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Effort Mediates Access to Information in Online Social Networks

Published:10 March 2017Publication History
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Abstract

Individuals’ access to information in a social network depends on how it is distributed and where in the network individuals position themselves. In addition, individuals vary in how much effort they invest in managing their social connections. Using data from a social media site, we study how the interplay between effort and network position affects social media users’ access to diverse and novel information. Previous studies of the role of networks in information access were limited in their ability to measure the diversity of information. We address this problem by learning the topics of interest to social media users from the messages they share online with followers. We use the learned topics to measure the diversity of information users receive from the people they follow online. We confirm that users in structurally diverse network positions, which bridge otherwise disconnected regions of the follower network, tend to be exposed to more diverse and novel information. We also show that users who invest more effort in their activity on the site are not only located in more structurally diverse positions within the network than the less engaged users but also receive more novel and diverse information when in similar network positions. These findings indicate that the relationship between network structure and access to information in networks is more nuanced than previously thought.

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