The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion
(2012)cite arxiv:1201.4145Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures. In the Proceedings of ACM WWW 2012, April 16-20, 2012, Lyon, France.Abstract
Online social networking technologies enable individuals to simultaneously
share information with any number of peers. Quantifying the causal effect of
these technologies on the dissemination of information requires not only
identification of who influences whom, but also of whether individuals would
still propagate information in the absence of social signals about that
information. We examine the role of social networks in online information
diffusion with a large-scale field experiment that randomizes exposure to
signals about friends' information sharing among 253 million subjects in situ.
Those who are exposed are significantly more likely to spread information, and
do so sooner than those who are not exposed. We further examine the relative
role of strong and weak ties in information propagation. We show that, although
stronger ties are individually more influential, it is the more abundant weak
ties who are responsible for the propagation of novel information. This
suggests that weak ties may play a more dominant role in the dissemination of
information online than currently believed.
Description
[1201.4145] The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion
