Constructing Political Coordinates: Aggregating Over the Opposition for Diverse News Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Earl, Eamon, Ding, Chen, Valenzano, Richard, Paulen-Patterson, Drai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Earl, Eamon
Ding, Chen
Valenzano, Richard
Paulen-Patterson, Drai
author_facet Earl, Eamon
Ding, Chen
Valenzano, Richard
Paulen-Patterson, Drai
contents In the past two decades, open access to news and information has increased rapidly, empowering educated political growth within democratic societies. News recommender systems (NRSs) have shown to be useful in this process, minimizing political disengagement and information overload by providing individuals with articles on topics that matter to them. Unfortunately, NRSs often conflate underlying user interest with the partisan bias of the articles in their reading history and with the most popular biases present in the coverage of their favored topics. Over extended interaction, this can result in the formation of filter bubbles and the polarization of user partisanship. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding space called Constructed Political Coordinates (CPC), which models the political partisanship of users over a given topic-space, relative to a larger sample population. We apply a simple collaborative filtering (CF) framework using CPC-based correlation to recommend articles sourced from oppositional users, who have different biases from the user in question. We compare against classical CF methods and find that CPC-based methods promote pointed bias diversity and better match the true political tolerance of users, while classical methods implicitly exploit biases to maximize interaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constructing Political Coordinates: Aggregating Over the Opposition for Diverse News Recommendation
Earl, Eamon
Ding, Chen
Valenzano, Richard
Paulen-Patterson, Drai
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
In the past two decades, open access to news and information has increased rapidly, empowering educated political growth within democratic societies. News recommender systems (NRSs) have shown to be useful in this process, minimizing political disengagement and information overload by providing individuals with articles on topics that matter to them. Unfortunately, NRSs often conflate underlying user interest with the partisan bias of the articles in their reading history and with the most popular biases present in the coverage of their favored topics. Over extended interaction, this can result in the formation of filter bubbles and the polarization of user partisanship. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding space called Constructed Political Coordinates (CPC), which models the political partisanship of users over a given topic-space, relative to a larger sample population. We apply a simple collaborative filtering (CF) framework using CPC-based correlation to recommend articles sourced from oppositional users, who have different biases from the user in question. We compare against classical CF methods and find that CPC-based methods promote pointed bias diversity and better match the true political tolerance of users, while classical methods implicitly exploit biases to maximize interaction.
title Constructing Political Coordinates: Aggregating Over the Opposition for Diverse News Recommendation
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17574