An approach to detect backbones of information diffusers among different communities of a social platform

Abstract

Information diffusion in social networks is a classic and, at the same time, very current problem. In fact, information diffusers are always looking for new techniques to disseminate information of their interest by creating backbones among them. In this paper, we focus on a specific, but very current and relevant, scenario regarding this way of proceeding. In fact, we propose an approach for the detection of possible backbones of information diffusers among different communities of a social network. Our approach is based on a new centrality measure that we call disseminator centrality. It is specifically designed to detect the so-called disseminator bridges, i.e., users belonging to multiple communities of a single social network, who want to disseminate information of their interest from one community to another by supporting each other. This paper describes the proposed approach, presents the disseminator centrality, illustrates the differences with respect to the related literature and presents the results of the experiments carried out to evaluate its performance.