Hegemony in Social Media and the effect of recommendations

As today’s media landscape is carved by social media endorsements and built on automated recommendations, both of these are often criticized for inducing vicious dynamics, such as the filter bubble effect, echo chamber, or polarization. We introduce a new model featuring a mild version of homophily and two well-known popularity dynamics. These broadly reproduce the organic activity and the algorithmic filtering, respectively, of which the latter is now commonplace within social media or other online services. Surprisingly, we show this is all that is needed to create hegemony: a single viewpoint (or side) not only receives undue attention, but it also captures all the attention given to “top trending” items.

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