Biases in the Facebook News Feed: a Case Study on the Italian Elections

Hargreaves, Eduardo and Agosti, Claudio and Menasche, Daniel and Neglia, Giovanni and Reiffers-Masson, Alexandre and Altman, Eitan (2018) Biases in the Facebook News Feed: a Case Study on the Italian Elections. In: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), AUG 28-31, 2018, Barcelona, SPAIN, pp. 806-812.

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Abstract

Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithms usually lacks transparency, motivating measurements, modeling and analysis in order to understand and improve its properties. In this paper, we propose a reproducible methodology encompassing measurements and an analytical model to capture the visibility of publishers over a News Feed. First, measurements are used to parameterize and to validate the expressive power of the proposed model. Then, we conduct a what-if analysis to assess the visibility bias incurred by the users against a baseline derived from the model. Our results indicate that a significant bias exists and it is more prominent at the top position of the News Feed. In addition, we found that the bias is non-negligible even for users that are deliberately set as neutral with respect to their political views.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Barcelona, SPAIN, AUG 28-31, 2018
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited:	07 Feb 2019 08:54
Last Modified:	07 Feb 2019 08:54
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/61667

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