A Behavioral Model of Popularity and Polarization in Social Media

Talk by Zaruhi Hakobyan (University of Luxembourg) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

This paper examines how popularity incentives in social media affect content dynamics, distinct from opinion dynamics in society. Popularity-driven posts are more common when society is high-opinionated (e.g., political debates) or low-opinionated (e.g., natural disasters) on a subject, leading to amplified or curtailed opinionation in social media compared to society. Social media connectivity and the degree of opinionation in society collectively shape subject-specific content dynamics, offering new insights into how the degree of opinionation in social media differs from the one in society on different subjects.