The Tip of the Iceberg: How the Social Media Production-Consumption Gap Distorts Public Opinion for Citizens and Researchers

The production–consumption gap on social media is a consistent finding across time, platforms, and cultural contexts: A small minority of highly active users produce the majority of online political content, while the majority of users consume content passively and remainlargely silent. Online content thus reveals only the tip of an iceberg, from which citizens and scholars alike are apt to draw incorrect inferences regarding the submerged mass of public opinion. This has substantive as well as methodological consequences for social media research, which must be taken into account when designing studies to describe and understand how social media use relates to content exposure, public opinion, and political behavior, and when designing and testing pro-democratic interventions.