Online City Disclosure: Projecting Real-World City Hierarchy Bias

Studies suggest that online communities can help alleviate biases related to spatial inequality. However, as platforms strive to increase transparency by disclosing certain information, such as user location, these benefits may be compromised. Location disclosure can reawaken biases about individuals from well-developed versus less-developed regions, potentially projecting these real-world biases into online spaces. Leveraging China’s city tier system, we aim to investigate whether city disclosure introduces biases, how it affects user interaction behaviors, and how it ultimately impacts the network significance of cities. Focusing on a Chinese civil service exam forum, we find that city disclosure reinforces location-induced social hierarchy bias, evidenced by decreased outdegree and indegree centralities for higher-tier cities compared to lower-tier cities. This bias can be mitigated by introducing real-world indicators like educational level or competition dynamics. Additionally, we show that city disclosure significantly increases same-tier competition.