A meritocratic network formation model for the rise of social media influencers

Nicolò Pagan1,2,3, Wenjun Mei1,4 *, Cheng Li1, Florian Dörfler1

1 Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.

2 Social Computing Group, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
3 Social Networks Lab, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
4 Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing, China.

* Wenjun Mei is the corresponding author (mei@pku.edu.cn)

Especially since the explosion of online services in the past couple of decades, the impact of social networks
on our lives has become more and more multifaceted: they play central roles, e.g., in the dissemination of
information, in the adoption of new technologies, in the diffusion of healthy behavior, in the formation and
polarization of public opinion. To advance our understanding of the phenomena that take place within these
platforms, there has been a recent coming-together of multiple disciplines in the study of social networks.
Much of the attention has been devoted to measuring the macroscopic properties of these networks, e.g.,
degree, density, or connectivity, as well as to understanding the microscopic formation mechanisms.
Along with the rapid research progress, nowadays online social networks are also evolving into new forms.
Compared with those that flourished in the first decade of the 21st century, e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn,
today’s most popular platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, exhibit some noticeably
distinguishing features. One of the most prominent differences is that these new online social platforms are
directed networks that do not require mutual consent for a friendship. As such, the lifeblood of these virtual
friendships is the User-Generated Content (UGC): in 2020, every day 500 million tweets were sent
(www.dsayce.com/social-media/tweets-day/), and >80 million Instagram pictures were posted
(www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/). Thanks to the use of hashtags and integrated search
engines, these new social platforms encourage their users to explore the UGC based on their interests.
Thereby, users tend to follow real-life strangers and create interest-based communities.
The statistical features of the aforementioned directed UGCbased online social platforms are not the same
as of real-life social networks. Yet, these directed UGC-based online platforms largely affect our societies
in terms of, e.g., public opinion polarization, or spreading of (mis)information. Moreover, since these
directed platforms increase the possibility to reach wide audiences (way beyond real-life friends), users can
now rapidly gain popularity through their UGC, and become the so-called new influencers. This trend has
deeply influenced consumers’ and companies’ behavior in markets to the point that >70% of US businesses
engaged Instagram influencers to promote their products in 2017 (www.emarketer.com).
Given the potentially profound impacts of the UGC-based online social platforms on public opinions and
economic behavior, as well as the spreading potential of highly influential nodes, it is important to
understand (i) how the UGC relates to the emergence of tremendously fast-growing social media
influencers, and (ii) what are the properties of the resulting networks.
Intuitively, better quality UGC is more likely to attract users because of its higher emotional value. Thus,
the network formation process on these platforms depends on a fundamental ingredient, the quality of the
UGC. However, except for the fitness model in which users are connected with probability proportional to
the individuals’ fitness attributes, the large multidisciplinary interest in the study of network formation has
so far privileged topological and socio-economic aspects observed in offline social networks (or in online
social networks which mimic them, e.g., Facebook) and neglected the effect of the UGC. For example,
Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models, in sociology, and strategic network formation models, in economics,
assume actors decide their ties according to a utilitarian principle based on sociological elements, such as
reciprocity or network closure, or topological measures, e.g., in-degree or closeness centrality, or a
combination of them. These models typically lead to networks characterized by bilateral social connections
and high transitivity. However, on Instagram, only 14% of the relationships are reciprocated and the average
clustering coefficient is smaller than 10% (for comparison, on Facebook reciprocity and clustering score,
respectively, 100% and 30%). Among the random graph models, the preferential attachment model,
proposed by Barábasi and Albert, in which newborn nodes choose connections proportional to the degree,
has been widely acknowledged. While this mechanism leads to the scalefree effect observed in many real-
world networks, this rich-getricher philosophy does not justify the rise of new Instagram celebrities, i.e.,
the so-called Instafamous, whose success is built without prior fame.
The prevalence of directed, UGC-based social networks and the absence of proper mathematical models
inspire us to think about their formation processes from an untouched perspective. In this paper, we propose
a simple yet predictive network formation mechanism that incorporates both the utilitarian principle and
the UGC quality. We assume users have a common interest and we associate them with an attribute defining
the quality of their UGC. To define a UGC-based formation process, we collected a longitudinal Twitter
data set on network scientists. Analyzing the temporal sequence of connections, we found evidence that the
formation process on directed social networks results from the individuals’ continuous search for better
quality UGC, measured by the alignment with the follower’s interests, i.e., homophily, and its goodness.
Based on this sociological evidence, in our model agents meet with uniform or in-degree-based probability,
and strategically create their ties according to a meritocratic principle, i.e., based on the UGC quality.
Depending on the application, the model can incorporate users that do not actively contribute with their
UGC, e.g., viewers on YouTube.
We analytically and numerically study the proposed network formation dynamics as well as the network
properties at equilibrium under different meeting probability functions. First, we found that the out-degree
distribution has characteristics similar to a gamma distribution, with expectations equal to the harmonic
number of the network size. Furthermore, the resulting networks feature real-world social networks’
properties, e.g., small diameter and small, but not vanishing, clustering coefficient, and a significant overlap
in the followers’ sets as a result of the homophily that characterizes agents with similar interests. Moreover,
the indegree distribution satisfies the well-known scaling property, but we also discover a specific pattern:
the highest quality node expects to have twice (respectively, three times) as many followers as the second
(respectively, third) highest, and so on. This empirical regularity has been found in many systems and goes
under the name of Zipf’s law. Notably, this result is robust against the effect of recommendation systems
(which increase the visibility of popular nodes). We emphasize that, despite being widely assumed to be
ubiquitous for systems where objects grow in size, the principle underlying the origin of Zipf’s law is an
open research question, and our qualitybased rule reveals an intuitive, meritocratic mechanism for it.
Finally, to empirically validate our model, we collected three data sets from Twitch, a popular platform for
online gamers (https://www.twitch.tv/p/press-center/). The successful comparison with our theoretical
predictions indicates that our model, despite its simple and parsimonious form, already captures several
real-world properties.