The Online Participation Divide

Women, members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and those of lower socioeconomic status tend to contribute to online conversations at lower levels. Such unequal participation then results in the underrepresentation of certain perspectives on the many user-generated content platforms that hundreds of millions of people peruse on a daily basis. Also, as more and more studies rely on automatically generated log data, or so-called “big data,” from such sites to study social behavior, the perspectives of people not participating on sites are also less likely to show up in an increasing number of scientific studies that may then form the basis of policy interventions.