Co-exposure Maximization in Online Social Networks

Social media has created new ways for citizens to stay informed on societal matters and participate in political discourse. However, with its algorithmically-curated and virally-propagating content, social media has contributed further to the polarization of opinions by reinforcing users' existing viewpoints. An emerging line of research seeks to understand how content-recommendation algorithms can be re-designed to mitigate societal polarization amplified by social-media interactions. In this paper, we study the problem of allocating seed users to opposing campaigns: by drawing on the equal-time rule of political campaigning on traditional media, our goal is to allocate seed users to campaigners with the aim to maximize the expected number of users who are co-exposed to both campaigns.