Joint Effects of Recommender Systems and Network Structure on the Visibility of Content and Creators
For social media platforms and researchers, this work provides insights into how feed design and network topology affect visibility allocation, but it is incremental as it extends known concepts through simulation.
This paper uses agent-based simulations to study how recommender systems and network structure jointly shape visibility of content and creators. It finds that popularity-based ranking concentrates visibility on a few items and creators, while collaborative filtering distributes it more broadly, with network structure modulating inequality without changing qualitative patterns.
Social media algorithms allocate users' visibility by ranking content within their social networks. Yet, how recommendation logic and network structure jointly shape visibility across content and creators remains largely understudied. In this work, we tackle this question through agent-based simulations using YSocial, a social media virtual twin, in which agents interact under 7 recommendation strategies and 2 network topologies. We find that recommender logic sets the visibility regime: popularity creates a reinforcement loop in which early reactions increase later exposure, concentrating visibility on a small subset of content and limiting creator visibility to those whose content enters this loop, while collaborative filtering distributes visibility broadly across the active catalogue and user base. When the follower graph shapes candidate selection, network structure changes the direction of inequality: under popularity ranking, creator-level concentration becomes comparable to global popularity, but visibility is systematically redirected toward creators who are already socially popular. Network topology modulates the magnitude of these effects without changing their qualitative ordering. These results show that visibility allocation should be evaluated across content, creators, network position, and temporal reinforcement, and that controlled simulations can help test how feed design distributes visibility before deployment.