Key ideas

Introduction

Users play a role to select their sources for information as opposed to the past.
Many users limit themselves to news stories that reinforce their views.
This leads to a more politically fragmented, less cohesive society.
There are systems to promote blue information for red users and viceversa but users do not like them.
Purple news are news with high consensus of reader reactions. Hopefully these evoke a more unified response across society which might help to understand each other.

"high consensus if there is a general agreement in readers' reaction despite readers' political leaning"
consensus = abs((democrats disagree/number of democrats) - (republicans disagree/number of republicans))
Mechanical turk used to measure consensus from WSJ blue/red feed and Twitter top 10 publishers.
Confirmed that political extremes tend to pick lower consensus content.

Count Retweets to measure popularity. High consensus (158) and low consensus (177) on avg. Similar engagement.
Do they cover similar or different topics? Consensus seems to cover non-US centric political topics.
High cross-cutting exposure: # opposite leaning retweeters > baseline of opposite leaning retwitters for a publisher
Clearly high consensus correlates with high cross cutitng exposure

Features found
- followers - on avg 67% are of the same political leaning
- retweeters - active supporters, 78% of the same politicall leaning
- repliers - 35% are of opposite political leaning
Use Kulshrestha et al 2017 to measure political leaning in [-1, 1]

Supervised learning using ground truth from the AMt dataset. Used SVM, Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression and Random forest.
Pruned insignificant features and used 5-fold cross validation.
Accuracies near 60/70% for predicting consensus.
Publisher-based features are better than tweet-based features. Poor performance due to short size of tweet.
74% of high consensus posts identified, 70% of low consensus.

We propose a complementary approach to inject diversity in users news consumption.
First attempt at operationalizing consensus of news posts on social media.
Deployed 'purple feed', a system to highlight high consensus posts.
Possibilities to study further evaluating the impact of showing high consensus posts on social media.