Promoting Fairness in Online Attention
Promoting Fairness in Online Attention
Lexing Xie, Pascal Van Hentenryck
ARC Discovery Project
This project aims to design mechanisms for fairness of attention to online digital items, by promoting diversity and reducing biases. Attention is one of the most valuable, yet scarce resources in the modern world. Biased attention fuels the propagation of fake information, hurts democratic debate in society and leads to public trust crisis of online media, which could result in unpleasant surprises in individual and group decisions. This project builds upon recent breakthroughs in social dynamics, and expects to design new methods for measuring the extent of (un)fairness and (mis)trust, validate novel intervention strategies in a series of online experiments promoting unbiased information consumption and fair decision-making. This project was funded $332,000 and runs from July 2018 - June 2021.