Breaking the Loop: Causal Learning to Mitigate Echo Chambers in Social Networks

In social networks, echo chambers form when users primarily encounter information that reinforces their existing views with limited exposure to different perspectives. This self-reinforcing isolation worsens societal issues such as division and declining public discourse. Traditional approaches attempt to mitigate echo chambers by analyzing observable interaction patterns to identify their formative mechanisms. However, they overlook unobserved implicit factors, called hidden confounders in causal inference, that significantly influence content exposure and user behaviors despite not being directly captured in the data. To address this, we propose Causal Echo Diffusion Attenuator (CEDA) , a novel framework that integrates causal learning with sequential recommendations to detect and adjust for hidden confounders in social networks. Generally, CEDA comprises four key components: (1) User Dual Modelling builds comprehensive user embeddings by combining users’ attributes and structural information to fully capture behavior patterns. (2) Causal Transformer then estimates residual embeddings that account for hidden confounders, incorporating them into the Transformer as causal adjustments for unbiased user embeddings. (3) Social Diffusion Predictor uses unbiased user embeddings to jointly optimize diffusion prediction accuracy and information diversity. (4) Targeted Interventions strategically reshapes information flows to disrupt echo chambers based on the generated prediction and diversity insights. Extensive experiments demonstrate CEDA’s superior performance in both predicting information diffusion patterns and mitigating echo chambers.