The role of luck in the success of social media influencers

Motivation Social media platforms centered around content creators (CCs) faced rapid growth in the past decade. Currently, millions of CCs make livable incomes through platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. As such, similarly to the job market, it is important to ensure the success and income (usually related to the follower counts) of CCs reflect the quality of their work. Since quality cannot be observed directly, two other factors govern the network-formation process: (a) the visibility of CCs (resulted from, e.g., recommender systems and moderation processes) and (b) the decision-making process of seekers (i.e., of users focused on finding CCs). Prior virtual experiments and empirical work seem contradictory regarding fairness: While the first suggests the expected number of followers of CCs reflects their quality, the second says that quality does not perfectly predict success. Results Our paper extends prior models in order to bridge this gap between theoretical and empirical work. We (a) define a parameterized recommendation process which allocates visibility based on popularity biases, (b) define two metrics of individual fairness (ex-ante and ex-post), and (c) define a metric for seeker satisfaction. Through an analytical approach we show our process is an absorbing Markov Chain where exploring only the most popular CCs leads to lower expected times to absorption but higher chances of unfairness for CCs. While increasing the exploration helps, doing so only guarantees fair outcomes for the highest (and lowest) quality CC. Simulations revealed that CCs and seekers prefer different algorithmic designs: CCs generally have higher chances of fairness with anti-popularity biased recommendation processes, while seekers are more satisfied with popularity-biased recommendations. Altogether, our results suggest that while the exploration of low-popularity CCs is needed to improve fairness, platforms might not have the incentive to do so and such interventions do not entirely prevent unfair outcomes.