Improving Emotional Well-Being on Social Media with Collaborative Filtering

Recommender systems and content personalization systems use algorithms that optimize for a given factor.We are interested in developing content recommendation algorithms that optimize for user well-being. In previous work, we showed that content can have large, significant impacts on users’ well-being. In this paper, we present the results of two large studies that show (1) people sometimes come to social media with the specific goal of improving their well-being and (2) that personalization systems can effectively recommend social media content that improves well-being.