Distributed gatekeeping. Uncovering the patterns of linking behaviors on Facebook
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19195/1899-5101.10.1(18).2Keywords:
gatekeeping, social networking sites, sharing links, Facebok, computer-mediated communicationAbstract
Based on an analysis of 770,269 links posted by 1,969 Polish Facebook users, the present article investigates how the users’ characteristics influence their link-sharing behaviors, and how these characteristics are related to social rewards received for posting links. Male users, older ones and inhabitants of larger cities tend to link more to politics-related news they also receive more social feedback for doing that while female users, younger ones and inhabitants of smaller locations tend to link more to entertainment-related sites. The cluster analysis of linking strategies of Facebook users suggests that the most common behavior is to provide a mixture of news and entertainment-related links, although pure “news-keeper” and “entertainment-keeper” types of users are distinguishable.
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