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I've got an idea to fix social media. No, seriously.
There's a concept of social capital, where your network of human connections is roughly analogous to financial capital. Some people have more, some people have less. And it's pretty clearly better to have more- whether it's finding a job, finding a romantic partner, or just finding someone to go bowling with, social connections matter a lot.
The only problem is, it's hard to measure it. How do you quantify how popular someone is? As that wiki article says, "There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself." But now, thanks to social media, now we know! You can just look at your social media accounts and it tells you exactly how many friends/followers/subscribers/whatever you have. (of course that leaves out a lot of info, like how many of those accounts are bots vs real people, and whether they really love you or just clicked the button on a whim. But it's a start). I'm going to focus on twitter for simplicity, but this is broadly true of any social media platform.
I was wondering if anyone had calculated a "gini index" to measure inequality in social media. I couldn't find anything, maybe because there were too many results about how social media distorts income inequality. But maybe this is new ground for economists to study? What I did find about Twitter:
Anecdotally, that seems to be how most people now use social media. They don't use it to connect to their real-life friends and family, they use it to follow big accounts. Either real-life celebrities like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, or just an influencer who was lucky enough to go viral. Those people have a huge audience for every single shit they post, while most of us have barely anyone reacting to us. It's a weird dynamic where the big accounts get so many replies they can't possibly read them all, and most normal people are screaming into the void. Not very "social." . They used to say that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, " but that doesn't seem to be the case. Big celebrities just suck up all the attention.
My idea: redistribution! Put a progressive tax on followers, so that every big account loses a certain percentage each year, with the percentage going up with size. Maybe 10% per year for the top accounts. Those followers are reassigned to follow some random person at the bottom, just like how taxes take away rich people's money and give it to poor as welfare. We'd all get around 5-10 new followers randomly assigned to us each year, which isn't going to make us e-famous, but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.
You might ask, what's to stop the reassigned from just going dropping their new follow and going back to Taylor Swift? Nothing. If they really want to follow her, and hate this new person they've been assigned, they're free to do that. But my sense is that most people are following a lot of accounts out of sheer inertia. I hardly ever curate my connection list, I just keep following the same people forever. I have a lot of Facebook "friends" who I went to high school with and now barely recognize. I have Youtube subs I never watch. If you took them away, I don't think I'd notice. And it would give me more of an incentive to post if I knew that someone was actually going to read it, without me having to "work the algorithm" to "build up a following."
To some extent Youtube seems to actually do this. I've noticed it randomly recommends me some very low-view videos sometimes, like double-digit views with no comments. One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.
Is Travis Brown, an antifa activist, a source whose data you can trust ?
Probably not (i didnt know he was an Antifa activist) but i think the basic gist is true. Huge inequality between the big accounts with tons of followers, and the "common folk" who follow but are not followed.
It would be ludicrously unlikely that the Matthew principle weren't true on Twitter, since it's true everywhere else. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Attention economy feedback loop.
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