Personalization and Ideological Segregation in Social Media

Social media often provides personalized content to enhance the efficiency and experience of their users. By modeling social media as a dynamic network, this study examines the effects of personalization on the opinion formation of social media users (henceforth, users). We argue that even when all users are openminded, personalization in social media can still lead to ideological segregation (e.g., political polarization). This ideological segregation will not disappear even if the population using this social media becomes very large. We characterize a necessary condition for the personalization algorithm used by social media not to cause ideological segregation. However, to satisfy this necessary condition in reality is almost impossible because that would require complete knowledge of users’ private information as well as an unchanging user population. To resolve the ideological segregation issue, we propose a random personalization algorithm that will not lead to ideological segregation. This algorithm can be easily applied in reality because it does not require any private information of the users or unchanging user populations.