Mix It Up

Mix It Up: Exposes You to Perspectives Outside Your Social Media Filter Bubble

An open-source browser extension that injects content suggestions from across the political spectrum into your Facebook and Twitter feeds, helping you see beyond your social media filter bubble.

What is Mix It Up?

Mix It Up is an open-source browser extension that aims to burst filter bubbles on social media by recommending content that offers alternate perspectives. It works by analyzing the political leanings of your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and then using an algorithm to suggest posts, articles, and commentary from across the ideological spectrum to add into your feeds.

The goal of Mix It Up is to expose social media users to a wider range of viewpoints and ideas instead of only seeing posts and articles that reinforce their existing beliefs and opinions. This helps combat the filter bubble effect created by the algorithms on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Research has shown that filter bubbles can polarize discourse and fuel extremism when people are not exposed to alternate ways of thinking.

As an open-source project, Mix It Up is transparent about how its recommendation engine works. It analyzes the bias and framing of content rather than just identifying content by simplistic partisan terms like left/right or liberal/conservative. The extension then suggests relevant articles, opinion pieces, and analysis to provide better ideological balance for users.

Early testing shows that Mix It Up helps users discover constructive perspectives they otherwise would never have found. By seeing more varied content in their social feeds, people gain greater media literacy about issues, diversify their sources of information, and have more empathy by understanding opposing points of view.

Mix It Up Features

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