Abstract
Information spreading in online social communities has attracted tremendous attention due to its utmost practical values in applications. Despite that several individual-level diffusion data have been investigated, we still lack the detailed understanding of the spreading pattern of information. Here, by comparing information flows and social links in a blog community, we find that the diffusion processes are induced by three different spreading mechanisms: social spreading, self-promotion and broadcast. Although numerous previous studies have employed epidemic spreading models to simulate information diffusion, we observe that such models fail to reproduce the realistic diffusion pattern. In respect to users behaviors, strikingly, we find that most users would stick to one specific diffusion mechanism. Moreover, our observations indicate that the social spreading is not only crucial for the structure of diffusion trees, but also capable of inducing more subsequent individuals to acquire the information. Our findings suggest new directions for modeling of information diffusion in social systems, and could inform design of efficient propagation strategies based on users behaviors.
Highlights
Information spreading is a key social phenomenon, which due to the prevalence of communication and information technologies in the recent years is becoming increasingly dynamic and powerful in shaping such processes as the adoption of innovations [1], the propagation of news and information [2,3,4,5], the success of viral marketing [6,7,8,9] as well as the spread of behaviors and social norms in general [10, 11]
From the perspective of human behaviors, our findings reveal a set of complex behavioral patterns exploiting different information spread mechanisms and suggest new directions for modeling information spreading in online social networks
As we focus on social contagion in detail, we eliminate the other types of information propagation links and obtain 363,115 distinct diffusion trees entirely composed of social spreading links
Summary
Information spreading is a key social phenomenon, which due to the prevalence of communication and information technologies in the recent years is becoming increasingly dynamic and powerful in shaping such processes as the adoption of innovations [1], the propagation of news and information [2,3,4,5], the success of viral marketing [6,7,8,9] as well as the spread of behaviors and social norms in general [10, 11]. With the mainstream adoption of Internet and World Wide Web, several types of user-based information dissemination platforms, such as the blogs sharing communities, online social networks, and microblog services, have become prevalent. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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