Enlightened: Can short-form news videos open minds?

Abstract

The United States of America has become severely polarized over the last twenty years, coincident with the increase in niche and fringe media. This contributes to the fragmentation of the shared assumptions, beliefs and trust in information that comprises ones perception of reality. Recently, the short-form video format has gained massive popularity in the world of social media and mobile applications (e.g. TikTok). To investigate whether this media format can be used to restore the shared reality among U.S. liberals and conservatives, I built a mobile-first progressive web application Enlightened that presents short, swipeable news videos in a manner similar to the popular dating app Tinder. The news clips were sourced from five major TV networks across the ideological spectrum (MSNBC, CNN, Bloomberg TV, ABC News and Fox News) and processed by a real-time news recording and processing system SuperGlue, to which I have also contributed. The processed news videos were summarized using a variation of the TextRank algorithm on the closed captions and the news source was visually masked by removing the lower third of the video using FFmpeg. Although the current interface of Enlightened has limited features, the results of a user study consisting of two surveys and the daily usage of Enlightened suggest that masked short-form news videos show great promise in opening the minds of both conservative and liberal users. However, the biggest limitation of this thesis is the small size of the user study. Hence, a larger-scale test needs to be conducted to ascertain whether short-form news videos can open minds.