Community Formation as a Byproduct of a Recommendation System: A Simulation Model for Bubble Formation in Social Media

Abstract

We investigate the problem of the formation of communities of users that selectively exchange messages among them in a simulated environment. This closed community can be seen as the prototype of the bubble effect, i.e., the isolation of individuals from other communities. We develop a computational model of a society, where each individual is represented as a simple neural network (a perceptron), under the influence of a recommendation system that honestly forward messages (posts) to other individuals that in the past appreciated previous messages from the sender, i.e., that showed a certain degree of affinity. This dynamical affinity database determines the interaction network. We start from a set of individuals with random preferences (factors), so that at the beginning, there is no community structure at all. We show that the simple effect of the recommendation system is not sufficient to induce the isolation of communities, even when the database of user–user affinity is based on a small sample of initial messages, subject to small-sampling fluctuations. On the contrary, when the simulated individuals evolve their internal factors accordingly with the received messages, communities can emerge. This emergence is stronger the slower the evolution of individuals, while immediate convergence favors to the breakdown of the system in smaller communities. In any case, the final communities are strongly dependent on the sequence of messages, since one can get different final communities starting from the same initial distribution of users’ factors, changing only the order of users emitting messages. In other words, the main outcome of our investigation is that the bubble formation depends on users’ evolution and is strongly dependent on early interactions.

Keywords

• community formation
• filter bubble
• echo chamber
• recommendation systems
• social media
• agent-based simulations