Measuring and managing information diets of social media users: Research overview

The widespread adoption of social media like Twitter and Facebook has lead to a paradigm shift in the way our society is producing and consuming information, from the broadcast mass media to online social media. To study the effects of this paradigm shift, we define the concept of information diet-which is the composition of a set of information items being produced or consumed. Information diets can be constructed along many aspects like topics (eg. politics, sports, science etc), or perspectives (eg. politically left leaning or right leaning), or sources (eg. originating from different parts of the world). We use information diets to measure the diversity and bias in the information produced or consumed, and to study how the recommendation and search systems are shaping the diets of social media users. We leverage the insights we gain from analysing social media users' diets to design better information discovery and exchange systems over social media.