Distributed gatekeeping. Uncovering the patterns of linking behaviors on Facebook

Abstract

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.