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Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization

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  • Jeon, Doh-Shin
  • Abreu, Luis

Abstract

We consider an ad-financed media firm that chooses the ideological location of its news and targets consumers who can share the news with their followers on 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 firm is likely to produce polarized news.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeon, Doh-Shin & Abreu, Luis, 2020. "Homophily in Social Media and News Polarization," TSE Working Papers 20-1081, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:124150
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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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    Cited by:

    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:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/27dls12b6d8aor7i6sipg9ie3g is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Leonardo Madio, 2023. "Content Moderation and Advertising in Social Media Platforms," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0297, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno".

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    More about this item

    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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