public perception can also help people to identify the health risks of air pollution and act accordingly. Unfortunately, current techniques for determining perception are not scalable: it involves surveying few hundred people with questionnaire-based surveys. Using the advances in natural language processing (NLP), we propose a more scalable solution called Vartalaap (which means Conversation in Hindi Langauge) to gauge public perception of air pollution via the microblogging social network Twitter. We used more than 2.2M tweets on Delhi, India, from a 7.3M tweet dataset, which we curated for air pollution perception studies. We find that (unfortunately) the public is supportive of unproven mitigation strategies to reduce pollution, thus risking their health due to a false sense of security. We also find that air quality is a year-long problem, but the discussions are not proportional to the level of pollution and spike up when pollution is more visible. The information required by Vartalaap is publicly available and, as such, it can be immediately applied to study different societal issues across the world.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449170
Enabling the free and equal exchange of arguments on social issues in a respectful manner is an integral part of establishing the democratic ideal. However, the current manifestation of online spaces tends to facilitate the gathering of like-minded people, leading to polarization of opinions. Such polarization inhibits the sharing of diverse opinions and deteriorates respect for disagreeing opinions, preventing the ideal exchange of opinion. To tackle this issue, we present StarryThoughts, an online system that supports users for expressing and exploring diverse perspectives on social issues. The system supports three types of exploration of the collected arguments online: navigating opinions based on the demographic identities of the posters, checking the user's demographic stereotypes related to given social issues, and engaging with opinions with semantically different point-of-views. Results from a user study with 50 participants showed that the system enables participants to explore a wide range of opinions on social issues, to be more informed on the various arguments, and to be more confident about their opinion. From our findings, we provide several design considerations for building online systems for supporting users to explore diverse opinions on social issues.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449140
People often prefer to consume news with similar political predispositions and access like-minded news articles, which aggravates polarized clusters known as "echo chamber". To mitigate this phenomenon, we propose a computer-aided solution to help combat extreme political polarization. Specifically, we present a framework for reversing or neutralizing the political polarity of news headlines and articles. The framework leverages the attention mechanism of a Transformer-based language model to first identify polar sentences, and then either flip the polarity to the neutral or to the opposite through a GAN network. Tested on the same benchmark dataset, our framework achieves a 3%-10% improvement on the flipping/neutralizing success rate of headlines compared with the current state-of-the-art model. Adding to prior literature, our framework not only flips the polarity of headlines but also extends the task of polarity flipping to full-length articles. Human evaluation results show that our model successfully neutralizes or reverse the polarity of news without reducing readability. We release a large annotated dataset that includes both news headlines and full-length articles with polarity labels and meta-data to be used for future research. Our framework has a potential to be used by, social scientists, content creators and content consumers in the real world.
Cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, allowing citizens to engage with alternate perspectives and form considered opinions. However, in the United States, amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity, these conversations are especially hard to have. In online spaces, such interactions often devolve into name-calling and personal attacks. We report on a qualitative study of 17 US residents who have engaged with outpartisans on Reddit, to understand their expectations and the strategies they adopt in such interactions. We find that users have multiple, sometimes contradictory expectations of these conversations, ranging from deliberative discussions to entertainment and banter, which adds to the challenge of finding conversations they like. Through experience, users have refined multiple strategies for fostering good cross-partisan engagement. Contrary to offline settings where knowing about the interlocutor can help manage disagreements, on Reddit, some users look to actively learn as little as possible about their outpartisan interlocutors for fear that such information may bias their interactions. Through design probes about hypothetical features intended to reduce partisan hostility, we find that users are actually open to knowing certain kinds of information about their interlocutors, such as non-political subreddits that they both participate in, and to having that information made visible to their interlocutors. However, making other information visible, such as the other subreddits that they participate in or previous comments they posted, though potentially humanizing, raises concerns around privacy and misuse of that information for personal attacks.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479537
This paper describes how village-level officials, relatively new to the Internet, use popular digital platforms on smartphones to supplement and extend long-standing patterns of information control and authoritarian power in rural Cambodia. They use these tools to monitor local affairs, report to the central government, and promote local government activities, practices which intimidate villagers and encourage their political withdrawal and self-censorship. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on networked authoritarianism and rural governance. First, technological changes currently underway in the Cambodian rural bureaucracy reflect a generational transition, as long-standing officials struggle to use new media easily or effectively, leading to new anxieties and breakdowns for these traditional holders of power. Second, bureaucratic information practices in these villages rely on material practices ranging from paper, face to face meetings, and loudspeakers, to new tools such as Facebook and smartphones - underlining significant continuities in mechanisms of bureaucratic power and control. Third, networked authoritarian practices conjure for villagers the historical links between information control and violence, and the effectiveness of these tactics on chilling speech is often rooted in villagers' memories of fear.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449124
Because of the increasingly negative impacts of the echo chamber effect, such as the dissemination of fake news and political polarization occurring in social networking services (SNSs), considerable efforts are being made to mitigate this effect. Prior HCI studies have presented the development of user interfaces to display information that reflects various standpoints, with the aim of nudging people to consume information in a more objective fashion. However, these efforts still lack the ability to highlight the characteristics, generation processes, and negative effects of echo chambers, so they may not be effective in helping people become sufficiently aware of the echo chamber effect and those who are already in an echo chamber. In this paper, we present ChamberBreaker (CB), which has been designed to help increase a player's awareness of and preemptively respond to an echo chamber effect based on psychological concepts: inoculation, heuristics for judging, and gamification. Through a user study with 882 participants (control group: 446, experimental group: 436), we demonstrated the feasibility of our game-based methodology to support the awareness of the echo chamber effect and the importance of maintaining diverse perspectives when consuming information. Our findings highlight the externalization of psychological standpoints in mitigating an echo chamber effect and suggest design implications for system development---the consideration of demographics, playing time, and the connection to fake news recognition---for digital literacy education. You can play CB at http://tiny.cc/chamberbreaker
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479859
In this study, we investigate the extent of polarisation among theist versus atheist groups on Arab Twitter and their networks. We find four main self-identified groups of Arab users that can be distinguished by different attitudes to religion. In addition to Atheists and Theists, there are Rationalists, who promote rational thinking regardless of religious affiliation, and Tanweeri, who promote religious reforms. Through a keyword search of Twitter account handles and biographies, we identified 2,673 active, public Twitter accounts that clearly state whether they are Atheists, Theists, Tanweeri or Rationalists and analysed the interactions among themselves and the accounts that are followed, retweeted, or mentioned the most in their networks. Depending on the network analysed, we found between four and seven sub-communities that highlight the rich socio-cultural context in which discussions of religion, non-religion, and religious reform unfold. While there was clear online polarisation between atheists and theists, Rationalist and Tanweeri accounts are spread among the two polarised sides, acting as natural bridges. We also found a clear separation between Arab atheists who engage with Arab accounts promoting atheism and those who primarily engage with Western accounts promoting atheism. We discuss implications for the study of religious debate and religious polarisation on social media.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479505