Universality, criticality and complexity of information propagation in social media

Daniele Notarmuzi, Claudio Castellano, Alessandro Flammini, Dario Mazzilli and Filippo Radicchi ()
Additional contact information
Daniele Notarmuzi: Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University
Claudio Castellano: Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi (ISC-CNR)
Alessandro Flammini: Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University
Dario Mazzilli: Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University
Filippo Radicchi: Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Statistical laws of information avalanches in social media appear, at least according to existing empirical studies, not robust across systems. As a consequence, radically different processes may represent plausible driving mechanisms for information propagation. Here, we analyze almost one billion time-stamped events collected from several online platforms – including Telegram, Twitter and Weibo – over observation windows longer than ten years, and show that the propagation of information in social media is a universal and critical process. Universality arises from the observation of identical macroscopic patterns across platforms, irrespective of the details of the specific system at hand. Critical behavior is deduced from the power-law distributions, and corresponding hyperscaling relations, characterizing size and duration of avalanches of information. Statistical testing on our data indicates that a mixture of simple and complex contagion characterizes the propagation of information in social media. Data suggest that the complexity of the process is correlated with the semantic content of the information that is propagated.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28964-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-28964-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28964-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().