Relationship between attention-driven heavy‑tailed popularity and echo‑chamber formation mechanisms

Determine how heavy‑tailed popularity distributions and content competition arising from limited user attention in social media relate to the mechanisms that produce information‑limiting environments (echo chambers), including algorithmic recommendation filtering and adaptive rewiring that yields modular, polarized communities. Establish this relationship to clarify how attention constraints connect to the formation and maintenance of echo chambers.

Background

The paper reviews evidence that limited human attention and competition among content can explain heavy‑tailed popularity distributions observed on social media, often likened to critical phenomena. Several models capture these dynamics of information spread under attention constraints.

However, despite extensive work on echo‑chamber formation through mechanisms such as algorithmic filtering and network rewiring, the connection between attention‑driven popularity patterns and the structural/algorithmic mechanisms that create information‑limiting environments is not settled. The authors explicitly note that this relationship remains unresolved.