Nowadays, many social media platforms are centered around content creators (CC). On these platforms, the tie formation process depends on two factors: (a) the exposure of users to CCs (decided by, e.g., a recommender system), and (b) the following decision-making process of users. Recent research studies underlined the importance of content quality by showing that under exploratory recommendation strategies, the network eventually converges to a state where the higher the quality of the CC, the higher their expected number of followers. In this paper, we extend prior work by (a) looking beyond averages to assess the fairness of the process and (b) investigating the importance of exploratory recommendations for achieving fair outcomes. Using an analytical approach, we show that non-exploratory recommendations converge fast but usually lead to unfair outcomes. Moreover, even with exploration, we are only guaranteed fair outcomes for the highest (and lowest) quality CCs.

翻译：目前,许多社交媒体平台都以内容创建者(CC)为中心。在这些平台上,搭桥形成过程取决于两个因素:(a) 用户接触CC(由推荐者系统等决定)和(b) 用户的以下决策程序:最近的研究显示,根据探索性建议战略,网络最终会聚集到CC质量越高、其追随者人数越多的状态,从而突显了内容质量的重要性。在本文中,我们扩大了先前的工作范围,(a) 展望超出平均值,评估过程的公平性,(b) 调查探索性建议对实现公平结果的重要性。我们使用分析方法表明,非探索性建议会快速趋同,但通常会导致不公平的结果。此外,即使进行探索,我们也只能保证最高(和最低)质量的CC取得公平结果。