Persuasion in social media: smoke and mirrors

Prabal Roy Chowdhury ()
Additional contact information
Prabal Roy Chowdhury: Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Discussion Papers from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Abstract: In the presence of individuals who think `categorically', we demonstrate that profit-maximizing social media platforms indulge in identity-based censoring, with nature of bias depending on the efficiency of the other epistemic institutions (EIs) of the society. In general, when the EIs are neither very efficient, nor very inefficient, the optimal strategy involves a mixture of confirmatory and (a minimal amount of) contrarian reporting, with the contrarian elements being used to create a false perception that no news is good news, which in turn allows the platform to camouflage the fact that it is suppressing all but one unwelcome signals. Further, public good implementation is inefficient if and only if the other epistemic institutions are inefficient.

Keywords: social media; confirmation bias; contrarianism; identity-based censoring; categorical thinking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.isid.ac.in/~epu/dispapers/dp24_03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:alo:isipdp:24-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Debasis Mishra ().