Identity effects in social media

Leveraging data from a longitudinal field experiment, Taylor and colleagues show that identity cues, such as a username, increase how viewers vote and reply to online content. Their results support a rich-get-richer dynamic when identity cues are salient. Identity cues appear ubiquitously alongside content in social media today. Some also suggest universal identification, with names and other cues, as a useful deterrent to harmful behaviours online. Unfortunately, we know little about the effects of identity cues on opinions and online behaviours. Here we used a large-scale longitudinal field experiment to estimate the extent to which identity cues affect how people form opinions about and interact with content online. We randomly assigned content produced on a social news aggregation website to 'identified' and 'anonymous' conditions to estimate the causal effect of identity cues on how viewers vote and reply to content. The effects of identity cues were significant and heterogeneous, accounting for between 28% and 61% of the variation in voting associated with commenters' production, reputation and reciprocity. Our results also showed that identity cues cause people to vote on content faster (consistent with heuristic processing) and to vote according to content producers' reputations, production history and reciprocal votes with content viewers. These results provide evidence that rich-get-richer dynamics and inequality in social content evaluation are mediated by identity cues. They also provide insights into the evolution of status in online communities. From a practical perspective, we show via simulation that social platforms may improve content quality by including votes on anonymized content as a ranking signal.

Automated summary

Leveraging data from a longitudinal field experiment, Taylor and colleagues found that identity cues have significant effects on people's opinions and interactions with online content, supporting the rich-get-richer dynamic. The results show that identity cues lead to faster voting and voting based on content producers' reputation and production history. These findings have important implications for understanding status evolution in online communities and improving content quality.