What a New Study Reveals About the 'Production-Consumption Gap' on Social Media
Research into the impact of social media on issues such as information integrity and political polarization has frequently surfaced a pattern: a tiny minority of highly active users produce the vast majority of political content, while most users are passive observers. For instance, previous research on the spread of fake news on Twitter found that a tiny minority of users—supersharers—disproportionately contributed to its spread in the lead-up to the 2020 US election.
A new research paper by social scientists Lisa Oswald, William Small Schulz, Ralph Hertwig, David Lazer, and Sebastian Stier analyzes this “production-consumption gap” and explores how this may lead citizens and scholars alike to “draw incorrect inferences regarding the submerged mass of public opinion.” The phenomenon has important implications, in particular, for the study of the relationship between social media and political polarization and for the design of policy interventions.
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