朋友网络作为把关人：WeChat用户对网络内容消费的研究
Friend Network as Gatekeeper: A Study of WeChat Users' Consumption of Friend-Curated Contents
摘要：
社交媒体使用户能够轻松发布、传播和访问信息。缺点是，与传统媒体相比，它在哪些内容可以进入公共流通方面的把关人较少。在本文中，我们提出了来自中国流行的消息应用程序微信的初步实证研究结果，表明社交媒体用户集体利用他们的朋友网络作为潜在的，动态的内容消费看门人。我们采用混合方法分析了超过700万用户在微信上的信息消费行为，并对$216$用户进行了在线调查。定量和定性的证据都表明，朋友网络确实在社交媒体中扮演着看门人的角色。从过去由把关人决定应该生产什么，朋友网络有助于区分个人信息消费的价值和不价值，其结构和动态在把关中起着重要作用，可能会启发未来的社会技术系统的设计。
英文摘要：
Social media enables users to publish, disseminate, and access information easily. The downside is that it has fewer gatekeepers of what content is allowed to enter public circulation than the traditional media. In this paper, we present preliminary empirical findings from WeChat, a popular messaging app of the Chinese, indicating that social media users leverage their friend networks collectively as latent, dynamic gatekeepers for content consumption. Taking a mixed-methods approach, we analyze over seven million users' information consumption behaviors on WeChat and conduct an online survey of $216$ users. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that friend network indeed acts as a gatekeeper in social media. Shifting from what should be produced that gatekeepers used to decide, friend network helps separate the worthy from the unworthy for individual information consumption, and its structure and dynamics that play an important role in gatekeeping may inspire the future design of socio-technical systems.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
