High Research | Projects

Imagine you are a nurse who just finished a 14 hour shift in the ER, dealing with COVID patients. Getting on the bus, you open Twitter, and every post is about COVID-19. No. You do not need to be surrounded by it on your off-time.

What you’re facing currently is an echo chamber - where all you see on your feed is an echo of what you tweet, view and engage with.

In our research, we wanted to investigate the presence of these echo chambers to see if we can help people become more aware of them and encourage them to break free.
Engaging in twelve user interviews, we eventually landed on a project that would allow users to see the makeup of their feed in terms of their own echo chambers and to explore other echo chambers, with which they not usually engage.

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The problem

The Twitter community is often considered a toxic one: Twitter users are constantly surrounded by posts that echo back their opinion, causing them to maintain their current opinions, regardless of alternative resources. This situation is referred to as an echo chamber and frequently causes users to engage in confirmation bias for potentially skewed information.

The Goal

Harness the collective powers of everyday users to help Twitter users break out of their echo chambers.

The Solution

In order to encourage users to notice that they are surrounded by the same opinion over and over, we suggest a plugin or chrome extension that overlays on Twitter posts, that classifies what post belongs to what echo chamber. The label that appears will be generated by allowing users to vote on which echo chamber the post best fits in. The top voted tags will link users to a third party website, in which users can simulate feeds stuck in different echo chambers.

Why it is Important

Since the majority of Twitter users do not know they are in an echo chamber, raising awareness is a powerful step to helping people break out of thir situation. The mere repetition of seeing that one post after the next belongs to a certain perspective helps user become more self aware. More than this, the third party website helps users understand what a feed might look like in another chamber, which can promote empathy between people of different perspectives and bring awareness to why people think the way they do.

My Role

I acted as the project manager and technical consult for this endeavor. I was in charge of interfacing with the team in order to make sure everything was on track, by sending emails, agendas, setting up research goals, and interfacing with external sources. I also provided feasability checks, as someone who has work experience in Artificial Intelligence.

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Want to take a deeper dive into the research?

Over the course of a semester, I participated in an in depth research study to understand some of the biases associated with Twitter. The first half of the semester was dedicated to learning the basis of the background of bias in social media, while the second half of the semester focused on the problem statement:

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How might we...

raise awareness about echo chambers among Twitter users and encourage them to break out of them?

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The process...

Here, we investigated the way that people approach their feed in terms of how they create the balance of perspectives seen on their feed, the kinds of content curated, and how they evaluate the success of how well their feed is catered to their interests. By asking these kinds of questions and investigating larger studies, we were able to determine that there is a significant problem in Twitter’s feed curation, making people unaware of the fact that they are surrounded by only one perspective and become stuck in an echo chamber, where their potentially incomplete or incorrect beliefs are supported by confirmation biases.

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User Interviews...

Think Aloud Protocols

How users currently navigate their twitter feed

Semi-structured Interviews

How users structure their feed

Contextual Inquiries

Artifact Analysis for how users deal with obvious echo chambers

Speed Dating Sessions

Possible echo chamber storyboard solutions

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Putting it together...

Culmination of Research Methods:
Affinity Map

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Evidence: User quotes that map the journey of our solution

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Major Insights:

Not all users want to break out of their echo chambers.

Certain echo chambers might be productive and useful for Twitter users.

Users do not want to take on full responsibility for breaking out of their echo chambers and require some tool to support them.

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The Solution...

The Plugin:

Users can enable a google chrome extension or a plugin for their phone, such that they can see labels appear over each Twitter post. This label will be generated by users voting for the relevant label for the post. The top voted label will show users what echo chamber they might belong to.

When users go to vote, they can see the top rated labels will allow for low effort voting, but by clicking the “other” category users can put in their own idea for what echo chamber the post belongs to, which will be structured by type ahead suggestions. Only after users vote, will they be able to see the statistical breakdown of how others voted, such that they are not as influenced by other’s opinions.

Users can also access the third party website for further explanation and exploration through these labels.

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The Third Party Website (Twother):

After seeing the possible echo chambers that might be on their own feed, we wanted users to have a chance to explore what other echo chambers might be out there. Here, we are giving a user to see through the eyes of people who are apart of various echo chambers, to see the (tw)other perspective.

Users can select multiple echo chambers at a time to see similarities to their own feed.

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Implications...

This project is the first step in helping people break out of their echo chambers. There is a gap in awareness of what people are consuming, but by showing them how deeply they are a part of this chamber, it can help people to be more cognizant of the types of media they are consuming.

In future implementations, we would like to come up with webbed maps of people’s echo chambers, such that they can do even more self investigation and realize where they might compare to their friends or people they follow.

The empathy aspect was also particularly important. Users reflected to us that they could not understand how someone could think a certain way. By having them experience the echo chambers of others, it can bring insights to why people think the way we do.

Understanding is the first goal in helping people break out. This project accomplishes this bridge in comprehension in a way that harnesses the collective power of every day users in a low effort way that encourages a learning-first approach.

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A thank you to my team...

I was part of an amazing team and had support from dedicated leaders:

Raelin Musuraca - Course Instructor

Motahhare Eslami - Course Instructor and Project Creator

Tomo Nagashima - Course Instructor and Project Mentor

Anushree Abhyankar - Codesign Lead and Engineering Consult

Noni Shelton - Codesign Lead

Linda Xue - Research Lead and Business Consult

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Twother