TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract In various settings (e.g., political elections, marketing campaigns), competing groups attempt to disseminate messages that promote different viewpoints. Moreover, these groups often differ substantially in the resources they have available for promotion, which may generate inequities in the reach of their messages. With a series of computer simulations, the author investigates the role that social network structure plays in perpetuating or mitigating the inequalities in reach brought about by asymmetric access to resources. The author models such asymmetric access by varying the number of "seeds” available to disseminators (i.e., places in the social network from where their messages begin spreading). The author finds that long ties – links that connect otherwise distant regions of a social network – help to decrease the disparities in dissemination brought about by asymmetric access to seeds. The author shows that this finding generalizes to different assumptions about the proportion of long ties present, the seeding asymmetry, and the rate that messages spread, and argues that information and communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter can foster dissemination equality by prioritizing interactions across long ties.
VL  - 17
SN  - 978-1-78769-666-2, 978-1-78769-665-5/2050-2060
DO  - 10.1108/S2050-206020180000017006
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S2050-206020180000017006
AU  - Shmargad Yotam
ED  - Barry Wellman
ED  - Laura Robinson
ED  - Casey Brienza
ED  - Wenhong Chen
ED  - Shelia R. Cotten
PY  - 2018
Y1  - 2018/01/01
TI  - Long Ties as Equalizers
T2  - Networks, Hacking, and Media – CITA MS@30: Now and Then and Tomorrow
T3  - Studies in Media and Communications
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 99
EP  - 112
Y2  - 2024/04/23
ER  -