Different mechanism for disparate visibility of minorities in social networks

Roncel Díaz, Daniel

Different mechanism for disparate visibility of minorities in social networks

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Roncel Díaz, D. Different mechanism for disparate visibility of minorities in social networks. 2022. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/54489

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Abstract

Recent studies have shown the existence of disparate visibility of groups in rankings. In [Germano et al., 2019] it is shown that in popularity-based rankings, the smaller the number of items of a particular group, the larger the share of traffic they can attract. This phenomenon has been coined by the term few-get-richer. Alternatively, [Karimi et al., 2018] show that, in social networks, the amplification of the traffic can be explained by means of homophily. In this TFG, we analyse whether the reported phenomena have a qualitatively different nature or they are consequences of the same mechanism. In particu- lar, we test through simulations (1) whether the disparate visibility observed in [Karimi et al., 2018] is a result of an amplification due to a network formation model; (2) whether in the absence of homophily in a network formation model, the disparate visibility of groups can also occur; (3) whether the few-get-richer effect can be observed in networks which do not depend on the homophily mechanism. Our results are that (1) the network formation model used in [Karimi et al., 2018] amplify the disparate visibility of groups; (2) the disparate visibility of groups can be explained by models that do not depend on the homophily mechanism; (3) the few-get-richer effect can also appear in models which do not depend on the homophily mechanism.