Rich-get-Richer but Richer-also-get-Richer effect in Social Media
Network effects such as information cascades, and Rich-get-richer situations happen quite often in social media. This post will elaborate on the influence of social media in the world today, based on network effects. Social media has connected the world, and provided a platform to communicate ideas and opinions, however it has turned into something negative. In the article below, Jonathan and Tobias mention that “social media turns so much communication into a public performance”. People have the opportunity to express themselves, but the type of audience decides the payoff (status boost) that the person receives. A political platform is a great example of this, politicians argue with other politicians which becomes a performance for entertainment to an audience which is split into biased sides.
To be more specific, Facebook and twitter are examples that consist of sharing capabilities that allow users to post content based on its relevance and popularity, respectively. As mentioned in the article,”In 2009, Facebook added the “Like” button, for the first time creating a public metric for the popularity of content”. This led to an algorithm that would find out a group of interests/posts that the user will enjoy based off the posts that he/she has already liked. This prevents a rich-get-richer effect since the information that the users are exposed to is not dependent on the popularity of the posts, but instead focused on the relevance. Twitter’s retweet button creates an effect that is opposite to this. Users are allowed to retweet someone else’s post/tweet which creates a direct link between the two users. If a new user is exposed to this retweet, he/she might copy this link and be directly linked to the original tweet. This behavior supports the Rich-get-Richer circumstance which would allow certain tweets to be more popular than others.
Facebook also allows users to create future events along with the ability to invite people to those events. This is also possible in twitter but with the limitation that people cannot be invited, and the event can only be publicized. This shows the networks effects in a form of an information cascade that occurs in each of these platforms. Since Facebook gives the users the information regarding the status of other people’s invitations, and twitter does not, an event in Facebook creates an information cascade whereas an event in twitter does not.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/