StarryThoughts:Facilitating Diverse Opinion Exploration on Social Issues

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Enabling the free and equal exchange of arguments on social issues in a respectful manner is an integral part of establishing the democratic ideal. However, the current manifestation of online spaces tends to facilitate the gathering of like-minded people, leading to polarization of opinions. Such polarization inhibits the sharing of diverse opinions and deteriorates respect for disagreeing opinions, preventing the ideal exchange of opinion. To tackle this issue, we present StarryThoughts, an online system that supports users for expressing and exploring diverse perspectives on social issues. The system supports three types of exploration of the collected arguments online: navigating opinions based on the demographic identities of the posters, checking the user's demographic stereotypes related to given social issues, and engaging with opinions with semantically different point-of-views. Results from a user study with 50 participants showed that the system enables participants to explore a wide range of opinions on social issues, to be more informed on the various arguments, and to be more confident about their opinion. From our findings, we provide several design considerations for building online systems for supporting users to explore diverse opinions on social issues.