BiasTube Trump vs. Biden
Team
Moshe Borouchov, Federica Berra, Anton Abilov, Pablo Mahave, Irene Font Peradejordi
Location
New York, NY
Year
2020
This project explores whether it is possible to tell whether someone is a Trump or a Biden supporter simply by looking at their Youtube homepage. Through an interactive experience, learned how we make assumptions about someone’s political leaning and raise awareness that we are sometimes too quick to judge someone’s identity.
This project explores whether it is possible to tell whether someone is a Trump or a Biden supporter simply by looking at their Youtube homepage. Through an interactive experience, we wish to learn how we make assumptions about someone’s political leaning and raise awareness that we are sometimes too quick to judge someone’s identity.
In an increasingly polarized society, we are prone to forming groups of co-occurring social identities and quickly judging someone from the opposing side. Everyday acts that scarcely registered as political in the past are now considered reliable clues about someone’s political group membership. Are we too quick to judge, or can we tell someone’s political leaning based on seemingly unrelated cues?
Working in a multidisciplinary team at Cornell Tech (Federica Berra, Irene Font Peradejordi, Anton Abilov, Pablo Mahave), we built an interactive experience that allows participants to guess whether a Youtube homepage belongs to a Trump or Biden supporter. Once the participant guesses a candidate, they can specify which video most influenced their decision. This allows us to collect data about which videos are more likely to associate a homepage with a political leaning.