Effect of Social Algorithms on Media Source Publishers in Social Media Ecosystems

Abstract

Social media systems have become a primary platform to consume and exchange information nowadays. The systems usually have three main components: media sources, content distributors (social media services), and content consumers, which we call social media content delivery ecosystem. A content distributor has social algorithms, as a black box, that were designed and trained to pick up, filter, and rank the most relevant and desired content to be delivered to each individual one of us. However, these modern social algorithms were typically complicated, so we do not really know how these social algorithms work such that we are unsure about the quality of the delivered content. Most researchers have worried about user side and investigated how fair of the contents that were delivered from social algorithms to users. On the other hand, no one focuses on impact of social algorithms on publisher side. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to understand how social algorithms have an impact on content publishers in social media ecosystem. From our SINCERE data, we firstly illustrate time series of all posts in each of global and local news media Facebook pages, including CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, and The Sacramento Bee, which were plotted in timeline during 2008 to early 2018 to see how they changed in terms of publishing times. We found that global news media changed their publish time. Our hypothesis was that they changed because social algorithms were changed. If they got better user reaction after changing publishing time somehow, we could assume social algorithms might deliver more contents to users at that time. We evaluated user reactions by the number of participants and user response time. We found that content most publishers got better reactions from users after changing publishing time. Therefore, we conclude that news media changed their time periods to published their post in order to make their content be more visible to users because social algorithms were changed.