Polarization Prism: Facilitating Diverse Viewpoint Reflection by Mining Unseen Perspectives in Social Media Polarization

Social media has enabled users to easily share opinions and engage with like-minded individuals, but it has also increased exposure to biased information through filter bubbles and polarization. We propose Polarization Prism, a novel reflection tool that visualizes polarization on social media and reveals diverse perspectives often overlooked under polarization. The tool extracts differences in perspectives between polarized groups using natural language processing techniques, capturing multifaceted perspectives without relying on predefined axes like pro/con. Polarization Prism is designed to be immediately generated from social media posts about ongoing events, enabling news media outlets to raise awareness about opinion biases and present diverse perspectives to their readers. An online user study with 847 participants demonstrated that the tool effectively increases awareness of perspective diversity, particularly among users with higher media literacy. Our findings highlight the potential of Polarization Prism to mitigate polarization and underscore the importance of user media literacy in maximizing its effectiveness.