Information cocoons in online navigation.

ABSTRACT: Social media and online navigation bring us enjoyable experiences in accessing information, and simultaneously create information cocoons (ICs) in which we are unconsciously trapped with limited and biased information. We provide a formal definition of IC in the scenario of online navigation. Subsequently, by analyzing real recommendation networks extracted from Science, PNAS, and Amazon websites, and testing mainstream algorithms in disparate recommender systems, we demonstrate that similarity-based recommendation techniques result in ICs, which suppress the system navigability by hundreds of times. We further propose a flexible recommendation strategy that addresses the IC-induced problem and improves retrieval accuracy in navigation, which are demonstrated by simulations on real data an

SUBMITTER: Hou L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9840977 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature