{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113856"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113856","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Mitigating selective exposure in social media forums","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-04-06 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-04-06 without embargo terms","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Gao, Mingkun"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Computer Science","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Sundaram, Hari","Kirlik, Alex","Karahalios, Karrie","Xu, Anbang"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2022,"date_issued":"2022-04-29T21:34:30Z","date_published":"2022-04-29T21:34:30Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:53Z","subjects":["Computer science"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["Copyright 2021 Mingkun Gao"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113856","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Sundaram, Hari","Kirlik, Alex","Karahalios, Karrie","Xu, Anbang"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Gao, Mingkun"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2022-04-29T21:34:30Z","2021-12","2021-11-29"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Computer Science"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Computer science"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2021 Mingkun Gao"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113856"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-04-06 without embargo terms","The student, Mingkun Gao, accepted the attached license on 2021-11-24 at 00:42.","The student, Mingkun Gao, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2021-11-24 at 02:08.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2021-11-29 at 15:49.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #17257 on 2022-04-06 at 17:09:56","Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-29T21:34:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 GAO-DISSERTATION-2021.pdf: 6000508 bytes, checksum: 10a8537202722dcc27e4c949f8f12624 (MD5) new_source.zip: 11582610 bytes, checksum: 56299578afe5cfa9328f77d67b6374a6 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4208 bytes, checksum: 6c9480b31274ce1387fed99e00f6b1f1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2021-11-29","This dissertation focuses on designing social media interfaces to help people explore diverse social opinions and mitigate selective exposure - a tendency that people actively seek attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-inconsistent information. Diverse information consumption has potential benefits, including but not limited to helping individuals form accurate viewpoints, facilitating better decision-making processes, cultivating people's tolerance and mutual understanding with others, which is essential for a thriving democratic society. Both actively seeking congenial information (i.e., selective exposure) and passively being in a congenial information environment (i.e., de facto selective exposure) can impair people's exposure to diverse social opinions. Meanwhile, people can play a significant role in shaping others' information environments by sharing information on social media. Thus, we break our general research problem down to two sub-problems: 1) designing interfaces to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption, which focuses on the effect of interface design on people's active information-seeking behavior; 2) understanding humans' role as the information filter for others, which is the first step towards a better interface design to tackle potential problems caused by information sharing among people. We first proposed organizing and showing categorized social opinions based on emotional reactions to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption. Our evaluation indicated that such a design could motivate people to explore diverse social opinions. Next, we designed and implemented a system that can provide novel visual hints with new recommendation mechanisms to improve people's awareness of diverse opinions and mitigate selective exposure. Finally, we studied the effect of the stance label and the credibility label on people's information selection and perception on a two-column news feed. We found that the stance label can exacerbate selective exposure and make people agree more on fake news. And the credibility label has a limited effect on mitigating selective exposure and combating fake news. Our work expanded the design toolbox of mitigating selective exposure and gave interface/system designers more choices when using these tools. To better understand people's role as the information filter, we conducted a simulated online experiment to figure out how the attitude distribution of the recipient group affects people's information-sharing behavior in the anonymous scenario. We observed that the attitude distribution of the recipient group has an impact on people’s sharing behavior even though various factors (e.g., topics, people's attitudes, etc.) may be related to such effect. People tend to cater to the majority's attitudes by selectively sharing more information consistent with the majority's attitudes in some specific context, which creates the filter bubble for others. This result indicated the necessity to study interface design to motivate people to share more balanced information to help break the filter bubble for those recipients."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Mitigating selective exposure in social media forums"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Sundaram, Hari","Kirlik, Alex","Karahalios, Karrie","Xu, Anbang"],"dc:creator":["Gao, Mingkun"],"dc:date":["2022-04-29T21:34:30Z","2021-12","2021-11-29"],"dc:description":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2022-04-06 without embargo terms","The student, Mingkun Gao, accepted the attached license on 2021-11-24 at 00:42.","The student, Mingkun Gao, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2021-11-24 at 02:08.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2021-11-29 at 15:49.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #17257 on 2022-04-06 at 17:09:56","Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-29T21:34:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 GAO-DISSERTATION-2021.pdf: 6000508 bytes, checksum: 10a8537202722dcc27e4c949f8f12624 (MD5) new_source.zip: 11582610 bytes, checksum: 56299578afe5cfa9328f77d67b6374a6 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4208 bytes, checksum: 6c9480b31274ce1387fed99e00f6b1f1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2021-11-29","This dissertation focuses on designing social media interfaces to help people explore diverse social opinions and mitigate selective exposure - a tendency that people actively seek attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-inconsistent information. Diverse information consumption has potential benefits, including but not limited to helping individuals form accurate viewpoints, facilitating better decision-making processes, cultivating people's tolerance and mutual understanding with others, which is essential for a thriving democratic society. Both actively seeking congenial information (i.e., selective exposure) and passively being in a congenial information environment (i.e., de facto selective exposure) can impair people's exposure to diverse social opinions. Meanwhile, people can play a significant role in shaping others' information environments by sharing information on social media. Thus, we break our general research problem down to two sub-problems: 1) designing interfaces to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption, which focuses on the effect of interface design on people's active information-seeking behavior; 2) understanding humans' role as the information filter for others, which is the first step towards a better interface design to tackle potential problems caused by information sharing among people. We first proposed organizing and showing categorized social opinions based on emotional reactions to mitigate selective exposure for individual information consumption. Our evaluation indicated that such a design could motivate people to explore diverse social opinions. Next, we designed and implemented a system that can provide novel visual hints with new recommendation mechanisms to improve people's awareness of diverse opinions and mitigate selective exposure. Finally, we studied the effect of the stance label and the credibility label on people's information selection and perception on a two-column news feed. We found that the stance label can exacerbate selective exposure and make people agree more on fake news. And the credibility label has a limited effect on mitigating selective exposure and combating fake news. Our work expanded the design toolbox of mitigating selective exposure and gave interface/system designers more choices when using these tools. To better understand people's role as the information filter, we conducted a simulated online experiment to figure out how the attitude distribution of the recipient group affects people's information-sharing behavior in the anonymous scenario. We observed that the attitude distribution of the recipient group has an impact on people’s sharing behavior even though various factors (e.g., topics, people's attitudes, etc.) may be related to such effect. People tend to cater to the majority's attitudes by selectively sharing more information consistent with the majority's attitudes in some specific context, which creates the filter bubble for others. This result indicated the necessity to study interface design to motivate people to share more balanced information to help break the filter bubble for those recipients."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113856"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2021 Mingkun Gao"],"dc:subject":["Computer science"],"dc:title":["Mitigating selective exposure in social media forums"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Computer Science"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:53Z"}