StarryThoughts: Facilitating Diverse Opinion Exploration on Social Issues

Abstract

Enabling the free and equal exchange of arguments on social issues in a respectful manner is an integral part of establishing the democratic ideal. However, the current manifestation of online spaces tends to facilitate the gathering of like-minded people, leading to the polarization of opinions. Such polarization inhibits the sharing of diverse opinions and deteriorates respect for disagreeing opinions. To tackle this issue, we present StarryThoughts, an online system that supports users to express and explore diverse perspectives on social issues. The system supports three types of exploration of the collected arguments online: navigating opinions based on the demographic identities of the posters, checking the the stereotypes users hold towards demographics in relation to given social issues, and engaging with opinions with semantically different point-of-views. By deploying the system to the public in co-operation with a nationwide broadcasting company, we collected 1,950 opinions with 144 free-form responses from 1,209 visitors as initial data and iterated on the design. Results from a user study with 56 participants showed that the system enables participants to explore a wide range of opinions on social issues, be more informed on the various arguments, and be more confident about their opinions. From our findings, we provide several design considerations for building online systems for supporting users to explore diverse opinions on social issues.