Presentation on YouTube.

This paper examines how popularity incentives in social media affect content dynamics, distinct from opinion dynamics in society. In the model, content virality enhances utility, incentivizing agents to create content different from their opinions. However, diverging from opinions brings disutility. Under this tradeoff, popularity-driven content is more common when societal polarization on a subject is high (e.g., political debates) or low (e.g., natural disasters), leading to amplified or curtailed polarization in social media compared to society. Connectivity and (subject-specific) societal polarization collectively shape content dynamics under popularity incentives, offering new insights into how social media polarization differs from societal polarization.

(With Zafer Kanik)