Computational Journalism Columbia Journalism School Week 3: Filters as Editors
September 22, 2016
This class Social filtering The Twitter network Filtering News On Twitter Problems with Filters Human-machine filtering The filter design problem Social Filtering who user chooses to follow = social filtering
x x
x x The Twitter Network Twitter follower network We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4, 262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks
Kwak et. al, What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? (2010) More followings than followers Small average distance between nodes Its a news network - hubs Twitter vs. Newswire timings
Petrovic et. al,
Can Twitter replace newswire for breaking news? (2011) Its a news network
Small number of high-degree hubs
Different network structure than e.g. Facebook.
Different uses.
why? - Zynep Tufekci, What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson data from SocialReach, who works with many publishers
John McDermott, Why Facebook is for ice buckets, Twitter is for Ferguson Sunita, Why #Ferguson broke out on Twitter, not Facebook Information flow on Facebook Filtering News on Twitter Reuters News Tracer
Score Cluster into Searches Filter veracity & events and Alerts newsworthy Liu et. al, Reuters Tracer: A Large Scale System of Detecting & Verifying Real-Time News Events from Twitter Liu et. al, Reuters Tracer: A Large Scale System of Detecting & Verifying Real-Time News Events from Twitter Liu et. al, Reuters Tracer: A Large Scale System of Detecting & Verifying Real-Time News Events from Twitter Problems with Filters The Echo Chamber [Echo chambers are] those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. ... While most of us had assumed that the Internet would increase the diversity of opinion, the echo chamber meme says the Net encourages groups to form that increase the homogeneity of belief. This isnt simply a factual argument about the topography carved by traffic and links. A tut, tut has been appended: See, you Web idealists have been shown up humankinds social nature sucks, just as we always told you!
- David Weinberger, Is there an echo in here?
Graph of political book sales during 2008 U.S. election, by orgnet.org From Amazon "users who bought X also bought Y" data. Retweet network of political tweets. From Conover, et. al., Political Polarization on Twitter Instagram co-tag graph, highlighting three distinct topical communities: 1) pro-Israeli (Orange), 2) pro-Palestinian (Yellow), and 3) Religious / muslim (Purple) Gilad Lotan, Betaworks The Filter Bubble What people care about politically, and what theyre motivated to do something about, is a function of what they know about and what they see in their media. ... People see something about the deficit on the news, and they say, Oh, the deficit is the big problem. If they see something about the environment, they say the environment is a big problem.
This creates this kind of a feedback loop in which your media influences your preferences and your choices; your choices influence your media; and you really can go down a long and narrow path, rather than actually seeing the whole set of issues in front of us.
- Eli Pariser, How do we recreate a front-page ethos for a digital world? The (Algorithmic) Filter Bubble
If we try to present stories that the user will want to
click on... do we end up only telling people what they want to hear?
If an algorithm only shows us things our friends like, will
we ever see anything that challenges us? Information diet The holy grail in this model, as far as Im concerned, would be a Firefox plugin that would passively watch your websurfing behavior and characterize your personal information consumption. Over the course of a week, it might let you know that you hadnt encountered any news about Latin America, or remind you that a full 40% of the pages you read had to do with Sarah Palin. It wouldnt necessarily prescribe changes in your behavior, simply help you monitor your own consumption in the hopes that you might make changes.
- Ethan Zuckerman, Playing the Internet with PMOG Information and Disinformation
The five clusters of users who made #TrumpWon trend after first presidential debate. Gilad Lotan, 2016 Human-Machine Filters Different Filtering Systems Content: Newsblaster analyzes the topics in the documents. No concept of users.
Social: What I see on Twitter determined by who I follow. Reddit comments filtered by votes as input. Amazon "people who bought X also bought Y - no content analysis.
Hybrid: Recommend based both on content and user behavior. TechMeme / MediaGazer Facebook trending (with editors) Facebook trending (without editors) Facebook trending review tool screenshot from leaked documents Filter Design Item Content My Data Other Users Data
what Ive read/liked
Text analysis, topic modeling, clustering...
social network structure, who I follow other users likes Filter design problem Formally, given U = user preferences, history, characteristics S = current story {P} = results of function on previous stories {B} = background world knowledge (other users?)
Define r(S,U,{P},{B}) in [0...1]
relevance of story S to user U
Filter design problem, restated When should a user see a story?
Aspects to this question:
normative personal: what I want societal: emergent group effects UI how do I tell the computer I want? technical constrained by algorithmic possibility economic cheap enough to deploy widely How to evaluate/optimize? How to evaluate/optimize? Netflix: try to predict the rating that the user gives a movie after watching it.
Amazon: sell more stuff.
Google web search: human raters A/B test every
change How to evaluate/optimize? Does the user understand how the filter works? Can they configure it as desired? Can they correctly predict what they will and won't see? Controls for abuse and harassment Can it be gamed? Spam, "user-generated censorship," etc.
