Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization
20.11.2019 14:15 – 15:45
INSTITUTE OF ECONOMICS AND ECONOMETRICS SEMINAR / ABSTRACT
(joint work Luis Abreu, TSE)
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.
Lieu
Bâtiment: Uni Mail
Bd du Pont-d'Arve 40
1205 Geneva
Room: M 3250, 3rd floor
Organisé par
Faculté d'économie et de managementInstitute of Economics and Econometrics
Intervenant-e-s
Doh-Shin JEON, Toulouse School of Economics, Franceentrée libre
Classement
Catégorie: Séminaire