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Paper Number
1783
Paper Type
Complete
Description
Social media platforms often distribute content through different newsfeed channels, most commonly, social networks, algorithmic recommendations and trending content. Prior literature has investigated each channel’s impact on user-content engagement. However, little is known about the relationships between these channels. We investigate the impacts of limiting content display from the social network channel on the quantity and diversity of user-engaged content across channels. We leverage a natural experiment, where a social media platform hides friends’ liked content from the social network channel, to identify the impacts. Results show that hiding friends’ liked content reduces the quantity of users’ content engagement on the entire platform. Across channels, users increase their engagement with trending content but decrease their engagement with algorithmic recommendations. Further, restricting exposure to friends’ liked content reduces the diversity of users’ content engagement. Our results highlight the intercorrelation of user-content engagement across newsfeed channels and provide insights for newsfeed designs.
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Xiaohui; He, Qinglai; and Zhang, Zhongju, "Impacts of Hiding Friends’ Liked Content on User-Content Engagement across Newsfeed Channels" (2022). ICIS 2022 Proceedings. 6.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2022/social/social/6
Impacts of Hiding Friends’ Liked Content on User-Content Engagement across Newsfeed Channels
Social media platforms often distribute content through different newsfeed channels, most commonly, social networks, algorithmic recommendations and trending content. Prior literature has investigated each channel’s impact on user-content engagement. However, little is known about the relationships between these channels. We investigate the impacts of limiting content display from the social network channel on the quantity and diversity of user-engaged content across channels. We leverage a natural experiment, where a social media platform hides friends’ liked content from the social network channel, to identify the impacts. Results show that hiding friends’ liked content reduces the quantity of users’ content engagement on the entire platform. Across channels, users increase their engagement with trending content but decrease their engagement with algorithmic recommendations. Further, restricting exposure to friends’ liked content reduces the diversity of users’ content engagement. Our results highlight the intercorrelation of user-content engagement across newsfeed channels and provide insights for newsfeed designs.
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15-SocialMedia