Balancing diversity to counter-measure geographical centralization in microblogging platforms

We study whether geographical centralization is reflected in the virtual population of microblogging platforms. A consequence of centralization is the decreased visibility and findability of content from less central locations.We propose to counteract geographical centralization in microblogging timelines by promoting geographical diversity through: 1) a characterization of imbalance in location interaction centralization over a graph of geographical interactions from user generated content; 2) geolocation of microposts using imbalance-aware content features in text classifiers, and evaluation of those classifiers according to their diversity and accuracy; 3) definition of a two-step information filtering algorithm to ensure diversity in summary timelines of events. We study our proposal through an analysis of a dataset of Twitter in Chile, in the context of the 2012 municipal political elections.

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