Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization

Luis Abreu and Doh-Shin Jeon

No 19-05, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: We study how media bias is affected by the structure of social networks on social media. We consider an ad-financed media firm which chooses the ideological location of its news and targets consumers who can share the news with their followers on an online social media. After studying how a targeted consumer’s incentive to share the news is shaped by the network structure of her followers, we study the firm’s strategy to maximize the breadth of news sharing and find that when the mean (respectively, the variance) of followers’ ideological locations is a convex (respectively, concave) function of a direct consumer’s location, the media firm is likely to produce polarized news. The analysis of the case in which consumers are uniformly distributed reveals that news polarization is more likely to occur as the degree of homophily increases. We also find that media competition makes polarization more likely.

Keywords: media bias; online social networks; homophily; sharing, polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D85 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-net, nep-pay, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Jeon_19-05.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
Working Paper: Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1905

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().