Encouraging Diversity- and Representation-Awareness in Geographically Centralized Content

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a decentralizing content algorithm and treemap visualizations can enhance geographical diversity awareness in micro-blogging platforms, counteracting centralization biases and improving user engagement with diverse content.

Contribution

It introduces a design approach using treemaps to reveal inherent geographical diversity in decentralized content timelines, supported by real-world interaction data.

Findings

Treemaps help users perceive geographical diversity in timelines.

Decentralized algorithms increase exposure to non-central locations.

Users engage more with diverse, geographically spread content.

Abstract

In centralized countries, not only population, media and economic power are concentrated, but people give more attention to central locations. While this is not inherently bad, this behavior extends to micro-blogging platforms: central locations get more attention in terms of information flow. In this paper we study the effects of an information filtering algorithm that decentralizes content in such platforms. Particularly, we find that users from non-central locations were not able to identify the geographical diversity on timelines generated by the algorithm, which were diverse by construction. To make users see the inherent diversity, we define a design rationale to approach this problem, focused on an already known visualization technique: treemaps. Using interaction data from an "in the wild" deployment of our proposed system, we find that, even though there are effects of centralization in exploratory user behavior, the treemap was able to make users see the inherent geographical diversity of timelines, and engage with user generated content. With these results in mind, we propose practical actions for micro-blogging platforms to account for the differences and biased behavior induced by centralization.