FollowBias: Broadening Twitter Gender Diversity

Networked gatekeepers on social media increasingly influence which people and groups receive media attention. Many unknowingly direct much greater attention to men than to women. Can technologies support these gatekeepers to follow their own values of equality?

As part of my Master’s thesis, Sarah Szalavitz and I created FollowBias, an app that gives people personalized feedback on the percentage of women they follow on Twitter and tracks whether they change their behavior. We published results from the FollowBias project at CSCW 2017:

Matias, J. N., Szalavitz, S., & Zuckerman, E. (2017, February). FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change toward Gender Equality by Networked Gatekeepers on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1082-1095). ACM.

FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change Toward Gender Equality on Social Media from J. Nathan Matias on Vimeo.

This project was created by:

• J. Nathan Matias
• Sarah Szalavitz
• Ethan Zuckerman