Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social Media

TL;DR

Datavoidant is an AI-powered system designed to help independent journalists identify and address political data voids on social media, thereby combating disinformation in underrepresented communities.

Contribution

The paper introduces Datavoidant, a novel collaborative AI system that leverages machine learning to assist journalists in understanding and filling political data voids.

Findings

Journalists found Datavoidant helped them understand information ecosystems more quickly.

Users felt more confident in creating content to cover data voids.

The system facilitated collaboration among journalists to prevent disinformation.

Abstract

The limited information (data voids) on political topics relevant to underrepresented communities has facilitated the spread of disinformation. Independent journalists who combat disinformation in underrepresented communities have reported feeling overwhelmed because they lack the tools necessary to make sense of the information they monitor and address the data voids. In this paper, we present a system to identify and address political data voids within underrepresented communities. Armed with an interview study, indicating that the independent news media has the potential to address them, we designed an intelligent collaborative system, called Datavoidant. Datavoidant uses state-of-the-art machine learning models and introduces a novel design space to provide independent journalists with a collective understanding of data voids to facilitate generating content to cover the voids. We performed a user interface evaluation with independent news media journalists (N=22). These journalists reported that Datavoidant's features allowed them to more rapidly while easily having a sense of what was taking place in the information ecosystem to address the data voids. They also reported feeling more confident about the content they created and the unique perspectives they had proposed to cover the voids. We conclude by discussing how Datavoidant enables a new design space wherein individuals can collaborate to make sense of their information ecosystem and actively devise strategies to prevent disinformation.