Within internet there exists the 90-9-1 principle (also called the 1% rule), which dictates that a vast majority of user-generated content in any specific community comes from the top 1% active users, with most people only listening in

Vuorio, Valtteri, and Zachary Horne. 2023. “A Lurking Bias: Representativeness of Users Across Social Media and Its Implications for Sampling Bias in Cognitive Science.” PsyArXiv. February 2. doi:10.31234/osf.io/n5d9j

Abstract: Within internet there exists the 90-9-1 principle (also called the 1% rule), which dictates that a vast majority of user-generated content in any specific community comes from the top 1% active users, with most people only listening in. When combined with other demographic biases among social media users, this casts doubt as to how well these users represent the wider world, which might be problematic considering how user-generated content is used in psychological research and in the wider media. We conduct three computational studies using pre-existing datasets from Reddit and Twitter; we examine the accuracy of the 1% rule and what effect this might have on how user-generated content is perceived by performing and comparing sentiment analyses between user groups. Our findings support the accuracy of the 1% rule, and we report a bias in sentiments between low- and high-frequency users. Limitations of our analyses will be discussed.