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arXiv · 2101.04751

RePBubLik: Reducing the Polarized Bubble Radius with Link Insertions

Shahrzad Haddadan·Cristina Menghini·Matteo Riondato·Eli Upfal
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Abstract

The topology of the hyperlink graph among pages expressing different opinions may influence the exposure of readers to diverse content. Structural bias may trap a reader in a polarized bubble with no access to other opinions. We model readers' behavior as random walks. A node is in a polarized bubble if the expected length of a random walk from it to a page of different opinion is large. The structural bias of a graph is the sum of the radii of highly-polarized bubbles. We study the problem of decreasing the structural bias through edge insertions. Healing all nodes with high polarized bubble radius is hard to approximate within a logarithmic factor, so we focus on finding the best $k$ edges to insert to maximally reduce the structural bias. We present RePBubLik, an algorithm that leverages a variant of the random walk closeness centrality to select the edges to insert. RePBubLik obtains, under mild conditions, a constant-factor approximation. It reduces the structural bias faster than existing edge-recommendation methods, including some designed to reduce the polarization of a graph.

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Shahrzad Haddadan, Cristina Menghini, Matteo Riondato, Eli Upfal. 2021-01-12. RePBubLik: Reducing the Polarized Bubble Radius with Link Insertions. https://doi.org/10.1145/3437963.3441825

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