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Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization

Author

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  • Luis Abreu

    (Toulouse School of Economics, 21 Allée de Brienne, 31015 Toulouse Cedex 6, France)

  • Doh-Shin Jeon

    (Toulouse School of Economics, 21 Allée de Brienne, 31015 Toulouse Cedex 6, France)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Luis Abreu & Doh-Shin Jeon, 2019. "Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization," Working Papers 19-05, NET Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:net:wpaper:1905
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Larcinese, Valentino & Puglisi, Riccardo & Snyder Jr., James M., 2011. "Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(9-10), pages 1178-1189, October.
    2. Halberstam, Yosh & Knight, Brian, 2016. "Homophily, group size, and the diffusion of political information in social networks: Evidence from Twitter," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C), pages 73-88.
    3. Ron Berman & Zsolt Katona, 2020. "Curation Algorithms and Filter Bubbles in Social Networks," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 39(2), pages 296-316, March.
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    1. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/27dls12b6d8aor7i6sipg9ie3g is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Emeric Henry & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya & Sergei Guriev, 2022. "Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 55-86, August.
    3. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/27dls12b6d8aor7i6sipg9ie3g is not listed on IDEAS
    4. repec:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/27dls12b6d8aor7i6sipg9ie3g is not listed on IDEAS
    5. repec:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/27dls12b6d8aor7i6sipg9ie3g is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Leonardo Madio, 2023. "Content Moderation and Advertising in Social Media Platforms," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0297, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno".
    7. Leonardo Madio & Martin Quinn, 2024. "Content Moderation and Advertising in Social Media Platforms," CESifo Working Paper Series 11169, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    media bias; online social networks; homophily; sharing; polarization;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media

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