A dashboard for controlling polarization in personalization

Personalization is pervasive in the online space as it leads to higher efficiency for the user and higher revenue for the platform by individualizing the most relevant content for each user. However, recent studies suggest that such personalization can learn and propagate systemic biases and polarize opinions; this has led to calls for regulatory mechanisms and algorithms that are constrained to combat bias and the resulting echo-chamber effect. We present our balanced news feed via a demo that displays a dashboard through which users can view the political leaning of their news consumption and set their polarization constraints. The balanced feed, as generated by the user-defined constraints, is then showcased side-by-side with the unconstrained (polarized) feed for comparison.