Social Networks and the News: An Agent-Based Model of a Media Market

Abstract

We propose an agent-based computational model of a media market that consists of two connected levels: media voices reporting news and households forming a social network. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model news dissemination in large media markets, as our model accounts for social networks of hundreds of thousands of agents. The model can be applied to address a variety of research questions, including media diversity. Here we report how the basic media market and social network characteristics affect news dissemination among the households.