Optimal Engagement-Diversity Tradeoffs in Social Media

Abstract: Social media platforms are known to optimize user engagement with the help of algorithms. It is widely understood that this practice gives rise to echo chambers\emdash users are mainly exposed to opinions that are similar to their own. In this paper, we ask whether echo chambers are an inevitable result of high engagement; we address this question in a novel model. Our main theoretical results establish bounds on the maximum engagement achievable under a diversity constraint, for suitable measures of engagement and diversity; we can therefore quantify the worst-case tradeoff between these two objectives. Our empirical results, based on real data from Twitter, chart the Pareto frontier of the engagement-diversity tradeoff.