2024/11/11 by Ruojia Tao, Marianne Aubin Le Quéré · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies #Social Capital and Networks #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3678884.3681870
Demographic differences lead to inequitable access to social resources, a trend that tends to be mirrored on social media platforms. On localized social networks, where people are mostly exposed to content written by others in their vicinity, there is potential for these offline differences to result in vastly different experiences online. This study focuses on the behavioral and structural content differences between neighborhoods on Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media platform. We identify six different types of Nextdoor neighborhoods: high posting, low posting, high engagement, low engagement, high advertising, and high information seeking. While high/low posting neighborhoods are, as expected, predicted by neighborhood population, high advertising and low information seeking neighborhoods are additionally predicted by a low percentage of white people. Our results show that not only the content, but the structural differences in posting behavior between neighborhoods, can lead to divergent experiences on local social media platforms. These findings complicate existing theories that higher income neighborhoods have more frequent exchanges of social capital in local online social media environments.