Stratifying Statuses: Penalties of Female Attractiveness and Male Blackness of Twitter

• In Event: 2207 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Identity and Influence in the Digital Landscape

Abstract

This paper brings the theory of statuses into dialogue with contemporary research on the Internet and social stratification. Offline, statuses such as gender or race have the power to organize interactions, shape the dynamics of small group processes, and contribute to social inequality. While these cues are less conspicuous than face-to-face impressions, they still affect social interactions and how individuals are evaluated in online communities. Combining Amazon Mechanical Turk workers’ evaluations of the race, gender, and attractiveness of over 800 Twitter profiles with observational measures of visibility, we explore the extent to which social media mirrors offline inequality. We estimated the effect of these statuses on each Twitter account’s number of followers, retweets, lists, and whether the Mechanical Turk workers indicated they would follow the account. We find that status characteristics behave differently for generic measures of visibility, such as number of followers, than for measures of domain specific reputation, such as lists. Twitter accounts perceived as attractive women or Black men are penalized for lists suggesting that evoked statuses are more salient and perhaps more discriminating in expertise driven interaction. Our findings carry important implications for understanding how self-presentation and the statuses they evoke influence online visibility.

Authors

• Anne Groggel, Indiana University

• Shirin Nilizadeh, Carnegie Mellon University

• Fabio Rojas, Indiana University

• Apu Kapadia, Indiana University

• Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University